Rebecca’s Country: A Welsh Story of Riot and Resistance

Rhian E Jones

The Rebecca riots are a story with, unusually for Welsh history, a happy ending.

Many of us are familiar with the general outline of events: farmers and labourers in 1840s south-west Wales, incensed by a new tax on road travel, dressed in carnivalesque costumes and massed behind the figure of ‘Rebecca’ to tear down the tollgates that barred their way, in a spectacular example of successful direct action.

A huge amount of work exists by local historians and other enthusiasts on the events, and books on the Rebecca riots include Henry  Tobit Evans’s Rebecca and her Daughters (1910), David Williams’s The Rebecca Riots: A Study in Agrarian Discontent (1955) and Pat Molloy’s And They Blessed Rebecca (1983), as well as my own Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest (2016).

So why it is time for a new telling of the story? Firstly, because much about the movement is less well-known than its targeting of tollgates.

Evictions

The people who took part were also opposing high rents, tithes, evictions, workhouses and the New Poor Law. Their movement included demands for financial support for unmarried mothers and children, rural and industrial workers’ rights, and national political reform.

The Rebecca movement contained many quirks and idiosyncrasies, at times seeming strange or surreal to modern observers – and to some observers at the time – but in fact solidly rooted in Welsh society and culture.

Outside Wales, not only were the events a subject of contemporary political debate, but the imagery and aesthetics of ‘Rebecca’ became deeply embedded in popular media and the public imagination, inspiring comedy, satire and even playful imitation among groups and individuals completely unconnected with the events – arguably becoming an early version of a meme.

Wider struggles

Looking at the movement’s lesser-known aspects ties the events into wider struggles and historical narratives on welfare reform, gender relations and the development of working-class politics. Beyond the success story of the defeat of the tollgates, Rebeccaism was a wide-ranging movement concerned with defending the established rights of local communities and with popular opposition to social, economic and political injustice.

It formed part of the conflict and resistance generated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain by the shift from a society regulated by paternalist obligations, popular customs and what the historian E. P. Thompson called a pre-existing ‘moral economy’, towards an economy, politics and society informed by industrial capitalism.

The impact that this had on ordinary people, and how they responded, is a story in which Rebeccaism plays an important part.

Secondly, the world of the Rebecca riots can feel surprisingly near to our own. The people in this story led lives that feel as modern as they do archaic: they spent their time working or looking for work, struggled to bring up children or support ageing parents, and thought and talked about old and new ideas, plans and beliefs.

Newspapers

The newspapers they read carried reports on the lives of the rich and powerful while, in streets, pubs, rented rooms and marketplaces across the country, people grumbled and sighed – and occasionally took to the streets in protest – over unemployment, foreign policy and the rising cost of living. Faced with absent, negligent or actively oppressive local authorities, those who took part in the Rebecca movement were attempting to remedy their collective discontent by taking matters into their own hands.

Rather than a single-minded campaign against tollgates, then, Rebeccaism can look more like an 1840s version of the ‘Occupy’ campaigns that arose after the 2008 financial crisis or, a decade later, the gilets jaunes of France. Like them, it was a broad, if not always coherent popular movement trying to call attention to economic and social inequality, and to the lack of attention by local elites to the problems of those they governed.

Bonnets and petticoats

In early Victorian Wales, protestors obscured their identity and proclaimed their allegiance using bonnets and petticoats rather than yellow vests or Guy Fawkes masks, and, rather than ‘the 99 per cent’, they called themselves ‘the children of Rebecca’.

Some of the major characters in Rebecca’s story are at least recognisable by name – in particular Shoni Sguborfawr and Dai’r Cantwr who have gone down in history as both heroes and villains. Some of the best impressions of the story come from relative outsiders, like the Times reporter Thomas Campbell Foster or the estate manager and reluctant observer Thomas Cooke.

Other individuals who appear in the archives are not often focused on, but their involvement in particular events, or general journey within or alongside the events of Rebeccaism, paint a vivid picture of the movement and the motivations, conflicts, hopes and fears that participants brought to it. I have tried to bring some of these people to the forefront, even if only for a brief glimpse, like Alcwyn C. Evans, the schoolboy who went on to tell his own story of the movement, or Frances Evans, the young single mother who inspired the storming of a workhouse.

Well-organised

I have also tried to emphasise the links between rural and urban, and industrial and agricultural Wales, showing how the ‘riots’ were, in fact, a well-organised umbrella movement that brought together farmers, labourers and industrial workers, as well as middle-class reformers and working-class radicals.

Although ‘Rebecca’s country’ of Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire can seem insular or isolated, the movement and responses to it were inextricably linked with the world outside it – not just industrial Wales and Chartist Britain, but revolutionary France and pro-independence Ireland – and with larger contexts, systems and structures including imperialism and colonialism.

Lastly, stories of the past can also tell us something about the present, and Rebeccaism strongly resonates with much of today’s political turmoil, economic crisis, and reactions to both. Many problems familiar to our Victorian ancestors – poverty, high rents, unemployment, the privatisation of common space, the policing of protest – either have never gone away or are making a stark return.

In a world that can seem increasingly fraught and volatile, the study of historical responses to comparable developments is one of our few remaining ways to make sense of things.

Rebecca’s Country: A Welsh Story of Riot and Resistance is written by Rhian E Jones and can be purchased here.