This week’s entry: Nottingham cheese riot
What it’s about: “Widespread looting of cheese,” is not a phrase we thought we’d hear outside of our spec script for a gritty Wallace And Gromit reboot, but gouda-related violence marred an annual outdoor market in Nottingham, England in 1766 in what became known as the Great Cheese Riot.
Biggest controversy: Then as now, people are not happy about price gouging. Winning the Seven Years’ War three years previous had come at a cost of alienating Great Britain from the other European powers, and inflaming tensions in its colonies in India and America. At home, England saw food shortages and rising prices, which came to a head in Nottingham’s annual Goose Fair (more on that later), when merchants from Lincolnshire bought wheels of cheese, intending to sell them in their own city well above their already inflated prices. Locals objected to large quantities of food leaving their hungry borough, and when a group of “rude lads” attacked the merchants, it threw a match on an already smoldering fondue pot of resentment, and a riot spread out across the city.
Strangest fact: The Goose Fair is a 1,000-year-old tradition that continues to this day. As with most 1,000-year-old things, no one knows precisely when it started, but it has origins in the Feast of Matthew the Apostle, celebrated by the early Saxons. King Henry II granted the Martinmas Fair a royal charter in 1164, forbidding any competitors to set up shop in the Nottingham area during the fair. The festival became a livestock trading event, and thousands of geese were herded to Nottingham, giving the fair its long-standing nickname. (Roast goose was the traditional Michaelmas feast.) By the 19th century, it became less of a market and more of a carnival, and it continues in that form to this day. In its long history, it has only been canceled four times—for several years during each World War, once in 1646 because of the bubonic plague, and in 2020 because of COVID-19.
Thing we were happiest to learn: The Great Cheese Riot may have had the most surreal imagery of any riot in history, as rioters looted a warehouse, shops, and a cargo ship in search of cheese “and hundreds of cheese wheels were rolled through the streets.” The mayor “attempted to restore order but was knocked over by a rolling cheese.”
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Basically everything else. As amusing a visual as the mayor being knocked over by a wheel of cheese is, it was still a violent uprising based on food shortages. A lot of anger was directed at local shops, which had been jacking up prices in response to the shortage, but even merchants who offered reasonable prices were targeted.
The army was called in (the 15th Dragoons were stationed in Nottingham), firing shots into a crowd. One man was killed, a farmer trying to protect his cheese who soldiers mistook for a looter. (Defund the dragoons!) It took several days for the military to restore order, and according to the Leicester And Nottingham Journal, the disorder only exacerbated the town’s food shortages. (Both food shortages and riots would continue across England throughout the year.)
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: We actually have a Worst Link this week. For those interested in why cheese is manufactured in wheel form, or how, or where the practice originated, don’t look to truckle (which “cheese wheel” redirects to), which is a three-sentence stub article, which confers only three pieces of information: A truckle is another name for a wheel of cheese; the word comes from the Latin word for “wheel,” and truckles vary in size.
Further down the Wormhole: For reasons Wikipedia doesn’t explain, the South East of England was largely exempt from food shortage riots in 1766. The South East includes much of the area surrounding London (but not the city itself), and is one of England’s most prosperous regions (and likely was in the 1760s as well). Its largest cities include Brighton, Southampton, Oxford, and Maidstone. Maidstone was originally settled in or before the Stone Age, and is the birthplace of notables including 18th-century painter William Alexander, actor Mackenzie Crook, and YouTuber Chris Broad, who left Maidstone for Tōhoku and began the YouTube series Abroad In Japan. Since 2012, he’s provided an outsider’s perspective on everything from McDonalds’ Japan-only McChoco Potatoes; reactions to North Korea’s launch of a missile over Japan in 2017; and Tama, a cat who runs a train station. We’ll look at the country that built a technologically superior high-speed rail system and then put a cat in charge of it next week.
53 Comments
I camembert to watch cheese-related violence!
It’s worse getting caught up in it. You need to tread Caerphilly.
I wouldn’t pule this kind of puns if you know what’s gouda for you
I can keep going all day. There are still tons to choose from
You should have said “cheese from.” It was right there man!
Too obvious. I couldn’t take credit for a feta complit.
Quelle fromage!
There’s so many it should be a Brie-ze.
Havarti you have to think up that pun?
Another very good riot is the Straw Hat riot, where a bunch of New Yorkers decided to take to the streets to protest straw hats (which were the fashion at the time) being worn too late in the year. Don’t forget to tell your family and friends about mobs of white folks protesting because of some cheese or a few hats if the opportunity ever arises.
Wasn’t the straw hat riot covered in an earlier Wiki Wormhole?
Oh, I guess it was. I rarely used to see these articles because of whatever front page nonsense Kinja does, and have only lately been seeing them regularly. I found out about it recently because I was researching suits, and something mentioned the Top Hat Riot, which sounded unbelievable, and is in fact very likely made up. But not entirely ludicrous, as it turns out.
…or the price of tea.
How ‘bout them Zoot Suit Riots?
Mark Twain’s trademark white suit was a protest against contemporary fashions arbitrarily not allowing white suits to be worn in the winter, and also him finding it less depressing than wearing dark suits
Just one of the many things Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens did just to cheese off the establishment.
whats your problem?
I’ll give you the Straw Hat nonsense, but food shortages cross racial lines. It’s about rich vs poor (like most things).
True. Its not like it was a mac’n’cheese and casserole riot
I want to buy some chheeesse
Can’t blame them, I’ve seen wedges of brie for like $17 at upscale delis and seriously considered pocking a couple just to stick it to the man.
Unfortunately, this was followed by the Great Constipation Riot of 1767.
Given the state of sanitation and drinking water in the late 18th century, not pooping all the time would have been a rare luxury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tama_(cat)“On January 5, 2008, Tama was promoted to “super station master” in a ceremony attended by the president of the company, the mayor, and approximately 300 spectators. As a result of her promotion, she was “the only female in a managerial position” in the company.”Hmmm.
I’ll just say it:JAPAN!!!
Here’s a photo of her!JAPAN!!!
I would also like to crush the mayor with a block of cheese
Which kind? Cheddar, gouda, Havarti, Monterey jack, pepper jack, Colby jack?
I think a nice gouda would be soft yet firm enough to send a message without killing them
N/m, Blue Dog made the same joke, only better
There can never be enough Mayor McCheese jokes.
Group cheese!
I prefer my Mayor with a single thin slice of processed
cheese between burger and bun, spats, striped pants, pince nez and askew
top hat.I did not know until now that he was the subject of lawsuit based on a supposed resemblance to HR Pufnstuf, which I just don’t see.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonaldland
You would only make Mayor McCheese more powerful, you fool!
Soon he will proclaim himself Emperor McCheese!
Food shortages were sadly very common until quite recently. I’m on a team conducting an archaeological survey of a village in the North of England, and the archive guys established that the harvest failed at least once every five years, or once every three in a particularly bad decade.
Food shortages are actually still pretty common around the world. Many of us are insulated from that reality in America and Western Europe, but they even still exist in the U.S. And that’s not taking the quality of food that’s available into account—urban food deserts are a real thing. Nobody can get all their food from a dollar store and say they’re getting complete nutrition.
Any correspondence between a famine and animal/human sacrifice?
The period we’re looking at is 1300 – 1900 more or less, so not much in terms of sacrifice. Though the village does have Saxon and Roman remains, as well as Neolithic stuff so its occupation goes back to the retreat of the glaciers in that region.It’s a shrunken Medieval village, so the main impact of repeated famines was emigration. It’s only about half the size now that it was in the mid-1500s. The Scots burned it down twice too.
Another dangerous English cheese rolling event is the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Roll:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper%27s_Hill_Cheese-Rolling_and_Wake
Cheese has always been associated with violence. After all, ‘Feta’ is very nearly an anagram of ‘Fatal’.
Or in 2011…
hell yeah, Tama rules
So who would do a better job of performing a farcical presentation of the cheese riots: Benny Hill or Monty Python?
I mean clearly the only appropriate soundtrack to the mayor running away from a wheel of cheese is “Yakety Sax”.
Benny Hill would find plenty of ways to turn a cheese riot into a dirty joke; Monty Python would do great at exaggerating the absurdity of it
If you want a sketch about cheese that actually has cheese in it, maybe Python isn’t the way to go.
Thank you Kinja for totally scrambling my post and making me edit it repeatedly.It’s supposed to read like this:When it comes to naming historical eventsI think The Great Cheese Riotranks right up there with The Defenestrations of Prague.
After a half dozen edits and eventually ditching the Wikipedia link to said defenestrations, I feel like tossing the IT people who run this site out a window.
Everyone loves a good defenestration but how many enjoyed the Diet of Worms.
I understand the Diet of Finland is rather heavy on the lutefisk. If you’ve ever had lutefisk, you may well opt for worms instead.
“…at a cost of alienating Great Britain from the other European powers, and inflaming tensions in its colonies in India and America. At home, England saw food shortages and rising prices…”Time is a flat circle.