Episode
The City That Rioted Over CHEESE
- Podcast
- Mysteries and Histories
- Published
- Aug 10, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 893
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
At Nottingham’s Goose Fair in 1766, cheese became a symbol of something much bigger: hunger, profiteering, and a town pushed too far. After failed harvests sent food prices soaring, locals watched Lincolnshire merchants buy up huge quantities of cheese, already selling at nearly double its usual price, to carry away and resell elsewhere. What began as an argument spiralled into days of chaos: stalls were looted, wheels of cheese rolled through the streets, a cargo boat was raided, and even Nottingham’s mayor was knocked down by a runaway cheese wheel. When soldiers arrived to restore order, they fired into the crowd and killed a man, proof that the Great Cheese Riot was never really about a silly food fight, but the violence that erupts when ordinary people can no longer afford to eat.