In a sense, this was a transitional mob, on its way to becoming a self-conscious Radical crowd; the leaven of Dissent and political education was at work, giving to the people a predisposition to turn out in defence of popular liberties, in defiance of authority, and in ‘movements of social protest, in which the underlying conflict of poor against rich… is clearly visible’ […] For nearly a decade London and the south seemed (in the words of one critic) to be ‘a great Bedlam under the dominion of a beggarly, idle and intoxicated mob without keepers…’

E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), p.75