Destitute floating populations supplied manpower for preindustrial urban riots

Evidence

We have also met the ribauz, twelfth century London’s version of the economically destitute and organizationally unattached floating populations that were to be found throughout all preindustrial cities. 10 Just how these persons survived at all is not clear. Sometimes, as Holmes reported above, they begged, sometimes they stole, but much of their time appeared to have been spent hanging about waiting to involve themselves in whatever was happening. Surely their numbers provided much of the manpower for the preindustrial city’s many riots. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Lofland’s broader argument and to the reader’s frame: the unattached urban wanderer as a category of the public-space observer, complementing Simmel’s blasé actor. — connects to: Abandoning full employment creates an assisted liminal population as manpower reserve. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1083