Women’s Role in Britain’s Food Riots

History has traditionally had a rather convenient way of describing popular unrest. Men become rebels, radicals and revolutionaries; women become an unruly mob.

Yet in the food riots that repeatedly swept through Britain during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women were often far more than anonymous members of a hungry crowd. They could initiate disturbances, organise neighbours, confront merchants, stop carts and wagons, seize grain, dictate the price at which food would be sold and, remarkably often, ensure that the owner was actually paid.

These were not necessarily riots in the modern sense of indiscriminate looting and destruction. Many operated according to surprisingly strict rules.

The women involved often believed that they were enforcing rules that merchants, millers and grain dealers had themselves broken.

At the heart of their actions lay one simple conviction:

People had a right to eat.

And when the mechanisms of the market threatened that right, ordinary people sometimes decided that the market needed correcting.

The Woman Who Bought the Bread

For most working-class families, food occupied an enormous proportion of household expenditure. Bread in particular was not simply another item on the shopping list. It was the foundation of the diet.

The person most directly confronted with its changing price was frequently a woman.

Women bought bread, flour, meat, vegetables and other necessities. They stood in markets, dealt with bakers and shopkeepers, compared prices and attempted to stretch inadequate household incomes sufficiently far to feed children and husbands.

They knew when prices changed.

They knew which baker had put up his prices.

They knew which miller was suspected of withholding flour.

They knew when grain was being transported out of a district in which local families were struggling to find enough bread.

And they knew what yesterday’s loaf had cost.

This gave women a peculiar form of economic expertise that formal political structures denied them.

They could not vote in parliamentary elections. Most possessed very limited independent legal power, particularly if married. They occupied a society that regarded politics overwhelmingly as a masculine concern.

Yet they understood the economics of survival extraordinarily well.

The marketplace was therefore one of the places where working women exercised genuine knowledge and authority.

When food became scarce, that knowledge could become political power.

When Hunger Became Political

Britain experienced repeated waves of food disturbances during the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth.

Particularly serious outbreaks occurred during periods such as 1756–57, 1766–68, 1794–96 and 1800–01.

The great crises of the 1790s and early 1800s occurred against an especially volatile background.

Britain was at war with revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. Harvests could be poor. Grain prices rose. Wages frequently failed to keep pace with the cost of food.

But high prices alone did not necessarily cause riots.

What particularly infuriated communities was the belief that someone was profiting from scarcity.

A farmer might be accused of withholding grain while waiting for its price to rise.

A dealer might purchase grain locally and transport it somewhere else where it commanded a higher price.

A merchant might buy enormous quantities and thereby appear to manipulate the local supply.

Middlemen were particularly mistrusted because they appeared to make money simply by buying something cheaply and selling it more dearly.

From the modern economic perspective, much of this could be explained as the normal operation of supply and demand.

To an eighteenth-century labourer’s family watching grain leave their district while their children went hungry, it could look very different.

It looked like profiteering.

And there was a deeply rooted belief that essential foodstuffs were not commodities quite like everything else.

Property had rights.

But property also carried obligations.

Profit was legitimate.

Profiteering from hunger was not.

The Moral Economy

The historian E. P. Thompson famously described this collection of beliefs as the “moral economy of the crowd.”

His argument transformed historians’ understanding of the food riot.

Earlier interpretations could portray such disturbances as almost automatic explosions of desperation: the price of bread rose, hungry people became angry, and a riot followed.

Thompson suggested something much more sophisticated.

Crowds possessed ideas about how markets ought to operate.

These ideas had grown from older traditions in which authorities were expected to intervene in food markets during times of scarcity. Governments and magistrates had historically regulated markets, weights, measures and certain prices and attempted to prevent practices regarded as exploitative.

There was therefore a customary expectation that the supply of food carried social responsibilities.

The transition towards a freer market increasingly collided with those expectations.

A grain dealer might say:

The grain belongs to me. I am entitled to sell it wherever I can obtain the highest price.

The crowd effectively replied:

Not if our families are starving.

That disagreement went to the heart of the food riot.

Women as Guardians of the Moral Economy

Women possessed particular authority in this dispute because feeding the household was considered part of their social role.

This created an extraordinary contradiction.

The same society that told women that their proper place was within domestic life inadvertently supplied them with a justification for entering public protest.

If a woman’s duty was to feed her children, what was she supposed to do when merchants made feeding them impossible?

The domestic role could therefore become politically explosive.

A woman confronting a grain merchant could argue, implicitly or explicitly, that she was not abandoning her proper female responsibilities.

She was fulfilling them.

She was acting as a wife.

She was acting as a mother.

She was protecting her household.

And because many other women faced precisely the same problem, an individual domestic responsibility could rapidly become collective action.

The kitchen entered the street.

They Were Not Simply Stealing

One of the most fascinating features of many British food riots was what historians call taxation populaire — popular price-setting.

A crowd might intercept a wagon carrying grain or flour.

They might take it to the marketplace.

But rather than simply stealing its contents, they could sell the food at what they considered a reasonable price.

The money might then be handed to the owner.

Sometimes the crowd carefully supervised the transaction.

This distinction mattered enormously to participants.

They were not necessarily claiming:

“This grain belongs to us.”

They were claiming:

“You are entitled to sell this grain — but you are not entitled to exploit our hunger.”

The difference is fundamental.

There are recorded examples in which people stopped bread or grain, took what they needed, paid for it and dispersed peacefully.

The crowd was temporarily assuming the regulatory authority it believed magistrates or other officials should have exercised.

In effect, ordinary people created an improvised market regulator.

The price was wrong.

The authorities had failed to correct it.

So the crowd corrected it themselves.

Stop That Wagon

Another frequent source of anger was the physical removal of food from a community.

Imagine the scene.

A harvest has been poor.

Bread is becoming increasingly expensive.

Families are already reducing what they eat.

Then a wagon loaded with grain passes through the village.

Everyone knows where it is going.

Not to the local mill.

Not to the local baker.

It is going to another market because somebody can obtain a better price there.

Legally, there might be nothing wrong with that.

Morally, the community could regard it as intolerable.

Stopping carts, wagons and boats carrying grain therefore became one of the characteristic actions of food protesters.

This was particularly important because the issue was not merely price.

It was availability.

People feared that local supplies were being drained away.

The merchant saw a national or regional market.

The hungry family saw bread disappearing down the road.

Women Could Be Formidable Rioters

Female participation in food protest was not unusual.

Indeed, women appear repeatedly in accounts of disturbances stretching back centuries.

At Maldon in Essex in 1629, for example, more than one hundred women and children boarded a ship that was carrying grain. The incident arose amid rising food prices and anger about grain being taken away from the locality. The women forced grain to be distributed.

This was no trivial gathering.

A large group of women had collectively intervened in commercial trade because they believed the survival of the local community took precedence over the unrestricted movement of grain.

Similar patterns appeared repeatedly.

Women could surround merchants.

They could stop carts.

They could demand reductions in prices.

They could encourage others to join them.

They could intimidate traders.

And, where persuasion failed, they could participate in physical violence and destruction.

It would be romanticising these events to portray every food riot as peaceful female community activism. Threats, assaults, property destruction and intimidation occurred.

But violence was frequently selective rather than indiscriminate.

The objective was usually food — its availability and its price — rather than destruction for destruction’s sake.

The Advantage of Being a Woman

There may also have been a tactical reason for women taking prominent roles.

Authorities could hesitate before treating women with the same severity routinely inflicted upon male rioters.

Eighteenth-century assumptions about female weakness could therefore work unexpectedly in women’s favour.

Women might be considered less threatening.

A gathering of mothers demanding affordable bread did not initially possess the same political appearance as a crowd of male labourers making demands.

Women could exploit that assumption.

There was also an expectation that women acting to obtain food for their families possessed at least some legitimate grievance.

This certainly did not provide immunity from arrest or punishment. Women were prosecuted for riot and associated offences.

But gender could complicate the authorities’ response.

A magistrate faced an uncomfortable question.

Was this woman a dangerous criminal?

Or was she a desperate mother trying to obtain bread?

The answer was not always straightforward.

Aprons as Political Equipment

There is something particularly striking about the imagery surrounding women in food disturbances.

The objects of ordinary domestic life could become the equipment of protest.

Aprons could carry grain.

Baskets intended for household shopping could carry food taken from an intercepted shipment.

The marketplace itself — normally associated with mundane household purchasing — became a political arena.

There was no manifesto.

There was no political party.

There was rarely a formal organisation.

Yet these actions contained a clear political argument:

The community possessed rights that the market could not simply erase.

For women excluded from formal politics, this was a form of political participation that grew directly from everyday experience.

“We Will Decide the Price”

Perhaps the most radical moment came when the crowd imposed its own price.

This reversed the normal relationship between seller and buyer.

Ordinarily the merchant named the price and the customer decided whether to purchase.

During a food riot, the crowd could effectively tell the merchant:

You will sell — and this is what you will charge.

Yet the fact that payment was often made demonstrates that protesters continued to recognise private property.

They were not necessarily attempting to abolish commerce.

They were trying to discipline it.

That makes the traditional word riot slightly misleading.

Some disturbances certainly became riots.

Others resembled unauthorised market regulation backed by the threat of collective force.

The protesters believed that merchants had violated accepted rules of economic behaviour.

Their response was to enforce those rules themselves.

The Authorities Had a Problem

Local authorities occupied an awkward position.

They were expected to maintain order and defend property.

But magistrates also understood that hungry crowds could become dangerous crowds.

Furthermore, some officials shared the belief that profiteering during scarcity was morally objectionable.

Authorities therefore sometimes attempted to negotiate.

They might pressure farmers to bring grain to market.

They might encourage merchants to reduce prices.

They might arrange subsidised supplies.

They might seek charitable subscriptions.

Sometimes troops were summoned.

Sometimes arrests followed.

But repression carried risks.

Sending soldiers against people whose principal demand was affordable bread could transform an economic grievance into a political crisis.

And soldiers themselves were not immune from high food prices.

Militiamen occasionally sympathised with food protesters and could even participate in disturbances.

Hunger had an inconvenient habit of crossing social boundaries.

1795: A Dangerous Year

The food crisis of 1795 illustrates the combustible mixture particularly well.

Britain was fighting France.

The harvest was poor.

Grain prices soared.

Working families struggled.

The authorities were already nervous about the influence of the French Revolution and radical political societies within Britain.

A gathering demanding bread could therefore appear to contain something more sinister.

Was it merely a food riot?

Or was it revolution?

The government increasingly feared crowds of almost any description.

Yet most food protesters were not demanding the overthrow of the monarchy or Parliament.

Their demands were often strikingly conservative.

They wanted older obligations restored.

They wanted fair dealing.

They wanted merchants restrained.

They wanted magistrates to protect the community.

They wanted bread at a price ordinary people could afford.

Their methods could be radical.

Their objectives often were not.

Women, Revolution and Respectability

Female participation made these disturbances especially difficult to categorise.

The political culture of the period did not readily recognise poor women as legitimate political actors.

A woman discussing parliamentary reform could be dismissed as behaving outside her proper sphere.

A woman demanding bread for her children was harder to dismiss.

Food provided women with a socially understandable language of protest.

Motherhood itself could become a political claim.

A woman might have no constitutional voice whatsoever.

But she could stand in a marketplace and demand that a miller lower his price.

She could persuade fifty neighbours to join her.

And suddenly the supposedly powerless woman possessed considerable bargaining power.

This was politics conducted without the vocabulary of formal politics.

The Limits of the Romantic Image

There is a temptation to turn female food rioters into heroic figures — mothers defending their children against wicked profiteers.

Reality was inevitably more complicated.

Not every merchant was deliberately creating scarcity.

Not every price increase represented profiteering.

Britain’s food economy was becoming increasingly complex, and moving grain between regions could actually help relieve shortages elsewhere.

Preventing grain from leaving one district might protect local consumers while worsening scarcity in another.

The moral economy therefore contained its own contradictions.

The local community naturally prioritised itself.

A merchant operating across several markets viewed supply differently.

Both perspectives had an internal logic.

Nor should every woman participating in a disturbance be assumed to have shared an identical motivation. Hunger, anger, community loyalty, resentment of particular merchants and simple opportunity could all play roles.

But acknowledging those complexities does not diminish the significance of women’s participation.

It makes it more interesting.

From Household Management to Political Action

Women’s role in the food riots exposes one of the great contradictions of eighteenth-century society.

Women were formally excluded from most political power.

Yet they performed work essential to the functioning of households and communities.

Purchasing food was one of those responsibilities.

That placed women directly at the point where great economic forces became painfully personal.

War.

Harvest failure.

Inflation.

Trade.

Agricultural markets.

Wages.

National economic policy.

All eventually arrived at the market stall in the form of one brutally simple question:

How much does the bread cost today?

A government minister might discuss grain imports.

An economist might discuss markets.

A merchant might discuss profit.

The woman with three hungry children had to turn those abstractions into dinner.

That gave her an entirely different perspective on political economy.

Joanie and

The Armour of Light

Ken Follett draws upon precisely this historical world in The Armour of Light.

Joanie’s intervention when grain is being removed from Kingsbridge is particularly revealing because she does not simply steal it.

She intervenes in the transaction.

The grain has already been sold by Hornbeam to another buyer. Joanie stops it from being taken away and pays that purchaser — not Hornbeam — according to the price that had prevailed before Hornbeam’s profiteering drove prices upwards. She then ensures that the grain remains available to the Kingsbridge bakers.

That distinction is important.

Her fictional action closely resembles the historical logic of taxation populaire.

She is not denying ownership.

She is denying what she regards as an unjust price and the right to remove desperately needed food from the community.

To Hornbeam, of course, this is an intolerable challenge.

It undermines more than his financial interests.

It undermines his authority.

Joanie has effectively declared that ownership does not give a wealthy man unlimited moral authority over a community’s food supply.

And she has demonstrated that ordinary people can intervene when those in authority refuse to do so.

That is precisely why seemingly simple disputes over grain could become politically dangerous.

The Politics of a Loaf of Bread

It is easy, looking backwards from a society of supermarkets and complicated international supply chains, to underestimate what bread represented.

Bread could consume an enormous portion of a poor household’s income.

Its price could determine whether children ate adequately.

A few pennies mattered.

A failed harvest mattered.

A wagon of grain leaving town mattered.

And the woman responsible for somehow turning inadequate wages into enough food for a family understood those facts intimately.

That is why women appear so persistently in the history of food protest.

Their involvement was not an accidental intrusion into male politics.

Food was their politics.

The domestic responsibilities imposed upon women gave them knowledge of markets, prices and household survival. When those markets appeared to violate accepted standards of fairness, women could transform that knowledge into collective action.

They marched.

They shouted.

They stopped wagons.

They confronted millers.

They boarded ships.

They seized grain.

Sometimes they dictated its price.

And remarkably often, having done all that, they paid for it.

That last detail tells us something fundamental about the British food riot.

These women were not necessarily trying to destroy the market.

They were trying to make it behave.

They demanded neither charity nor revolution.

They demanded justice.

And sometimes justice began with something as ordinary — and as politically explosive — as a loaf of bread.

Tim Alderman ©️2026

Sources and Further Reading

E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present, No. 50, 1971. The foundational study that developed the concept of the “moral economy” and transformed historical interpretation of food riots.

E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy Reviewed,” in Customs in Common, 1991. Thompson’s later reconsideration and defence of the concept.

John E. Archer, Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780–1840, Cambridge University Press. Particularly useful on food riots, their frequency, objectives and relationship to wider popular protest.

John Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c.1550–1850, Ashgate, 2010. A major examination of food protest and changing market relationships.

Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Liverpool University Press, 1996. Essays exploring the relationship between market expectations, food supplies and popular protest.

John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England, Manchester University Press, 2006. Valuable for the longer history of food protest, including the remarkable female-led Maldon grain disturbance of 1629.

Carl J. Griffin, research on rural workers and eighteenth-century English food rioting, including the importance of stopping carts and wagons, popular price-setting and the relationship between rural communities and market towns.

Institute of Historical Research, work and seminars on women, food and power, including scholarship examining women’s economic authority within household provisioning and food production.

Cambridge University Press, research on household provision and the moral authority of wives and mothers in early modern England, examining how women’s responsibility for feeding families gave them a particular legitimacy in subsistence protests.