Prof. Mike Braddick, Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, University of Oxford.
For centuries, the local miller was one of the most vital and deeply distrusted figures in English village life. Accused of everything from inflating prices to mixing chalk into flour, millers occupied a unique and scandalous space in the popular imagination. Professor Mike Braddick, a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a leading expert on early modern popular politics and protest, will unravel this fascinating 500-year history. Through tales of economic anxiety, moral outrage, and local riots, this lecture will explore how the figures controlling the daily bread were central to England’s evolving political and social dynamics.