ABSTRACT
Studies of rebellion, crime and disorder can expose the anxieties and actions ofpeople at all levels of society. As such, these subjects have received attention from a wide range of social, political and legal historians. An early generation of social historians looked at the records of crime and the courts to examine the experiences of those men and women long left out of the historical record. These scholars valued riots and rebellions as moments when popular beliefs, norms and needs erupted from beneath the usual habits of deference. Their efforts reinvigorated and reshaped long established legal and political histories of the early modern period, for the records of riot, crime and disorder say much of the priorities of the politically powerful, too. Indeed, what counted as a crime or a riotous assembly in any given instance depended much on the definitions solidified in statute or constructed by the courts; what the authorities deemed ‘disorder’ might sometimes more objectively be seen as ‘conflict’. Thus, much recent work on crime and rebellion has focused on the ways in which authority was constructed, experienced and challenged in interactions between governors and governed, on the nature of the relationships between rulers and ruled rather than the experiences of one group or the other.
