In our first chapter we delineated some of the broader frameworks for contextualising a history from below in Bristol during the long eighteenth century. We mapped out a social topography of the city in a period of solid demographic growth, and the slow emergence of elite suburbs in the upland areas. We suggested there was a conspicuous fusion of political and economic privilege at the centre of Bristol society, enough to make it a genuine urban patriciate, something we develop in our next chapter. And we offered some thoughts on whether the corporate privilege of that patriciate and its gentrification were responsible for the relative economic decline of Bristol after the American war, or whether Bristol's fortunes were determined by more impersonal structural factors in a rapidly changing industrial era. After the Napoleonic war, Bristol's loss of competitive advantage was visibly inscribed in bankruptcies, higher poor rates and deepening pauperism that generated critiques of the patricians who ran the city.

In this chapter we move to the voices in the crowd and its rules or conventions of engagement with authority. Pioneering studies of the crowd tended to ignore the interplay with authority. They were more interested in the faces of the crowd than the manner in which power was exercised. It was Edward Thompson's study of the ‘moral economy’ of provision that opened up investigations of the dialogue between rulers and ruled in a relatively unpoliced society: one that addressed not only the customary expectations of the poor but the theatre of the great, whose studied paternalism and spectacle strove for consensus rather than conflict, or at the very least, legitimations of rule. That model of eighteenth-century relations, of a field of force whose radiating centres were patrician and plebeian, has come under criticism for ignoring third-party middling players. Yet in Bristol's social formation, where the merchant class was patrician, where political and economic power overlapped conspicuously, it works rather well as an organising model of social action. While it does not ignore those middle-class actors who as voters, petitioners, jurymen, employers or charitable-aid professionals played their part in the life of the city – and we are alert to their contribution, as readers will discover in the chapters on politics in particular – it proves particularly pertinent to those visible social dramas where power, authority and reputation were at stake.