The London “Mob” in the Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Shortened from the Latin phrase mobile vulgus (the movable or excitable crowd), “the mob” was first used to denote rioters in London during the Exclusion Crisis (1678–81). The term gradually entered the language Londoners used to describe disorder over the next few decades; justices of the peace did not commonly use it to refer to riots in the Quarter Sessions court records until the first decade of the eighteenth century. By 1721, 44 percent of the rioters who were bound over by recognizance to appear at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions were accused of raising, or participating in, a mob. Concurrently, the total number of recognizances for riot in urban Middlesex increased 520 percent between the 1660s and the early 1720s (table 1). These changes in the frequency and the language of London rioting recorded in the Middlesex court records around the turn of the eighteenth century raise several questions. Did the fundamental character of rioting in London also change? How (and when) did rioting become such a common occurrence on London's streets? What was the relation between riots prosecuted at Quarter Sessions and the larger, primarily political disturbances of the period that were first studied by George Rudé? How does urban rioting as a social phenomenon compare with rural riots such as food riots, riots against enclosures, and ridings, which have also been the subject of considerable recent research? What are the implications of the existence of widespread collective disorder for our understanding of social relations in London during a time of rapid population growth and socioeconomic change?