The social history of the early modern period has been transformed in recent years by the attempt to explore and explain the popular culture of the common people through their rituals, celebrations and protests. The last of these has become one of the most important windows onto the world of otherwise largely inarticulate sections of the population. Hence for a generation or more British scholars have followed a path first trodden by the Annales school in using popular disturbances and movements not only to investigate the ideas and beliefs of the people concerned, but also to reconstruct their assumptions and attitudes and to place them in the context of larger-scale processes of social and economic change. Few concepts have proved more influential in this exploration than E.P. Thompson's notion of the ‘moral economy’, in which Thompson argued that the activities of English crowds in the eighteenth century indicated an ‘extraordinary deep-rooted pattern of behaviour and belief’ – a ‘moral economy’ – which legitimised popular actions against those who transgressed customary practice. For Thompson the crucial task was to ‘decode’ these actions and their ceremony and symbolism in order to reveal the underlying assumptions of what he called the ‘plebeian culture’, assumptions which frequently ran contrary to those of the propertied and those in authority.