Robie Swann, the mayor of Nottingham, spent the second of October 1766 trying to get his own town back, and couldn't. Goose Fair was on. Lincolnshire merchants had bought up Nottinghamshire cheese and were loading it to take home, and people stood in front of the carts, because the price of food had been climbing all year and here it went, out of the county, on wheels.
So how do you measure a riot? This one you measure in cheeses. A warehouse was emptied, shops too, and a cargo boat, and hundreds of whole wheels went rolling down the streets with people chasing them. Wheeler Gate slopes, which helps. (There's a story that the mayor himself was bowled off his feet by one coming down the hill — told everywhere, and I've never managed to find it in anything written at the time, so I'd leave it off a quiz sheet.)
Swann sent for the government troops. They fired, and it took several days after that before the thing settled. One man was killed and others were wounded, and I can't find his name written down anywhere.
The riots that autumn ran well beyond Nottingham, and the government — Chatham's, with Parliament not sitting — put an embargo on grain exports by royal proclamation in late September 1766. Ministers then had to go back to the House for an act of indemnity, since the prerogative wouldn't quite stretch that far. The record shows the troops came first and the paperwork after.
A Nottinghamshire wheel that size wasn't a snack, Pip — pressed hard for days, bound in cloth, rind greased or waxed and then months on a shelf, so you're talking a stone or more of solid cheese with a flat edge to run on. It was winter food for a household, which is why people stood in front of the carts.