No form of English popular protest has been subject to such close scholarly analysis as the eighteenth-century food riot, a response not just to the understanding that food riots comprised two out of every three crowd actions but also to the influence of E. P. Thompson's seminal paper ‘The moral economy of the English crowd’. If the food riot is now understood as an event of considerable complexity, one assertion remains unchallenged: that riots remained a tradition of the towns, with agrarian society all but unaffected by food rioting. This article offers a new interpretation in which the rural is not just the backdrop to food protests but instead a locus and focus of collective actions over the marketing of provisions, with agricultural workers taking centre stage. It is shown that agricultural workers often took the lead in market town riots as well as well as in instigating riots in the countryside. Further, such episodes of collective protest were neither rare nor unusual but instead formed an integral part of the food rioting repertoire. It is also shown that rural industrial workers – notoriously active in market town riots – were often joined or even led by agricultural workers in their protests.

没有任何形式的英国民众抗议像 18 世纪的食物暴动那样受到如此密切的学术分析，这不仅是对食物暴动包含三分之二的人群行动的理解的回应，而且还受到了 EP 汤普森开创性论文的影响“英国人群的道德经济”。如果现在将食物暴动理解为一个相当复杂的事件，那么一个断言仍然没有受到质疑：暴乱仍然是城镇的传统，农业社会几乎不受食物暴动的影响。本文提供了一种新的解释，其中农村不仅是食品抗议的背景，而且还是粮食销售集体行动的场所和焦点，农业工人处于中心位置。可见，在集镇暴动和在农村煽动暴动时，农业工人往往是带头的。此外，这种集体抗议事件既不罕见也不罕见，而是构成了食物暴动的一个组成部分。还表明，农村产业工人——在集镇骚乱中非常活跃——经常参加甚至由农业工人领导他们的抗议活动。