Shortened from the Latin phrase mobile vulgus (the movable or excitable crowd), “the mob” was first used to denote rioters in London during the Exclusion Crisis (1678–81). The term gradually entered the language Londoners used to describe disorder over the next few decades; justices of the peace did not commonly use it to refer to riots in the Quarter Sessions court records until the first decade of the eighteenth century. By 1721, 44 percent of the rioters who were bound over by recognizance to appear at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions were accused of raising, or participating in, a mob. Concurrently, the total number of recognizances for riot in urban Middlesex increased 520 percent between the 1660s and the early 1720s (table 1). These changes in the frequency and the language of London rioting recorded in the Middlesex court records around the turn of the eighteenth century raise several questions. Did the fundamental character of rioting in London also change? How (and when) did rioting become such a common occurrence on London's streets? What was the relation between riots prosecuted at Quarter Sessions and the larger, primarily political disturbances of the period that were first studied by George Rudé? How does urban rioting as a social phenomenon compare with rural riots such as food riots, riots against enclosures, and ridings, which have also been the subject of considerable recent research? What are the implications of the existence of widespread collective disorder for our understanding of social relations in London during a time of rapid population growth and socioeconomic change?

The triennium 1536–38 marks the crisis of Henry VIII's reign. The palace coup that toppled Anne Boleyn in May and June 1536 and apparently left Thomas Cromwell more firmly in control instead ushered in a series of further threats to both Cromwell and Henry. The upheaval of the Pilgrimage of Grace convulsed the north in late 1536 and early 1537 and looked for a time as if it would shake Henry's throne. The Pilgrims' calls for the upstart Cromwell's removal forced the chief minister to withdraw behind the scenes for a time, always a tricky maneuver. The battle of wits and wills between the king and his cousin and sometime protégé Reginald Pole runs as counterpoint throughout these dislocations. Pole's intemperate attack on Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, De unitate, arrived at the extremely sensitive moment of June 1536 and announced the beginning of an eighteen-month struggle that finally led to an irreparable breach between Henry and Pole. De unitate has often been taken to signal Pole's crossing of the Rubicon. It should certainly have discomfited Pole's potential allies just as many of his partisans thought they had jockeyed themselves into power by engineering Anne's downfall. In fact, the work had a minimal effect, mainly because the committee entrusted with reading it was heavily stacked with Pole's friends. Henry probably never saw De unitate. Despite its violent language, neither Pole nor his supporters were then quite ready to give up on Henry. Early the next year the situation changed. Paul III created the new cardinal Pole a legate and dispatched him to Flanders, traditional locus of plots against England.

The Whig educational proposals of 1839 are regarded as an important step in the centralization and growth of state control over the education of English working-class children. Introduced by Lord John Russell on February 12, the plan called for state supervision of education by a committee of the Privy Council, the erection of a nondenominational state normal school and two model schools, state inspection of all schools in receipt of the grants established in 1833, and a new system of allocation of those grants based not on the size of the voluntary contributions raised by the National Society or the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) but on the local needs as ascertained by any “reputable” school society. Historians have viewed the proposals as the inevitable outcome of popular pressures brought to bear on government. Unable to resist their own Erastian urge to attack the privileged position of the church, and persuaded by Brougham, who figured prominently in the 1833 grant and had unsuccessfully proposed a national system as recently as the autumn of 1837, or alternatively by the Radicals J. A. Roebuck and Thomas Wyse, themselves supporters of the Central Society for Education's plans for a national secular system of education, the Whigs are regarded as having responded to popular, reformist demands. “In 1839,” wrote Halevy, “the cabinet yielded.” England was last among the Protestant countries in the matter of primary education; Roebuck, Wyse, and Brougham had failed in their separate efforts to promote the cause; and the government could do little other than propose a remedy for 3 million uneducated children.