Hard times: what centuries of cost-of-living crises reveal

As prices have soared in recent months, living costs have outstripped many incomes in the UK. 

- VICTORIA BATEMAN

Life seems less affordable with each passing month. Over the past two years, energy prices in the UK have risen faster than at any time since 1973. The last time food seemed this expensive was in 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. With the cost of everyday items having risen faster than wages for the past couple of years, families are facing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began. One in 14 households in the UK have used emergency food aid in the past year and, globally, 51 million people have been plunged into extreme poverty as a result of the rising cost of living.

Having come to assume that living standards would rise year on year, and having boasted confidently that economic policy would prevent a repeat of the inflation of the 1970s, economists are learning to be more humble. While the cost-of-living crisis might now be starting to ease, history still warns against hubris.

Until the 20th century, rising food prices caused by factors including harvest failure, trade disruption and war frequently sparked riots. In the middle of 1347, for example, Bordeaux wine merchant William Casse had just finished loading his ship with grain in Bristol ready for his return trip to France when a crowd “carried the grain away”. Exports of wheat to support Edward III’s siege of Calais at a time of harvest failure at home also led to altercations in Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Kent, prompting what would become a common policy response to rising food prices: a ban on food exports.