Inflation and nostalgia in early modern Britain

Prices in history

The historian E. P. Thompson famously argued that eighteenth-century English riots over the price of bread were triggered less by hunger and more by a collective sense of moral outrage that such essentials were so expensive. In the past, as today, it appears, a common sense of fair price was a ubiquitous social phenomenon and a vital form of economic knowledge (if not an easy way to expose out-of-touch politicians).

It certainly didn’t escape the notice of our forebears that prices appeared much lower in days gone by. ‘Provisions were very cheap in those days’, reported one late eighteenth-century schoolbook on ancient Roman history. ‘A bushel of wheat was usually sold for no more than four oboli, or three-pence, and a bushel of barley for half that price’. Around the same time, John Holt’s history of English monarchs suggested that the cost of living was now twenty-seven times what it had been in the year 1000, when you could procure a whole ox for just two shillings and sixpence. Try getting that kind of value from your Tesco Clubcard!

For historians, memories of past prices not only offer a fascinating window into the ways people perceived the inevitable tide of inflation; they also tell us much about how – and why – people recall things in the ways they do. Remembering was rarely a neutral act. It was employed selectively, whether for fostering social identity or fanning flames of political dissent.

Subversive nostalgia

By providing a particularly explicit, quantitative yardstick for comparing living conditions between one era and another, prices were easily evoked in political arguments. Following the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, reactionary Catholic writers criticised economic conditions and harked back to the days of ‘a good world when Mass was up, for then all things were cheap’. One contemporary ballad suggested that in the days when Catholic friars were still around, ‘A bushel of the best wheat was sold for fourteen pence: And forty eggs a penny’ [1].

This nostalgia was not simply for bygone days when costs were lower (in real terms, of course, this wasn’t always the case). Rather, prices were bundled up in a wider range of sentimental feelings about an imagined past that was more prosperous, charitable and neighbourly. ‘There was more good fellowship in the old time’, lamented a fictional priest in a 1581 tract, ‘and all things were better cheap… and a man might have more for a penny, than he can have now for a groat’ [2].

Tugging these heartstrings was all the easier during periods when inflation was especially noticeable. In 1550 the pace of change was such that one homemaker in north-west England felt the need to inscribe current prices on his house, reminding future generations that ‘This house was builded in the fourth year of the reign of King Edward the six [sic] When a bushel of wheat was at seven shillings’ [3].

During a later period of intense inflation in the 1790s, one minister on the Isle of Skye remembered that

Of course, low prices and high wages were bad news for those selling and hiring. So, in the aftermath of the 1340s plague epidemic known as the Black Death, when worker shortages drove up wages, contemporary poet John Gower bemoaned the high cost of labour, complaining that ‘whoever wants anything done must pay five or six shillings for what formerly cost two’.

Examples like these spanning several centuries remind us that cost of living crises and nostalgia for days when things were cheaper (whether or not they really were) have a long history. So whether it was forty eggs for a penny in the sixteenth century, or a dozen for $1.60 in 2021, we should remember that nostalgia can easily colour views of the past. The observation of historians like Alexandra Walsham, that nostalgia tells us as much about hopes for the future as memories of the past, is something worth bearing in mind as a new government attempts to recharge the UK economy. In the meantime, I’ll look forward to the day I can tell my grandkids about those £2.20 pints when I started university. Those were the days...

N.b. Spellings from quotations in the following works have been modernised:

[1] Francis Oscar Mann (ed.), The Works of Thomas Deloney (Oxford, 1912), p. 352.

[2] I. B., A Dialogue Betweene a Vertuous Gentleman and a Popish Priest (London, 1581), sig. B8v.

[3] Andy Wood, ‘‘When this old hat was new’: Ballads, Nostalgia and Social Change in Early Modern England’, in Harriet Lyon and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), Nostalgia in the Early Modern World: Memory, Temporality, and Emotion (Woodbridge, 2023), p. 243.

Sources

Charles Allen, A New and Improved Roman History (London, [1793]), p. 76.

John Hatcher, ‘England in the Aftermath of the Black Death’, Past & Present, 144 (1994), p. 16.

John Holt, The Characters of the Kings of England, and a Concise History of the Kingdom, with Historical Notes (London, 1794), p. 4.

John Sinclair, The Statistical Account of Scotland (20 vols., Edinburgh, 1791–99), vol. XVI, p. 153.

Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England: The Creighton Trust Lecture 1983 (London, 1983), pp. 12–13.

E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, 50 (1971), pp. 76–136.

Alexandra Walsham, Generations: Age, Ancestry, and Memory in the English Reformations (Oxford, 2023), ch. 6.