Towards the end of the 18th century, there were successive bad wheat harvests resulting in the price of wheat doubling and with it the price of bread.
It created a very much English crisis. And within England, an urban crisis. And doesn’t seem to have affected Cumberland much at all.
For not only was Cumberland largely rural – like Scotland and Wales, it have never been a big consumer of bread in the first place.
The rest of England
For many people in other counties, bread formed almost half of their diet. The soaring prices caused hardship, hunger, and in some cases riots and arson attacks, from Cornwall to Newcastle. It coincided with a period when some Englishmen were looking at France, admiring the Revolution and thought working folk in Britain might be better off following the example. Many people turned against King George III, to the point of attacking his carriage when he went to open Parliament.
Something Had To Be Done.
The Brown Bread Act
The ‘Making of Bread’ Act, also known as the ‘Brown Bread Act’ or the ‘Poison Act’ prohibited millers from producing flour other than wholemeal.
The idea was that a brown loaf used ALL the wheat (the bran etc). Whereas a white loaf discarded the bran and therefore used greater quantities of wheat.
Local measures
What today we’d call ‘trading standards’ were set by local magistrates.
An Act for the better regulating the Assize and making of Bread.
Oct 1799. by virtue of this Act, the justices of the peace of Bath do prohibit for three months the makers of bread for sale with the city from baking, selling or exposing for sale any other one or more sorts of bread being or purporting to be of a superior quality and sold at a higher price than Standard Wheaten Bread, as described in the Act.
Food price inflation – and shrinkflation
To understand the problem, it’s useful to compare the prices of grains – and ‘shrinkflation’. Today we moan that chocolate bars cost the same but are smaller. It’s not a new idea! All prices are taken from Northampton, for consistency):
1799.
January. The sixpenny wheaten loaf is to weigh 3lb 2oz 9dr.
The price of wheat was fixed at 44s to 48s per quarter. Rye was 20s-26s; barley 23s-25s; oats 17s-20s.
March. The sixpenny loaf was to weigh 2lb 13oz 12dr.
Derby ruled that white bread was be ‘fair marked with a large Roman W’. Wheaten bread had to be marked WH, and household bread H. And bakers had to imprint their initials on all loaves for sale.
June. Wheat had steadily risen to 60s-63s; rye to 34-38s; barley to 28-32s. And ‘cheap’ oats were now 26-29s.
The sixpenny wheaten loaf had shrunk to 2lb 7oz 7dr.
July. Wheat was 68s-72s. And the loaf 2lb 3oz 8dr.
August. By harvest time, wheat was 76s-80s per quarter and the loaf now down to 2lb 0oz 7dr. The price fell a little by the end of the month, with the public getting an extra 10oz 6dr for their sixpence. But it was short-lived.
September. Wheat 78s-82s. And sixpence got you a miserly 1lb 15oz wheaten loaf.
October. Wheat 96s-100s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 10oz 7dr.
By November, oats were 36s-44s, roughly double what they’d been at the start of the year.
December. Wheat 102s-106s. The sixpenny loaf is to weigh 1lb 9oz 2dr.
And, to reduce wheat consumption – and prices for consumers – Leicester magistrates were permitting bakers to make bread from a mix of wheat, barley, rye, oats, buckwheat, Indian corn, pease, beans, rice, other grains, or potatoes. As long as it was clearly labelled.
‘White bread is better for you’
1800. January. Wheat 110s-114s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 7oz 4r.
The loaf is now less than half the size of a year earlier, for the same price.
By now, millers weren’t sure what they were supposed to be producing, so stopped. Bakers were up in arms that it would bankrupt them (while saving people little).
And the public didn’t seem to be any better off – although there does seem to have been a prejudice against brown bread (that it was inferior and less nutritious). Workers eating brown bread were claiming they were not able to work with the same ‘force and heartiness’ as they been eating white bread!
Meanwhile, parish officers and workhouses were being advised to hand out soup, rice, and potatoes as relief to the poor who were struggling to feed themselves.
However, ‘the lower orders’ regarded soup as ‘poverty food’ only, and inferior to bread.
Grow your own
March. Wheat 118s-122s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 5oz 2dr.
By now, the Archbishop of Canterbury was proposing that members of the House of Lords should limit consumption of bread to a quarter of a loaf per person. The idea being to reduce the use of wheat, which would dampen the price.
The government was looking to encourage the importation of rice, and subsidise grain imports from the US. They noted that coastal areas were now eating more fish than bread, and wanted to import Swedish herrings. And they wanted to stop distilleries, which used large quantities of grain. People should be encouraged to grow potatoes.
The booze cruise. And don’t let them eat cake
In recent times, Brits started the ‘custom’ of going to France to stock up on cheap wine and other goodies. In March 1800, a Captain Crosby of Liverpool stocked up on bread at 15d (which was selling for 4s 6d here), 200 apples for 2d, and ‘as many cabbages and other vegetables as he could carry’ for 6d.
The ‘wealthy classes,’ meanwhile, were being urged to stop eating pastry, to save wheat for bread.
May. Wheat 122s-124s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 4oz 13dr.
Meanwhile, a Coventry chemist had come up with a ‘paste from a mineral substance’ to replace wheat flour. Parliament were not impressed. Newspapers were printing recipes for barley bread. And those who could afford to were donating money to funds to buy soup and bread for the poor.
Bread couldn’t be sold until 24 hours after it had been baked. This was somehow to stop people buying it fresh and discarding it after a day: they had to get used to eating stale bread, basically.
June. Wheat 116s-124s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 5oz 10dr.
July. Wheat 120s-144s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 4oz 5dr.
The House of Lords wanted to establish state mills, which could grind grain cheaper than than was done now. Imports of wheat last year had cost £5million, ‘a drain no other country could bear’.
August. Wheat 88s-120s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 8oz 14dr.
The harvest was reported to be going well and all crops were said to be in great abundance. Sadly, rain was spoil the harvest in many districts.
September. Wheat 128s-152s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 3oz 0dr.
However, this seems to have been an outlier, for in Exeter the loaf was to weigh 2lb 2oz and 12dr and towards the end of the month wheat prices were 84-100s.
‘Faddy eaters’
October. Wheat 126s-142s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 7oz 10dr.
Thomas Carr, high sheriff of Sussex, sent 1,200 of prime wheaten meal to Lewes, to be sold (limit one bushel per person) at 18d the gallon – 6d under the market price, It was snapped up by folk who all signed a paper to say ‘thank you’ to Sir Thomas.
A letter writer in Kent blamed the problem partly on the weather, partly on population increase, but also on changing tastes: people in ‘the northern counties’ were now eating wheaten bread when they hadn’t before. This was down to militia getting a taste for it in barracks. Said barracks were also responsible for a lot of waste. And there was:
‘an obstinate resolution in the lower orders to eat none but the best of wheaten bread’.
Marching on its stomach
November. Wheat 120s-160s. Sixpenny loaf 1lb 5oz 6dr.
Wheat at Worcester was 171s. while at Stamford it had fallen about 16s a quarter.
In Parliament, calling for Peace, a Mr Nicholls or Nicholl said soldiers and sailors were being fed bread while labourers hardly ate any. And the Irish, Scots and Welsh workers ‘feed on different cheap articles and consume but very little bread’. Why should the soldiers and sailors not be fed the same as labourers? Another MP pointed out that the armed forces had taken some 300,000-400,000 people away from agricultural labour.
1801
Prices of wheat fluctuated throughout the year, from highs of 96s-120s, down to 63s-76s in October – a level not seen since June 1799 (and it went back up 3s in November).
Meanwhile, the sixpenny loaf weight was never lower than 2lb 0oz 1dr, rising (briefly) to 3lb 0oz 15dr in October.
The unpopular, and hard to enforce Brown Bread Act was repealed a month later.