The Carmarthen Cheese Riot of 1818

In September 1818, Carmarthen became the scene of an unusual but serious food protest: the Carmarthen Cheese Riot.

The disturbance took place at a time when food was not simply a matter of choice or taste. For many working people, cheese was an important and affordable source of protein, especially when meat was too expensive. When local people saw cheese being prepared for shipment away from Carmarthen, anger spilled over.

On 25 September 1818, a crowd gathered and stopped a cargo of cheese from being shipped from the port at Carmarthen. One later account describes the crowd as a “numerous and tumultuous assemblage” of inhabitants who prevented the cheese from being loaded. The mayor and a magistrate attempted to intervene, but the crowd boarded the vessel and took the cheese back to the warehouse.

The protest did not end there. A few days later, another attempt was made to ship cheese from Carmarthen. This time, the crowd assembled again and the situation became more serious. The vessel was ransacked and the cheese was again removed and returned to the warehouse. In response, the Lord Lieutenant ordered the Carmarthen Yeomanry and Militia to assemble in the town.

The reason for the disturbance appears to have been local anger at the export of cheese and butter at a time when people believed those foods should have been available locally. A published letter from the period linked the opposition to complaints that certain people were monopolising cheese and butter for export, rather than selling them in Carmarthen and the surrounding district.

The Carmarthen Cheese Riot was not an isolated curiosity. Historians place it within a wider pattern of food protest in Wales and Britain during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although food riots became less common after the eighteenth century, they did still occur. One academic article on rural protest in Wales specifically identifies the Carmarthen cheese riot of 1818 as one of the food disturbances that continued into the nineteenth century.

These protests were often about what historians call the “moral economy”: the belief that essential food should not be removed from a community or priced beyond the reach of local people during difficult times. In that sense, the Carmarthen Cheese Riot was not simply about cheese. It was about fairness, hunger, and the belief that local people had a right to basic food before it was sent elsewhere for profit.

Today, the story is easy to smile at because of the name. But behind the Carmarthen Cheese Riot was a serious moment in the town’s history, when ordinary people challenged the movement of food out of Carmarthen at a time of economic pressure.

It remains one of Carmarthen’s more unusual historic episodes — but also one that says a great deal about everyday life, food, trade and public protest in early nineteenth-century Wales.