Rishi Sunak & the price of a loaf. Time to bring back the bread riot & Assize of Bread
Questioned on Thursday about rising food prices and what his Spring Statement had done to address this (nothing) Chancellor Rishi Sunak opined on the price of a loaf of bread. He noted that his household had several different breads depending on what family members ate. A nice option if it can be afforded and in Sunak’s case as he is a millionaire it can be.
He noted that he thought the price of the seeded loaf he ate had gone up from £1 to £1.20. In fact such loaves cost rather more than that unless of course he sends his butler to Lidl to do the shopping.
The cost and price of bread historically has been a key issue for those with rather less money than Sunak has. Indeed E P Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class notes that up to the 1840s Assizes of Bread often met locally to review the quality and price of bread and make sure there wasn’t profiteering. A control mechanism, by no means unknown, was the bread riot, where a crowd would seize grain and produce cheaper bread themselves.
Thompson wrote of a ‘moral economy, which taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people….not wages but the price of bread was the most sensitive indicator of popular discontent’
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