The Corn Laws

Assignment: Why were the Corn Laws passed in 1815?

Why were they repealed in 1846?

During the French wars farming was a business that was incredibly profitable. So this meant that farm owners had a big advantage of earning a lot of money. The war caused the food prices to be high. After the war no foreign corn into Britain until domestic corn cost 80/- per quarter. The high prices caused the cost of food to increase and this depressed the domestic market for manufactured goods because people spent most of their money on food rather than commodities. The Corn Laws also caused a lot of grief among the working classes in the towns. They were unable to grow their own food and had to pay the high prices in order to stay alive.

The majority of voters and members of Parliament were landowners; the government was unwilling to reconsider the new legislation in order to help the economy, the poor or the manufacturers who laid off workers in times of restricted trade. Samuel whitebread was a member of the parliament and he said “The proposition is not that rents are too high, but that corn is too low, and that it ought to be raised to such a price as to enable the farmers to cultivate their land with advantage, without reducing the landlord to the necessity of lowering his rents”. A man named F.J Robinson was a member of parliament and said “I am of the opinion, on the whole, not only that our security should be greater, but even that the price of corn should be in the end be cheaper, by home cultivation, than by depending on foreign countries”. The parliament protected and some agreed with what the men said. All Mps had to be landowners for them to be heard.

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In 1846 the Corn Laws were repealed. Historians have suggested that there were three factors that led to the repeal of the Corn Laws. One factor was the increasing power of the industrialists. The Anti-Corn Law association was set up in London in 1836 but had little success there; it was re-formed in 1838 in Manchester and in 1839 was re-named the Anti-Corn-Law League (ACLL).The ACLL was founded by Richard Cobden and John Bright. They were factory owners in England. The members of this movement were mainly middle-class manufacturers, merchants, bankers and traders. They wanted the Corn Laws to be repealed so that they could sell more goods both in Britain and overseas. If wheat prices dropped this meant that people could stay healthier than before. The money that was not spent on food could be used for new markets. This did not happen so there was conflict. Once they were repealed, the ACLL thought that free trade would follow. The ACLL headed a nation-wide campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws which ended in success in 1846 when the Prime Minister, repealed the legislation.

Another factor which led to the repeal of the Corn Laws was the Irish famine which broke out in 1845.

In the middle of August the weather changed. It rained for days and there was a fog which covered everywhere.
This caused a rotten smell and, the potatoes and the plants a were black and drooping and looked as if they are dead. This was called a blight. This left all Irish farm lands covered in black rot. The Irish were very upset because they relied on the crops to pay the rent to their British and Protestant landlords. Peasants who ate the rotten produce fell ill and most villages were consumed with cholera and typhus. Parish priests desperate to provide for their congregations were forced to forsake buying coffins in order to feed starving families, with the dead going unburied or buried only in the clothes they wore when they died. Landlords evicted hundreds of thousands of peasants, who then crowded into disease-infested workhouses. Other landlords paid for their tenants to emigrate, sending hundreds of thousands of Irish to America and other English-speaking countries. But even emigration was no panacea ship owners often crowded hundreds of desperate While Britain provided much relief for Ireland's starving populace, many Irish criticized Britain's delayed response and further blamed centuries of British political oppression on the underlying causes of the famine.

The Irish Famine of 1846-50 took as many as one million lives from hunger and disease, and changed the social and cultural structure of Ireland in profound ways. The Famine also spurred new waves of immigration, thus shaping the histories of the United States and Britain as well. The combined forces of famine, disease and emigration depopulated the island; Ireland's population dropped from 8 million before the Famine to 5 million years after. If Irish nationalism was dormant for the first half of the nineteenth-century, the Famine convinced Irish citizens and Irish-Americans of the urgent need for political change. The Famine also changed centuries-old agricultural practices, hastening the end of the division of family estates into tiny lots capable of sustaining life only with a potato crop. The prices were so high in England that food was being exported from Ireland for markets in England. This meant cheap corn/wheat could not be imported for Ireland.

The third factor which led to the repeal of the Corn Law was the ideas of the prime Minister at the time, Sir Robert Peel. Robert Peel refused to lead a group of Conservatives that supported Free Trade. He thought that most farmers in Britain were going to become inefficient. He was afraid that British labourers would stop buying wheat/corn for bread and start eating potatoes, leaving them in a possibility of being in the same position as Ireland. The repeal was too late to help the Irish and the conservative party was split because of Robert Peel and his views. This meant that landlords could not trust or support him any more.

A graph to show the difference between the amount of corn/wheat every year