Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture

Thompson argues that custom was not a residual, folkloric survival fading before the advance of enlightenment and market rationality, but a vigorous, contested field of social relations in which working people asserted traditional rights against agrarian capitalism and legal reform. He rejects the view that eighteenth-century plebeian culture was merely 'traditional' and backward-looking. Instead, some 'customs' were of recent invention and were in truth claims to new rights [citation:1]. The book's unifying thesis is that custom itself was 'a place in which many interests contested for advantage' [citation:7].

Customs in Common consolidated and expanded the concept of the 'moral economy of the crowd,' which Thompson had first articulated in a 1971 essay included here. The concept holds that food riots and other crowd actions were informed by a popular consensus about legitimate and illegitimate marketing practices—a traditional view of social norms and obligations that constituted the moral economy of the poor [citation:17]. The concept has been adopted across disciplines, from peasant studies to Latin American social movements, and remains central to debates about market society and popular resistance [citation:8][citation:16].

Orthodox Marxist accounts often treat pre-industrial protest as 'spasmodic'—an unreflective response to hunger and deprivation, lacking the class consciousness of later industrial movements. Thompson insists these actions were intentional and norm-governed: crowds acted to redress breaches of a traditional code of economic morality, and the remarkable thing was not the disorder but the restraint within it [citation:17]. He also argues that hegemony in eighteenth-century England did not impose all-embracing domination; the subordinate classes exhibited 'liveliness and vigour' and a 'notably skewed deference' that mechanistic models miss [citation:12].

Customs in Common is explicitly framed as the companion and sequel to The Making of the English Working Class, covering the century before the factory era [citation:12]. Thompson began work on the eighteenth century immediately after completing the Making manuscript, but the essays were published piecemeal over two decades and gathered only in 1991 [citation:1][citation:12]. Where The Making traced the emergence of industrial working-class consciousness, Customs in Common reconstructs the plebeian customary culture from which that class consciousness later developed, making it 'essential reading' for understanding the cultural preconditions of working-class institutions [citation:5].

The book has proven durable and influential, though not uncontested. Reviewers praised its 'empathy and erudition' and its restoration of customs to the social and economic arena, treating them as dynamics of change and resistance rather than picturesque survivals [citation:7][citation:19]. Critics have noted theoretical ambiguities: Thompson appears to treat rulers' legal usage of 'custom' as typical for society as a whole, and the relationship between norms made from above and from below remains unclear [citation:3]. Nonetheless, scholars argue that Thompson's brand of cultural history remains critically relevant on a global scale, precisely because market economies continue to displace traditional ones [citation:8].

A frequent misreading treats Thompson's subjects as nostalgic conservatives defending an unchanging past. In fact, Thompson argues that customs were often recent inventions—claims to new rights articulated in the language of tradition [citation:1]. The plebeian culture he describes was 'rebellious, but rebellious in defence of custom' [citation:5]. He also insists that the customary consciousness of the poor was not merely reactive: it was a 'very vigorous self-activating culture of the people derived from their own experience and resources' [citation:12]. Custom was not the opposite of change but a language through which change was contested.