The Revolt of the Housewives
In 1795, English women facing starvation organised to seize food supplies and distribute them for an honest price — making the case for a system that placed community need above individual profit.
Before the nineteenth century, the food riot was the predominant form of popular struggle. (Photo by HultonArchive / Illustrated London News / Getty Images)
In a July day in 1795, a crowd of women approached a bread cart on a road outside Delph, near Manchester. The cart was stopped and the loaves in it taken. Its driver, Richard Broome, probably thought he was being robbed, but then the bread was sold to onlookers for two pence a pound and the takings placed back into his hands.
That event, described by Edwin Butterworth in his 1856 Historical Sketches of Oldham, was one of a series of ‘price-fixing’ riots that took place through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Wales. Social historians John and Barbara Hammond saw a pattern, exemplified by Delph: rioters would seize food supplies, distribute them for a price they deemed fair to both consumers and producers (or owners), and return the money. At times they were sophisticated operations. The Hammonds write:
At Carlisle, a band of women accompanied by boys paraded the streets, and in spite of the remonstrances of a magistrate, entered various houses and shops, seized all the grain, deposited it in the public hall, and then formed a committee to regulate the price at which it should be sold.
That even-handedness was not always present. Research by historian John Bohstedt suggests that rioters stole as often as they paid, and examples prove it: in September 1800, near Wolverhampton, a group of women stopped a dairyman on his way to market, asked him his prices, and finding them too expensive, ‘immediately seized and besmeared him all over with his butter and then rolled him in a ditch’. But that fair pricing was a feature of even half of the riots indicates that something other than immediate need-satisfaction was taking place. These ‘highly-complex form[s] of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives’, writes E. P. Thompson in The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, also made the case for an economic system that placed necessity and community above individual profit at a moment of multiple crises — one not unlike our own.
Falling, and Falling Far
Hunger was widespread in late-eighteenth-century England and Wales. The year 1795, according to Thompson, saw ‘a distress that was “truly painful”’. One writer observed that rising prices had ‘stript the cloaths from their [working people’s] backs, torn the shoes and stockings from their feet, and snatched the food from their mouths’. In some cases dearth was accompanied by a sickness that Thompson associates with jaundice resulting from near-starvation. Agricultural historian Walter Stern writes that the mortality figures show ‘a distinct peak in the death rate which owes nothing to direct military action’, strengthening the impression ‘of a real crisis’. One of the reasons for this crisis was poor harvests, which for a time became almost the rule. Heavy rains in 1794 and the ‘uncommon cold frost’ in January 1795, a peak riot year, ruined the crops. According to Stern, the 1795 wheat yield amounted to ‘15 bushels to the acre at a time when 24 was considered average’, a shortfall which sent prices spiralling.
But poor harvests were not the only factor. The Enclosure Acts, the first of which was passed in 1604, wore away rights that might have helped the labouring class weather agricultural shock. Enclosure made once-common fields private property and collapsed together small holdings into large farms controlled by landlords. Labourers who had enjoyed varied means of survival — taking fuel from common woods, raising animals or crops there, ‘gleaning’ for leftovers after harvest season — were thereby made wage earners alone. ‘Not only had he to buy the food that formerly he produced himself, but he had to buy it in a rising market,’ the Hammonds write. Only a big hike in wages could have compensated for these losses, but instead of increasing, real wages in 1795 ‘had fallen, and fallen far’.
Enclosure was one example of the way nascent capitalism was changing the landscape of Britain and the experience of its residents. Another was the repeal of legislation against forestalling — intercepting sellers on their way to market and buying their stock — in 1772, allowing middlemen, like dealers, as well as millers and bakers, a growing influence over food prices. While shortages were real, then, want was compounded by low wages, land privatisation, and market-meddling, all factors which increased public anger. In 1800, when the harvest had improved but hunger remained, the minister of Colne wrote to the Home Office to complain as much:
I think myself bound in justice to bear attestation to the good conduct of the labouring people in this neighbourhood. As long as they conceived the scarcity to be real, they bore their privations with almost stoic patience and fortitude. But I very much fear this patience will soon be exhausted if some beneficial alteration in the price of provisions does not immediately take place. They will be unwilling to starve in the midst of plenty, and quietly to behold their oppressors growing rich out of their bowels and fattening upon their afflictions.
For Thompson, disquiet stemmed from the loss of the old as much as the arrival of the new. What early capitalism was replacing, he argues, was a ‘consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community’, which saw food producers ‘working not for a profit but for a fair allowance’. Like the minister of Colne, Thompson argues it was the perceived affront to this ‘moral economy’, rather than the simple fact of hunger, that led to unrest. A quote from a 1768 pamphlet, critiquing the supposed right of every farmer to set prices as high as he liked, sums up this mood:
It cannot then be said to be the liberty of a citizen, or of one who lives under the protection of any community; it is rather the liberty of a savage; therefore[,] he who avails himself deserves not that protection the power of Society affords.
Desperate Housewives
The Hammonds describe the resulting riots as the ‘Revolt of the Housewives’, emphasising the leading role taken by women in their execution. Bohstedt argues that the sexual makeup was less defined than that phrase suggests, but the female presence was at least worth noting to contemporaries: newspaper reports listed by history professor Alan Booth describe ‘an assemblage of wrong-headed women’, ‘a large body of poor women’, ‘chiefly women and boys’, ‘a gang of tumultuous women’, ‘a great number of raggelty women’, and ‘women . . . to the number of two hundred’.
To contemporary poet Robert Southey, the reason for women’s involvement was obvious: women are ‘more disposed to be mutinous; they stand less in fear of law, partly from ignorance, partly because they presume upon the privilege of their sex, and therefore in all public tumults they are foremost in violence and ferocity’. Others have made the more conventional connection between women and the home, and, therefore, food; however, as Bohstedt writes, women at this time were also often workers, ‘significant partners to men as bread rioters’ because they were ‘essential partners as bread-winners in household economies’. As an example, he refers to reports of ‘five women “nailors” [nail-makers]’ in rioting in the Black Country in August 1795, who led a crowd into a weaver’s house and carried away two flitches of bacon.
Southey was wrong regarding the ‘privilege of [our] sex’, too; women were also targeted for punishment. After leading raids on potato carts in 1812 and threatening to do the same to butter and milk sellers if they refused to lower their prices, 54-year-old Hannah Smith of Manchester was hanged for the crime of highway robbery, a more serious offence than riot, by a judge who intended her death as a warning that women would receive no special treatment. In 1795, Margaret Boulker had also been hanged for rioting in Birmingham, and Emma Birks from Staffordshire was sentenced to hanging in 1800 but transported for life instead.
At other times the response from the authorities was more sympathetic. Thompson describes a London magistrate in 1795 who, arriving on the scene of a Seven Dials riot and finding a crowd demolishing the shop of a baker accused of selling underweight bread, seized and weighed the loaves and, agreeing with the people, handed them out. In other cases, magistrates were enlisted to help rioters by supervising fixed-price sales, overseeing payment, and ensuring compliance. Thompson writes that sometimes militia or troops supervised forced sales ‘at bayonet-point’, ‘their officers looking steadfastly the other way’. The willingness of officers to ‘look the other way’ supports Thompson’s theory that the rioters were acting according to a declining but still potent belief system. The solutions suggested by the upper classes, however, focused on palliating rather than preventing the new normal: they increased philanthropic efforts, encouraged the poor to change their diets, and introduced the Speenhamland system, which gave poor families subsidies adjusted for the price of bread.
One more radical proposal was made by the Liberal MP Samuel Whitbread in 1795 and again in 1800. Critical of philanthropic responses (charity had ‘mischievous effects’, because it undermined independence, ‘a consideration as valuable to the labourer as to the man of high rank’) and of the notion that fair wages would be a natural outcome of the free market (‘labour found its level by combinations [trade unions]’ which had been found to be ‘so great an evil’ that legislation had been passed against them), Whitbread proposed a minimum wage. His efforts, however, were opposed by Prime Minister William Pitt, who sought improvements to the Poor Laws instead — improvements which were also, later, abandoned.
The church, for its part, offered only instructions for repentance. After a breakdown of negotiations between rioting women and magistrates at Rochdale in August 1795, volunteers charged with bayonets and fired into the crowd, killing two and increasing public rage. A popular verse emerged later, damning the failure of the religious authorities to take the side of the needy against hunger and repression: ‘In 1795 a dearth of bread there were / And people cried for bread / The chiefest shepherd of the flock / He feedeth them with lead.’
Moral Memory
Price-fixing riots died out towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Hunger continued, but the acceleration of the industrial revolution shifted large numbers away from the villages and market towns, where price-fixing had been successful, to booming cities. There, without the close-knit communal ties on which disciplined action depended, the riot was overtaken by other forms of organising, including political societies (some of which had been influenced by the riots; in 1800 the password of the United Englishmen was said to be ‘a Big Loaf’) and, later, the trade union movement. ‘Women continued to be assertive,’ Bohstedt writes, ‘but they were citizens of a community politics whose efficacy decayed as the alienation between elites and masses grew.’
We live with that same alienation today. Around 9.3 million people — one in seven — currently face hunger in the UK, while supermarkets and others selling necessities — fuel, water, accommodation — continue to enjoy huge profits. The occasional mentions made of price and rent controls in recent years have faded, while a surging far right is keen to direct the resulting anger towards targets with no power over the price of bread. Thompson writes that it is hard, over a two-century gap, to imagine the world these riots imply: one in which profiteering from crisis was considered ‘unnatural’, and common sense held that ‘in time of dearth, prices of “necessities” should remain at a customary level, even though there might be less all around’. But only that kind of imagining can offer real solutions and give positive form to the rupture that must arise out of the present material conditions. Rupture of one kind or another can, it seems, only be delayed for so long. ‘When bread is costly,’ Thompson advises, ‘the poor do not go over to cake.’