Much of the thematic content of Riotous Assemblies will be familiar to keen students of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English popular protest. Indeed, in essence much of this splendid book is a direct product of Adrian Randall's two key long-run research areas: popular reactions to the introduction of labour-saving machinery in the cloth making industry and the culture of eighteenth-century food rioting. That not even a paragraph has appeared elsewhere, either as a journal paper or as a book chapter, is therefore as extraordinary as it is worthy of praise. Not only has Professor Randall managed to somehow circumvent the seemingly obdurate logic of the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) by producing one entirely ‘new’ book, but he has also managed to produce a thesis which, though in terms of content is somewhat familiar, is genuinely original in terms of analysis. In part the latter point has been achieved by a judicious use of new and otherwise previously unutilised archival research. This is without doubt a rich feast of scholarship, a wonderful, lucid culmination of three decades of scholarly endeavour.

Riotous Assemblies locates the resort to riot, a social practice that in many ways symbolically defined eighteenth-century England, in a popular discourse rooted in both ancient ‘rights’ and enshrined in the post 1688 Constitution and, depending on the exact context, law. Many riots were, so such an analysis goes, an attempt to defend the rights and liberties of the freeborn Englishman (and English woman) from those who sought to disabuse these hard won privileges. Riots therefore occurred with some degree of regularity whenever and wherever these social codes were broken. The workplace, the market place, commonable lands, places of religious worship and even, as the opening chapter demonstrates, the theatre all bore witness to riot. This is not say that Randall suggests that riot was in any way an automatic response to all transgressions of the customary code, but rather that riot was the tool most likely to be adopted to reassert customary rights and practices. It is unclear whether a lowly owler, working by night as part of an eighteenth-century smuggling gang, a practice that rested upon the power of the riotous assembly (see pp. 60–3), thought his actions were upholding a right to self-determination through attacking an unfair taxation system. Yet he was almost certainly hugely grateful that such an opportunity allowed him to supplement his otherwise meagre income. But Randall is probably correct in asserting that all such actions were fundamentally underpinned by a deeply held sense of injustice, whether rights or individuals’ bodies were being defended.

Given the theme it is unsurprising that the spectre of E.P. Thompson haunts Riotous Assemblies. Randall's analysis betrays an obvious debt to both Thompson's concept of the moral economy (something that chapters four, five and nine deal with directly) and Thompson's earlier conception of the centrality of deeply sensed, and fiercely protected, ‘rights’ in shaping English social relations. Whether, as Randall self-reflexively points out in the conclusion, Thompson would have been entirely comfortable with the way in which his concepts are applied is perhaps a moot point. This reader was not left entirely convinced that the grain crises of the 1790s represented a ‘repudiation’ of the moral economy. The popular resort to protest, manifest in both food riots and the tools of covert terror, during the later subsistence crises of 1811–3 and 1816 suggest that at least in some areas English men and women were still prepared to risk prosecution to enforce the moral economy. In addition, our understanding of the moral economy would be greatly heightened by a systematic analysis of the ways in which the populace and the authorities attempted to deal with illicit market practices outside the periods of grinding dearth. One suspects that riot in such circumstances was the exception rather than the rule. But these are minor quibbles, for in many ways Riotous Assemblies marks a highpoint in Thompsonian English social history.

As suggested above, Professor Randall's book is not a systematic history of the resort to riot in the eighteenth century, nor, as the subtitle somewhat misleadingly suggests, an account of the resort to popular protest in Hanoverian England. The importance of covert protest forms is a constant presence in the book but never a central theme. The individual chapters instead explore the ways in which liberty and rights were upheld in a variety of different contexts rather than offering new definitive accounts of, say, food rioting and Luddism. This is not to say that the substantive chapters add nothing to our understanding of particular outbreaks of popular protest in Hanoverian England. On the contrary, Randall's careful marshalling of a range of archival sources and his subtle analysis add much to our understanding of food riots, early industrial relations, the popular reception of machinery and, most notably, electoral riots.

Neither is Riotous Assemblies a systematic national study. The vast majority of Randall's material is drawn from three specific regions: the English west, the Midlands, and the north, particularly Lancashire and Yorkshire. Considering the important differences between crowd and authority actions highlighted by John Bohstedt in his comparison of the small market towns of Devon and industrial Manchester, it is quite possible that a systematic analysis of the areas not covered by Randall might disrupt elements of his thesis. Indeed, one is struck by both the different discourses deployed and the different attitudes that underpinned the protests of the Kingswood colliers compared to the more easily (socially) read protests of their neighbouring cloth working communities.

This tension is largely driven by the fact that most of Randall's examples are focused upon urban areas, although the riots therein described often drew in country people. But the modus operandi of country people was undoubtedly somewhat different to that adopted in the major urban centres, let alone the towns of the industrialising north. Whilst much of Randall's evidence is suggestive of a repudiation of the moral economy in those spaces where capitalist transformations were most dramatic, in many country communities the form and language of protest and the attendant responses of the rulers of rural England were much more strongly rooted in older paternalist models. Rural riots had a distinctly uneven spatiality, temporality and form. For instance, the ways in which protests played out and, at least initially, the authorities met popular concerns during the later Swing quasi-insurrection were not that far removed from the models followed in many eighteenth-century market town food riots. Moreover, Timothy Shakesheff's study of Herefordshire in the early nineteenth century suggests that crowd actions were relatively rare in that most rural of counties. Instead, grievances were ameliorated. or at least expressed, through the twin tools of rural terror and theft. For every malady there was not necessarily a riotous solution. As the welcome treatment of electoral riots (chapter four) demonstrates, we must also be careful in proscribing meaning to riotous assemblies, for whilst many were underpinned by some underlying nascent popular political ideology others were more firmly rooted in inter- (and even intra-) household quarrels and personal enmities.

In conclusion, this is a fine book that betrays its careful scholarship and erudition with a wonderful lightness of conceptual and linguistic touch. That there are absences and points of analysis that not all historians will be entirely comfortable with is inevitable in a book dealing with such a vast subject in so few pages. That it provokes many questions is a testament not therefore to any flaws but instead to the sheer scope of Randall's intellectual endeavour. Indeed, although Riotous Assemblies deals with many complex themes, it is so clearly written that it will make an ideal first-stop resource for undergraduates. One hopes therefore that not only does it stimulate further research into the cultural and political underpinnings of protest in Hanoverian England, but also that it stimulates Oxford University Press to publish a paperback edition forthwith.