When Ordinary People Decided What Was Fair

Imagine that a wagon loaded with grain is leaving an English market town during a food shortage.

The grain has been legally grown.

It has been legally purchased.

Its owner has every legal right to transport it elsewhere and sell it for whatever price another buyer is willing to pay.

Then a crowd blocks the road.

The grain is unloaded.

It is taken back to the marketplace and sold at a lower price determined by the crowd.

But something rather strange happens.

The crowd does not simply steal it.

The owner is paid.

To modern eyes, this seems contradictory. If these people are rioters and thieves, why bother paying? If they respect private property sufficiently to compensate its owner, why seize the grain in the first place?

The answer lies in one of the most influential ideas in the study of popular history:

the moral economy of the crowd.

The phrase is particularly associated with the British historian E. P. Thompson, whose landmark 1971 essay, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” challenged the traditional interpretation of food riots.

Thompson argued that many eighteenth-century food riots were neither random explosions of hunger nor mindless attacks upon property.

The crowds were acting according to an understood system of rights, obligations, customs and expectations.

They believed that there were things you simply did not do when people were hungry.

The law might disagree.

The market might disagree.

The merchant certainly might disagree.

But the crowd believed that there was another law operating alongside them:

the law of fairness.

Hunger Alone Does Not Explain a Riot

It seems obvious to say that hungry people riot because they are hungry.

But Thompson thought that explanation was inadequate.

He described such interpretations dismissively as a kind of “spasmodic” history: food prices rise, stomachs become empty and crowds automatically erupt.

Human beings do not work quite so mechanically.

Thousands of people throughout history have experienced hunger without rioting.

Something else has to happen.

People must believe not merely that they are suffering, but that their suffering is unjust.

That distinction is crucial.

A failed harvest might be regarded as a tragedy.

A merchant withholding grain from the market while waiting for its price to rise could be regarded as an outrage.

The first was misfortune.

The second involved human choice.

And therefore somebody could be blamed.

What Was a “Moral Economy”?

Thompson was not suggesting that eighteenth-century crowds had developed an alternative economic theory in the modern academic sense.

There was no textbook entitled The Poor Man’s Guide to Ethical Grain Distribution.

The moral economy consisted instead of customary assumptions about how essential goods should be produced, marketed and sold.

Those assumptions had deep historical roots.

Food was not regarded as an ordinary commodity.

Grain became bread.

Bread kept people alive.

Therefore, the person who possessed grain also carried certain obligations towards the wider community.

A farmer was entitled to make a living.

A miller was entitled to make a living.

A baker was entitled to make a living.

A merchant was entitled to make a living.

But there was believed to be a point at which legitimate profit became illegitimate exploitation.

The difficulty, naturally, was deciding where that point lay.

The crowd and the merchant frequently had very different answers.

The Old Rules of the Marketplace

The moral economy had not appeared from nowhere.

For centuries English authorities had attempted to regulate the supply and sale of food.

Markets operated according to rules.

Weights and measures were supervised.

Bakers could be punished for selling underweight bread.

Authorities worried about forestalling — buying goods before they reached the open market.

They worried about engrossing — accumulating large quantities of goods.

They worried about regrating — purchasing goods in a market and reselling them for profit.

These practices were feared because they appeared to allow middlemen to manipulate supply and increase prices.

The medieval and early modern state did not generally regard the food market as something that should simply be left alone.

Government possessed a responsibility to ensure order.

And ensuring order included ensuring that people could obtain food.

Over generations, those principles became embedded within popular expectations.

Ordinary people believed that magistrates had obligations towards them.

When authorities failed to fulfil those obligations, the crowd could claim the right to intervene.

The “Just Price”

At the heart of the moral economy was an ancient idea: the just price.

It did not necessarily mean that everyone believed bread should always cost exactly the same amount.

People understood that harvests varied.

They understood scarcity.

They understood that prices could rise.

But they also believed there were limits.

A sudden and enormous increase could provoke suspicion.

Why had the price risen?

Was grain genuinely scarce?

Or was somebody hiding it?

Was a merchant sending local grain elsewhere because he could obtain a higher price?

Was a miller manipulating supply?

Was somebody making a fortune from everybody else’s misery?

The market price answered one question:

What will somebody pay?

The moral price answered another:

What should somebody be allowed to charge?

Those two answers could be very different.

Adam Smith Enters the Marketplace

By the eighteenth century, however, economic thinking was changing.

The emerging political economy associated particularly with thinkers such as Adam Smith increasingly emphasised the benefits of freer trade.

Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, challenged many older assumptions about regulating the grain trade.

From this perspective, allowing grain to move freely was ultimately beneficial.

If grain was expensive in one district and cheaper in another, merchants would transport grain towards the area where prices were higher.

The higher price encouraged supply.

Eventually the market corrected itself.

Attempts to prevent merchants moving grain could therefore make shortages worse rather than better.

Economically, the argument possessed considerable logic.

But imagine explaining it to a hungry labourer’s wife watching a wagon of grain leave her town.

She was being asked to accept that allowing today’s bread to disappear might create a more efficient distribution of grain tomorrow.

Her children were hungry today.

There, in miniature, was the collision between political economy and moral economy.

“That Grain Belongs Here”

One of the most provocative sights during food shortages was grain physically leaving a community.

A cart, wagon, boat or ship loaded with food became a visible symbol of the market’s apparent indifference.

The grain might be going only twenty miles away.

It might be travelling to a place suffering an even greater shortage.

The merchant might have perfectly legitimate commercial reasons for transporting it.

None of that necessarily mattered to the people watching it leave.

They saw local food being removed while local people struggled to eat.

So they stopped it.

Food rioters frequently intercepted grain in transit.

Sometimes it was returned to the marketplace.

Sometimes it was distributed.

Sometimes it was sold.

The crowd was asserting an unwritten community claim over food produced or marketed locally.

Not ownership exactly.

Something closer to first moral claim.

Before you profit elsewhere, feed us.

The Extraordinary Ritual of Price-Setting

Perhaps the clearest evidence for Thompson’s argument was the disciplined behaviour sometimes displayed by food rioters.

A crowd might seize grain or flour and then sell it at a price the crowd considered fair.

The proceeds could subsequently be given to its owner.

This practice is often described by historians using the French expression taxation populaire — popular price-setting.

Its importance is difficult to exaggerate.

A thief takes something without paying.

These crowds could insist upon paying.

Their quarrel was therefore not necessarily with property itself.

Their quarrel was with the way property was being used.

The crowd effectively announced:

This grain is yours.

You will be paid for it.

But you will not decide its price.

For a few hours, economic authority changed hands.

The marketplace ceased to belong entirely to merchants.

The crowd became the regulator.

A Riot with Rules

This helps explain another curious feature of many food riots: their selectivity.

Crowds might attack one miller while leaving another alone.

They might target a particular merchant accused of profiteering.

They might stop grain but ignore other valuable goods.

They might break machinery associated with unpopular practices while leaving unrelated property untouched.

This does not mean food riots were always peaceful or disciplined.

They could involve violence, threats, intimidation, theft and destruction.

Crowds were crowds, and once large numbers of angry people gathered, events could become unpredictable.

But there was often an underlying pattern.

People knew what they were angry about.

They knew whom they blamed.

And frequently they knew what they wanted.

Affordable food.

Local supply.

Honest weights.

Reasonable prices.

No hoarding.

No profiteering.

These were demands, not simply explosions of rage.

The Magistrate’s Dilemma

The local magistrate occupied an unenviable position.

His legal duty was clear.

Property had to be protected.

Public order had to be maintained.

Rioting was illegal.

Yet magistrates were also members of local communities.

They knew when harvests had failed.

They knew when families were hungry.

They sometimes knew perfectly well which merchants had acquired reputations for questionable behaviour.

And older paternalistic traditions suggested that local elites possessed responsibilities towards poorer neighbours.

Authorities could therefore find themselves negotiating with people who were technically breaking the law while simultaneously acknowledging that their grievances were genuine.

Some magistrates pressured farmers to bring grain to market.

Some encouraged merchants to sell at reduced prices.

Some organised subscriptions or subsidised food.

Others read the Riot Act and summoned troops.

Much depended upon circumstances.

But repression alone could be dangerous.

A government that appeared to send soldiers to protect profiteers from hungry families risked destroying its own moral authority.

Women and the Moral Economy

Women occupied a particularly important place within this system.

Their customary responsibility for feeding households gave them an authority that formal politics denied them.

A woman might possess no parliamentary vote and virtually no official political influence.

But she knew exactly what bread had cost last week.

She knew how much her husband earned.

She knew how much flour remained in the house.

She knew how many mouths needed feeding.

And she knew whether the family’s money would last until payday.

Women therefore experienced inflation not as an abstract economic statistic but as an immediate household crisis.

This explains why women repeatedly appear at the forefront of food protests.

Their social role provided both motive and justification.

They could claim that they were not interfering in politics.

They were feeding their families.

Yet the moment they collectively dictated prices, stopped grain shipments or confronted merchants, household management became political action.

The domestic economy had marched into the marketplace.

The French Revolution Changes Everything

The moral economy became particularly politically sensitive during the 1790s.

The French Revolution had terrified much of the British establishment.

Revolutionary France demonstrated what could happen when economic hardship, political resentment and mass mobilisation combined.

Britain then went to war with France in 1793.

Food shortages and high prices followed during the decade, particularly during the severe crisis of 1795.

Suddenly a crowd was not simply a crowd.

Authorities wondered whether radicals were behind it.

Was a gathering demanding cheaper bread really concerned only with bread?

Was political reform lurking underneath?

Were revolutionary ideas spreading?

Sometimes radical politics and economic protest did overlap.

But many food rioters were remarkably conservative in their demands.

They were not necessarily demanding a new social order.

In many cases they were demanding the restoration of an older one.

They wanted authorities to regulate markets.

They wanted merchants to behave responsibly.

They wanted customary protections enforced.

In that sense, the food riot could employ radical methods in defence of traditional values.

The Crowd Was Not Necessarily Anti-Market

This is one of the most important misunderstandings to avoid.

The moral economy was not necessarily an argument against markets.

People bought and sold goods every day.

Working people understood commerce perfectly well.

Nor did they necessarily oppose profit.

What they objected to was the belief that market rights were absolute.

To the moral economy, economic freedom carried social obligations.

A merchant could trade.

But should he export grain during a local famine?

A farmer could seek a good price.

But should he withhold grain while waiting for desperate buyers to offer more?

A baker could make a profit.

But should he exploit scarcity?

The answer of the moral economy was:

There are limits.

The New Political Economy Says Otherwise

The emerging free-market philosophy increasingly rejected those limits.

Its argument was powerful.

Interfering with prices could discourage suppliers.

Preventing grain exports from one locality could produce shortages elsewhere.

Punishing merchants for seeking higher prices could reduce incentives to bring grain to places where it was most desperately required.

What looked like profiteering might actually be the mechanism by which supply responded to scarcity.

The market, not the crowd, was supposedly better equipped to distribute resources.

This created one of the great ideological conflicts of the age.

The moral economy said:

Food is too important to leave entirely to the market.

Political economy increasingly replied:

The market is precisely what will ensure food reaches where it is needed.

Versions of that argument continue today.

Was Thompson Right?

Thompson’s interpretation became enormously influential, but historians have also challenged and refined it.

One criticism is that the concept of a single “moral economy of the crowd” can make popular attitudes appear more uniform than they actually were.

Different communities behaved differently.

Local customs varied.

Relationships between farmers, merchants, consumers and magistrates varied.

Some disturbances were highly disciplined.

Others were much less so.

Economic self-interest also mattered.

A crowd preventing grain leaving its town might defend local families while simultaneously making shortages worse somewhere else.

What appeared morally just from one community’s perspective could be decidedly less attractive from its neighbour’s.

Historians such as John Bohstedt have consequently emphasised the importance of local circumstances, negotiation and community relationships.

The moral economy should therefore not be imagined as a written constitution universally understood throughout Britain.

It was more fluid.

A collection of expectations.

A language of fairness.

A belief that survival created obligations that property alone could not extinguish.

The Decline of the Food Riot

During the nineteenth century, the traditional food riot gradually became less common.

Several things changed.

Markets became increasingly integrated.

Transport improved.

Industrialisation transformed communities.

Older paternalistic relationships weakened.

The state became increasingly capable of policing large gatherings.

Free-market ideas gained greater political legitimacy.

The old expectation that local authorities should directly regulate food supplies became harder to sustain.

The crowd gradually lost its customary claim to police the marketplace.

But the underlying idea did not disappear.

The Moral Economy Is Still With Us

Modern societies still make distinctions between ordinary profit and morally unacceptable profit.

After natural disasters, businesses accused of dramatically increasing prices can face public fury.

During pandemics or emergencies, shortages of essential goods can produce demands for government intervention.

Energy companies making enormous profits while households struggle with bills provoke arguments remarkably similar to those heard during eighteenth-century food crises.

Housing provides another example.

Legally, landlords may charge whatever the market permits within existing regulations.

But when rents rise dramatically, public discussion quickly moves beyond legality.

People ask whether the increases are fair.

That is the language of moral economy.

The terminology changes.

The underlying argument does not.

There are some things society regards as too fundamental to be treated as ordinary commodities without ethical limits.

Food.

Shelter.

Water.

Energy.

Medicine.

The eighteenth-century crowd would recognise the argument immediately.

Joanie’s Grain

This is what makes Joanie’s actions in Ken Follett’s The Armour of Light such an illuminating fictional example.

Hornbeam has sold grain outside Kingsbridge.

Joanie intercepts it before it can be taken away.

But she does not simply steal Hornbeam’s property.

Indeed, by this stage it is no longer Hornbeam’s grain at all.

It belongs to the man who purchased it from him.

Joanie pays that purchaser.

The crucial issue is the price.

She pays according to the earlier market price, before Hornbeam’s manoeuvring has helped push prices to what she regards as an extortionate level. The grain is then made available to Kingsbridge’s bakers.

From the perspective of strict property rights, her behaviour is outrageous.

She has interfered with a legitimate commercial transaction.

She has prevented a lawful owner transporting his property.

She has imposed a price without authority.

But according to the moral economy, her behaviour possesses its own logic.

The purchaser retains his right to payment.

Kingsbridge retains what Joanie considers its moral claim to essential food.

And profiteering is denied its reward.

She has effectively transformed herself into the market regulator that official authority has failed to provide.

This also explains why Hornbeam’s fury goes beyond the financial loss.

His authority has been challenged.

Joanie has publicly demonstrated that his wealth does not automatically grant him moral legitimacy.

She has obeyed one set of rules while breaking another.

The law says Hornbeam can do what he likes with his grain.

The community says:

Not when we are hungry.

Who Gets to Decide What Is Fair?

Ultimately, that is the question at the centre of the moral economy.

Who determines fairness?

The merchant?

The government?

The courts?

The marketplace?

Or the community?

There is no simple answer.

The free market solved genuine problems that older systems of local regulation could not. Moving grain between regions could alleviate shortages. Price increases could attract supplies. Commercial networks could feed rapidly growing towns and cities far more effectively than purely local economies.

But Thompson’s great insight was that economic behaviour cannot be understood purely through economics.

People judge economic systems morally.

They always have.

A starving person does not necessarily accept that something is just because it is legal.

A community does not automatically regard a price as fair because somebody is willing to pay it.

Property rights do not erase social expectations.

And when the distance between what is legal and what people believe is right becomes too wide, trouble begins.

Sometimes that trouble took the form of petitions.

Sometimes negotiation.

Sometimes political agitation.

And sometimes a group of women stood in front of a wagon loaded with grain and refused to move.

They were breaking the law.

But in their minds, someone else had broken the rules first.

That is the moral economy of the crowd.

Tim Alderman ©️2026

Sources and Further Reading

E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present, No. 50, February 1971. The foundational essay establishing Thompson’s interpretation of food riots as disciplined actions informed by customary ideas of economic justice.

E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy Reviewed,” in Customs in Common, Merlin Press, 1991. Thompson revisits the concept and responds to criticisms and subsequent scholarship.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776, particularly discussions concerning the corn trade and the role of merchants in distributing grain.

John Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c.1550–1850, Ashgate, 2010. An important reassessment of Thompson emphasising regional differences, negotiation and changing relationships between communities and markets.

Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Liverpool University Press, 1996. Explores the interaction between market development and popular expectations of economic fairness.

John E. Archer, Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780–1840, Cambridge University Press. A useful broader examination of food riots and other forms of popular protest during industrialisation.

John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England, Manchester University Press, 2006. Places eighteenth-century crowd action within the longer history of English popular politics and subsistence protest.

George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848. A classic study challenging older portrayals of crowds as irrational mobs and examining their social composition and objectives.

Andrew Charlesworth, An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain 1548–1900. Useful for locating food disturbances within the broader geography and chronology of British popular protest.

Ken Follett, The Armour of Light, Pan Macmillan, 2023. Historical fiction set during the Industrial Revolution and Napoleonic era, incorporating food shortages, economic upheaval, industrial change and popular protest.