The 1795 food riots, often referred to as the "revolt of the housewives," were a series of disturbances in England arising from severe food scarcity.
The term was coined by historians John and Barbara Hammond. Women played a prominent role in these riots, which reflected the broader socio-economic challenges of the period.
The Hammonds contextualise these riots within the broader framework of land enclosure starting around 1760. This process removed common rights - such as cultivating land, grazing animals, and collecting fuel - from yeomen, copyholders, cottagers, and squatters, leading to significant hardship or ruin.
(I’m planning another post on copyholders – but these were basically tenant-farmers. The feudal system was considered over and done with by the 1700s in England – yes. Really.
When regular people found themselves unable to freely graze stock, farm, gather wood, etc. on land belonging to the great estates , when they'd been doing this for over a hundred years already, they were understandably unhappy.)
The Poor Laws & Land Enclosures:
This situation was exacerbated by the constraints of the English Poor Laws, which restricted the poor from moving to or settling in other parishes. With the parish obliged to care for the indigent within its borders, you can see why local clergy preferred each parish to keep its impoverished residents within its own borders.
I touch on just this issue in my most recent Clifton Hall novella, A Holiday Season at Clifton Hall. The Lancashire magistrate tended to have the poor (especially the homeless, which include the Romany), locked up for ‘vagrancy’ – a real crime back then. Locking up the poor in prisons meant moving them out of Lancashire, and swelling the numbers imprisoned in the villainous Duke’s private gaols – which were located well beyond his own borders.
With constraint of movement and the enclosure of previously accessible hunting and gathering grounds, the rural poor of England had cause to feel hemmed in from every side – and then the grain prices rose on top of everything else, making starvation a real possibility.
Add to this the ongoing wars with France, and the suspicion that certain landholders were hoarding grain stores in order to gouge greater profits from the hungry and desperate and those with the foresight to gauge the current mood began warning parliament – and the king - that it wouldn’t take much to tip the public into civil unrest. As it turned out, all it took was a bad run of worse weather.
The winter of 1794-95 was notably harsh, with January 1795 being the coldest month recorded in the Central England temperature series, averaging -3.1°C (26.4 °F). February saw significant flooding on the Rivers Severn and Wye due to ice breakup, snowmelt, and heavy rainfall. These weather conditions led to severe food scarcity early in the year, bringing simmering local tensions to the boil.
The riots occurred during the French Revolution - a time when the British ruling class was particularly concerned about the potential for civil unrest, and the stability of their heads on their elevated noble-class necks.
The Housewives’ Revolt:
Food scarcity led to riots across the country, prominently involving women. Rioters enforced the redistribution of available food stocks. The Hammonds describe these riots as disciplined and orderly, noting that the rioters, upon gaining control of food stores, set fair prices for their seized goods and paid over the proceeds to the original owners.
Reports of women-led food redistribution riots came from various locations, including:
Aylesbury in March 1795
Carlisle
Ipswich
Fordingbridge
Bath
Deddington,
Wiltshire
Suffolk
Norfolk.
In Seaford, East Sussex, militia brought in to quell the riots chose to join forces with the women rioters in redistributing meat and flour, leading to the execution of two soldiers on June 13. In Chudleigh, two mills were destroyed, with speculation that men disguised in petticoats were among the rioters (thought false flag events were a modern invention? Not since the Trojan horse…)
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women played significant roles in at least 26 riots and 50 demonstrations, with 10 being primarily under their control, and instigated by us.
Women were responsible for cooking and purchasing food for their families. Consequently, women typically managed large portions of their household finances – especially if their men were away at war. Women were often the first to notice issues of food scarcity and high prices. Our involvement was further influenced by the fact that food riots often began in marketplaces near shops and mills, which were common gathering places for women.
Now That We Have Your Attention...
Local magistrates took action against named rioters, such as Sarah Rogers of Fordingbridge, who received a three-month prison sentence for redistributing butter. However, they also began considering more constructive actions. Several local initiatives offered fuel at reasonable prices for poor parishioners and implemented more complex support systems like the Speenhamland system (more of that one in another post).
National discussions centred on questions of diet and the poor’s subsistence. Efforts to persuade the poor to consume cheaper brown breads and abandon tea proved unsuccessful (they were poor, but they were English). Debates on pegging minimum wages to the cost of provisions saw figures like Edmund Burke opposing and Arthur Young supporting this idea.
Some magistrates and quarter sessions recommended this approach (something else I touch on in my novella). In late 1795, Samuel Whitbread introduced a minimum wage bill in Parliament, gaining support from Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charles Grey, and Charles James Fox (all Whigs), but it failed to pass a second reading due to opposition from William Pitt the Younger (Tory, or Conservative).
The government also finally began importing grains from Canada, Europe, and Bengal to address the food shortage.
What do we learn from this?
Women make a difference – and remember, we did this without any legal or financial right of our own at the time. Women didn’t even have the right to vote.
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