This advice seemed but cold comfort to men and women whose hardships were severe. Political discontent was greatly increased by dear food and uncertainty of employment. The symptoms had long been threatening. At midsummer of the year 1795 the men of Birmingham assembled in hundreds opposite a mill and bakehouse on Snow Hill, crying out: "A large loaf. Are we to be starved to death?" They were dispersed by armed force, but not without bloodshed. At that time insubordination in the troops was met by summary executions or repression at Horsham, Brighton, and Dumfries. In July a drunken brawl at Charing Cross led to a riot, in the course of which the mob smashed Pitt's windows in Downing Street, and demolished a recruiting station in St. George's Fields, Lambeth. The country districts were deeply agitated by the shortage of corn resulting from the bad harvest of 1794. A report from Beaminster in Dorset stated that for six weeks before the harvest of 1795 no wheat remained; and the poor of that county would have starved, had not a sum of money been raised sufficient to buy cargoes of wheat which then reached Plymouth. The suffering was increased by the extraordinary cold of that midsummer which destroyed hundreds of newly-shorn sheep and blighted the corn. Driving storms of rain in August laid the crops. On heavy land they were utterly spoilt, so that even by October the poor felt the pinch. From all parts there came the gloomiest reports. In Oxfordshire there was no old wheat left, and the insatiable demands from the large towns of the north sent up prices alarmingly. In November Lord Bateman wrote from Leominster that the wheat crop was but two thirds of the average, and, if Government did not import wheat directly, not through fraudulent contractors, riots must ensue. Reports from Petworth, East Grinstead, and Battle told of the havoc wrought by blight and rains. At Plymouth the price of wheat exceeded all records. Lord Salisbury reported a shortage of one third in the wheat crop of mid-Hertfordshire. Kensington sent a better estimate for its corn lands. But the magistrates of Enfield and Edmonton deemed the outlook so threatening that they urged Pitt and his colleagues (1) to encourage the free importation of wheat, (2) to facilitate the enclosure of all common fields and the conversion of common and waste lands into tillage; (3) to pass an Act legalizing relief of the poor in every parish by the weekly distribution of bread and meat at reduced prices in proportion to the size of the family and of its earnings.[425]