Odd this day
Excellent. It’s time for one of those fun stories. Today, you see, is the 258th anniversary of the Nottingham Cheese Riot.
Or, at least, it sounds hilarious on the face of it. In the words of 1880’s The date-book of remarkable & memorable events connected with Nottingham and its neighbourhood, 1750–1879, from authentic records, (traditionally and more manageably known as the ‘Nottingham Date Book’):
The farmers demanded from 28s. to 30s. per cwt., a price deemed highly excessive. The people were so exasperated that their violence broke loose like a torrent; cheeses were rolled down Wheeler-gate and Peck-lane in abundance, many others were carried away, and the Mayor, in endeavouring to restore peace, was knocked down with one in the open fair.
The Leicester and Nottingham Journal noted that the “fine day” began well, but “some rude lads” got a bit tetchy when traders from Lincolnshire bought “sixty hundred [weights] of cheese” in order — the horror! — to transport it to a different county to sell it. The traders were
threatened they should not stir a cheese till the town was first served … [Later] the mob began to be outrageous, fell upon the heaps of cheese, and amidst loud shouts in a short time took and destroyed the whole parcel, which was chiefly carried off by women and boys.
There was also the connected case on Saturday, 4 October of an “old woman” in Ashby-de-la-Zouch who
rubb’d a pound of the butter all over [a farmer’s] face
…all of which certainly amuses me. But, if we dig a little deeper, there were (a) serious reasons for the rioting, and (b) some not exactly unserious consequences.
To begin with, Nottingham and its surroundings were still largely rural, but the Industrial Revolution was definitely underway, and in the preceding two or three decades, the town’s population had swelled by 50% (from about 10,000 to 15,000. Obviously, there was a lot more to come, what with the dark, satanic mills and all that. By the end of the 1780s, it was around 24,400, and by the 1830s 50,000.)
All those people have to eat, and fluctuating food prices, of course, can jeopardise their ability to do that. There was, in fact, a series of food riots in this era, across the country. Grain riots were the most common type, according to historian Robert Barrie Rose, and
may be divided into four classes, varying from a simple outbreak of looting, through riots directed against the transportation and export of corn, to direct action by rioters to impose fixed prices on the market, and attempts to force local magistrates to decree maximum prices by mob pressure.
An account by the Nottingham & Notts Radical History Group suggests
that these events were not only less jolly but also more complex affairs than implied by the standard references to the Great Cheese Riot, which usually depict the riot as an anti-social version of the popular sport of Cheese-Rolling.
…and, indeed, if we look at the Nottingham Date Book in more detail, rather than just cherry-picking the funny bits, it does tell us that
The Fifteenth Dragoons … were sent for, and acted with great vigour in quelling the tumult, which was not fully subdued until blood had been shed.
It is unfortunate for the dragoons’ posthumous reputation that the one man who died, William Eggleston, of Car Colston, was
kneeling and leaning over a heap of cheese
at the time, according to the Leicester and Nottingham Journal, because he was… er, a farmer, guarding his cheese.
On the issue of motive for the rioters, two Proper Historians, John Bohstedt and Dale E. Williams in the MIT Press, have this to say:
Rioters at Exeter in 1795 said that “if they were to suffer they might as well be hung as starved, and they would run the risk of making their situation better, for worse cou’d not be”. In 1801, the poor at Bideford cried, “We are starving alive”, and a man in the Modbury crowd declared, “It is a hard matter to starve”.
The paper is specifically about food riots in Devon, but there was a
popular sense of injustice which arose from the conviction that farmers and merchants selfishly profited from community need.
This backs up a point made in the radical history group’s account, but benefits from being written straight, rather than coming across as… a little po-faced. (In a section on the “despicable” nature of the police, for example, there is an aside that “many rioters may have been bigoted, racist, homophobic misogynists”.)
Sending in law enforcement officers has… not always been noted for its ability to calm matters, let’s say, but the dragoons’ arrival on the Friday (3rd) did eventually quell the rioting. Well, except for a boat “laden with cheese” which was seized at Trent Bridge later. Oh, and on the Saturday, people “behaved very insolently to the Magistrates” (Leicester and Nottingham Journal again) who read the Riot Act. And on Monday 6th, when soldiers were required to face down rioters near Derby who rather fancied the idea of burning down a warehouse. And later that evening, when another mob (possibly several hundred strong) tried to burn down a windmill near Trent Bridge. However, in that final incident, they
retreated from thence, without doing any considerable damage, on the report of the Magistrates and soldiers coming to defend it, which they did soon after their departure.
So, the radical historians are right in one sense: the mental picture of a mayor being bowled over by a rolling wheel of cheese is indeed funny, but it’s not an entirely comic affair.
Interestingly, though, the paper about hunger riots in Devon says:
Hardship alone cannot explain the crises, for rioting did not take place at the points of highest prices, either in time or place. Evidence for 1766 indicates, on the contrary, that the onset of the riots coincided with a lowering of prices … and that the end of the rioting sparked a dramatic increase. The market towns of the north and west, for instance, generally reported higher prices but fewer riots than their counterparts to the south and east.
That is specific to Devon, of course, but it’s not unreasonable to think it could have been true elsewhere, too. Affordability was a factor, but — as the earlier aside about Lincolnshire traders shows — outsiders getting their hands on ‘our’ stuff is at least as important. And the rioters in Devon were often rather exercised about exports to — Dear God! — France. It seems the history is more complex than ‘a cheese riot — how hilarious’, but also contains more nuance than ‘well, people were hungry’. Also:
analysis of these and other riots has shown that it was not the poorest people who rioted but those at least one level above pauperism. Although the hard-pressed woollen workers certainly participated in riots, the highly prosperous dockyard workers were among the most formidable rioters in 1795 and 1801.
Not that there’s any history, on either side of politics, of people from a privileged background rabble-rousing at little risk to themselves, of course. Heaven forfend.
Ultimately, though, if we’re talking about law and its enforcement, I think the Nottingham Date Book has my favourite sentence:
A number of persons were apprehended on suspicion of being parties to the riot, but all of them were afterwards liberated.
We may not riot over cheese any more, but there isn’t a great deal new under the sun.
