Book review: Rebecca’s Country by Rhian E. Jones

Julie Brominicks

‘Sleeping off the evening’s ale in a ground-floor room of the pub with two other drovers, he fuzzily awoke to sudden chaos: a buzz of urgent conversation, a shout of ‘Becca is come!’ and a crush of people streaming out through the pub’s front door. … Griffiths pulled on his boots and cautiously followed the crowd. Reaching the bridge, he saw a group of men, dressed in petticoats and white headdresses, pulling the tollgate apart and carrying its fragments to the river.’

In the rural south-west in the early 1840s, ordinary people set about destroying numerous tollgates that had sprung up on local roads because they could not afford the crippling tolls. I knew this. I knew that the men among them disguised themselves as women and were known as ‘Rebecca and her daughters.’ I had read quite a lot. What I knew amounted to a trailer. This book; Rebecca’s Country, is the film.

A full-fat, fabulous, documentary film. The opening teaser; an intimate glimpse of John Morgan smearing his face with a soot, flour and berry-juice paste before joining an attack on a tollgate, has us hooked and our sympathies too, as we learn that a few weeks previously, John Morgan had felt powerless and at a loss as to how feed his family.

Colourful

Our journey through the book is loud and colourful as we witness the movement growing in strength and the Rebeccaites’ extraordinary apparel of feathers, ferns and bonnets that drew on local customs such as ‘ceffyl pren’ and carnival, while chapel – the bible particularly – possibly contributed the name. ‘Our sister, may you become thousands of ten thousands, and may your offspring possess the gate of those who hate him!’

This is heady stuff. Pacy prose propels the reader along. Characters leap from the pages accompanied by ‘rough music.’ Dragoons and a brand-new police force scurry comically hither and thither in fruitless pursuit of people whose language they don’t speak and whose territory they don’t understand; it’s impossible not to think of Glyndŵr’s and subsequently Meibion Glyndŵr’s battles with English authorities.

Storm

Scenes are vividly rendered; like here in Carmarthen (Caerfyrddin) before Rebeccaites arrive to storm the Poor House. ‘The town hall which usually hosted a bustling indoor market was shadowed and silent, while, in the meeting rooms above, the local magistrates gathered around a table to steady their nerves with a glass of brandy.’ And when the same rioters realise the dragoons are coming; ‘Looking downhill with sudden apprehension, Alcwyn and his friends saw the ‘flashing of sunlight on a thin line of cavalry forcing their way up the hill and through the crowds. It was the reflection of sunrays from their epaulettes and sabres.’

Welsh author Rhian E. Jones is a London-dwelling historian who writes, according to her website, ‘fiction and non-fiction about history, politics, popular culture and the places where they intersect.’ She is fearsomely good at it, as I can vouch having spent time with some of her books; ‘Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender’, ‘Paint your Town Red: How Preston took back control and you can too’ and ‘Triptych: Three studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible.’ Jones’ intellect is matched by imagination, animation, sass and sympathy. Her concern is for the emancipation and empowerment of the exploited.

Tollgates

Yet her perspective is fair and her sources exhaustive; nonfiction history at its best. In the wake of the French Revolution we meet a nervous gentry and a struggling Welsh-speaking chapel-going rural poor, banned from newly ‘enclosed’ commonland and suffering meagre harvests, rising food prices, rents, taxes, and tithes payable to the Anglican Church. Failure to pay bills resulted in manual labour at the Poor House, increasingly the fate of unmarried mothers (often victims of rape) who could no longer claim paternity payments under new ‘bastardy’ laws. The proliferation of tollgates was the last straw. Tollgates were easy targets.

Having achieved some success towards making them untenable, ‘Rebecca’ broadened her remit to address the causes of poverty. Mobilising on a vast scale, Rebeccaites organised mass meetings along with direct action, and rather than merely grumbling, offered solutions to problems.

With a cast drawn from both rural poor and gentry (including soldiers and magistrates), Jones manages to portray events so fairly you cannot help but borrow everybody’s shoes, sympathising even, when mansions are surrounded by angry horn-blowing shot-firing crowds who nail menacing letters to the door and dig graves within sight of the window. This is not simply a story of good poor Welsh people and bad rich English and Welsh folk. It rarely is.

Jones reveals humanity in all its nuance. Witness for example, tenant farmer Thomas Howell, apologetically buying toll-keeper William Rees, who he has just helped make homeless and jobless, a ‘damper of ale’.

Relevance

These 200-year-old events are poignant in their continued relevance. Show me a movement that does not become corrupted or a campaigner who does not tire whilst fighting for change. When a Royal Commission was finally sent to investigate, it upheld the rioters’ grievances. Recommendations pertaining to tollgates were made, and soon after, the bastardy clause was rescinded. But the causes of poverty were ignored. Furthermore, it was suggested that rioting had been contributed to by the Welsh language and attendance at chapel rather than Anglican Church.

I write these words while Spain suffers catastrophic flooding as a result of climate change that our governments, despite the desperate efforts of scientists and activists, acknowledge but don’t address. It’s always too little too late.

Yet the Rebecca riots were not in vain. And as this enriching book that I do hope you’ll read ends – in the manner of a documentary film, with brief accounts of what happened next to key players and the movement itself – you feel emotional and motivated. You can almost hear the closing music. ‘Rough music’ of course; a medley of horns, bells, and a drumming on pots and pans. Rise up! Becca is come.

Rebecca’s Country by Rhian E. Jones is published by Calon. It is available from all good bookshops.