As prices have soared in recent months, living costs have outstripped many incomes in the UK. But as Victoria Bateman explains, this is not a new state of affairs
Life seems less affordable with each passing month. Over the past two years, energy prices in the UK have risen faster than at any time since 1973. The last time food seemed this expensive was in 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. With the cost of everyday items having risen faster than wages for the past couple of years, families are facing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began. One in 14 households in the UK have used emergency food aid in the past year and, globally, 51 million people have been plunged into extreme poverty as a result of the rising cost of living.
Having come to assume that living standards would rise year on year, and having boasted confidently that economic policy would prevent a repeat of the inflation of the 1970s, economists are learning to be more humble. While the cost-of-living crisis might now be starting to ease, history still warns against hubris.
Until the 20th century, rising food prices caused by factors including harvest failure, trade disruption and war frequently sparked riots. In the middle of 1347, for example, Bordeaux wine merchant William Casse had just finished loading his ship with grain in Bristol ready for his return trip to France when a crowd “carried the grain away”. Exports of wheat to support Edward III’s siege of Calais at a time of harvest failure at home also led to altercations in Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Kent, prompting what would become a common policy response to rising food prices: a ban on food exports.
As feudalism gave way to market forces, buying and selling rapidly became common. Whenever prices became unaffordable, market forces and morality came into conflict, with a distinction made between the ‘market price’ and the ‘just price’. In periods of hunger, a droit de subsistence – the law of necessity – took precedence over private property rights, with those in need seeing it as their right to seize food and force its sale at rates below the market price.
Rather than the desperate poor, rioters were typically members of the artisanal class – people who, in normal times, were able to keep their heads above water. They were not ‘anti-capitalists’ as we might think of them today, and some even had trade links with local elites to whom they could appeal. They believed in a social contract between the ruled and the rulers. At a time when democracy was reserved for the wealthy, the quid pro quo was that ‘gentlemen’ would rule with the public good in mind. This meant that either rulers had to keep their ear to the ground and offer relief when needed – keeping an eye on the price of wheat and intervening in the market if it rose too high became a task of the English crown in the 16th century – or rioters would send a signal by taking things into their own hands.
Repression and remedy
Witnessing some 700 clashes across a dozen cost-of-living crises, the 18th century marked the apogee of food riots in Britain. As the economy transitioned from agriculture to industry, and green and pleasant land was replaced with ‘dark satanic mills’, growing numbers of people were reliant on purchasing food on the market. Farmers rose to the challenge, and merchants shipped their grain far and wide, but the situation was precarious and unpredictable; good times could easily turn bad, leaving people who would normally have no need for relief demanding action.
In 1783, in response to a harvest failure the previous year, a scuffle broke out not far from the Wedgwood Potteries in Staffordshire. A hungry and frustrated mob seized a canal boat laden with flour and cheese that was being redirected to Manchester, where prices were even higher. After selling the contents to locals for what they considered to be ‘just’ prices, the mob seized a second boatload. The militia were sent in and, after much negotiation, the mob agreed to disperse if local elites clubbed together for a fund to help those struggling with the cost of living. Josiah Wedgwood contributed £20. The social contract had been fulfilled.
This combination of repression and remedy was the usual response to uprisings fuelled by the rising cost of living, but there were also times when rioters were brutally crushed. In the ‘hunger riots’ of 1766, which followed widespread crop failure across Europe, the War Office supplied troops on demand to country estates and market towns requesting protection from rioters, and even suggested that the gentry arm their own servants. By the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, barracks were springing up across the large northern towns. Local yeomanry – volunteer cavalry comprising farmers and the sons of gentry – also formed, providing more ways to repress disturbances.
As rapidly growing industrial cities demanded increasing amounts of food from an ever-expanding agricultural catchment area, even the sniff of a riot would cause those transporting food to divert their supplies to avoid them being seized. Rather than helping, therefore, riots could actually hinder the cause, making cost-of-living crises worse.
By 1820, with Napoleon’s attempt to starve Britain into submission having been defeated, and the industrial revolution surging full steam ahead, cotton cloth was rolling off factory production lines and being exchanged on international markets for plentiful supplies of foreign grain. This sparked an age of falling prices, welcomed by workers and industrialists alike – albeit not by agricultural landowners, who successfully lobbied for a tax on imported grain in the form of the Corn Laws (1815–46). This restricted access to cheap foreign grain, cushioning the price fall.
People power
By the ‘hungry forties’, food shortages and escalating food prices had returned to Britain and Ireland. Nowhere suffered more than Ireland where, in the summer of 1847, a peak of 3 million people were being fed by soup kitchens each day – until the British government declared that “Irish property must pay for Irish poverty”. Little in the way of a social contract existed between the English parliament and the colonised and, when the potato crops on which most Irish people relied failed over successive years from 1845 – and much Irish-grown grain continued to be exported to Britain, despite the devastating famine – a million people starved and more than a million emigrated.
In Rochdale, where food shortages were less severe but where people struggled with rising prices, a group of cotton-mill workers devised a plan. They pooled together their grocery money so that they could bulk buy everyday necessities more cheaply. Hearing about the scheme, other mill workers wanted to join. For a small fee, members were entitled to buy cheaper bulk-bought groceries in the group’s shop, and also reaped a share of any profits. Founded in 1844, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers was the first successful retail cooperative in England – and inspired similar cooperatives around the nation.
As the 19th century wore on, the twin processes of industrialisation and globalisation resulted in rising wages and fewer food shortages. The railway and steamship meant that importing food in return for cloth, steel and financial services was easier than ever, but also increased the nation’s vulnerability to global events. The collective energy of working people was increasingly channelled through the cooperative movement and ‘friendly societies’, improving resilience to periods of hardship.
As democracy spread in the 20th century, people expected their elected representatives to do all they could to avert cost-of-living crises. Food riots became a phenomenon not of the western world but of the global south and, after the beast of inflation so rife in the 1970s and 1980s was defeated, many economists felt that Britain would never again succumb to a serious cost-of-living crisis.
They were wrong. War in Europe, trade disruptions related to Brexit, faltering economic and wage growth and vulnerability to climate patterns have all had an impact on our ability to afford food and other necessities. Our current situation shows just how little has changed – and how little can be taken for granted.
This article was first published in the Christmas 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine