A sustained marketing campaign of assaults blazed throughout the Welsh counties of Carmarthenshire, Cardiganshire, and Pembrokeshire from 1839. Tenant-farmers and labourers, infuriated by elevated prices on street journey that made their working lives and funds much more burdensome, took issues into their very own arms by destroying tollhouses, gates, and bars in what turned generally known as the Rebecca riots.
Maybe the motion’s most recognisable facet was its enigmatic chief ‘Rebecca’, presupposed to be taken from Genesis, through which Rebecca is instructed: ‘Be thou the mom of 1000’s of tens of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of these which hate them.’ She was represented throughout protests by a participant in costume that mixed masculine and female signifiers: a robe or petticoat thrown on over work garments, or an elaborate wig paired with a false beard.
Because the unrest unfold throughout South Wales, reaching its peak in summer season 1843, it grew to embody workhouses, previously widespread land enclosed by personal landowners, and the estates of the native gentry. Simply because the targets of Rebeccaism went past tollgates, so their techniques went past rioting. Protesters organised mass demonstrations, stormed workhouses, resisted evictions of tenants and auctions of seized property, wrote threatening letters in Rebecca’s title, and picked up cash for unwed moms and kids. At public conferences, they drew up resolutions to Parliament that echoed the Chartist demand for the key poll and the vote for working males.
From the preliminary resistance to tollgates, Rebeccaism grew right into a wide-ranging well-liked motion coalesced round opposition to the established order. Though leaderless, considerably chaotic, and with calls for that have been broad and generally contradictory, at its peak it overturned native regulation and order, commanded nearly whole solidarity amongst its supporters, and was referred to in fearful press reviews as ‘a formidable riot’.
Authorities on the time, from native magistrates to the younger Queen Victoria, took the riots extra critically than many subsequent historians have. In June 1843, because the Welsh landed gentry issued pressing requires navy help or decamped solely from their nation estates, Victoria’s adviser Lord Melbourne fearful that the battle may spiral right into a revolutionary ‘basic rising in opposition to property’. Robert Peel’s Tory authorities, already shaken by the rise of Chartism, Eire’s independence marketing campaign, the overall strike of 1842, and, elsewhere in Wales, well-liked uprisings at Merthyr Tydfil and Newport, despatched in 1000’s of police and troopers to occupy the realm. As resistance continued, the federal government was compelled to take the extra conciliatory step of asking the individuals to air their grievances immediately within the 1843 Fee of Inquiry, which spent seven weeks touring South Wales and taking statements from supporters and opponents of Rebeccaism.
As those that testified of their tons of made clear, the underlying reason behind the unrest was a bunch of longstanding and unaddressed difficulties for the realm’s tenant-farmers, labourers, and poor. These included the New Poor Legislation, workhouses, a cost-of-living disaster brought on by falling incomes and excessive rents and tithes, and an almost-feudal system of native civic and judicial energy through which they discovered it not possible to get their voices heard. On this context, the imposition of prices to be used of the roads got here as a ultimate straw, and tollgates turned a lightning rod for the groundswell of current discontent.
Removed from being – as some radicals sneered on the time – ‘an affair of middle-class farmers’, the Rebecca motion drew poorer farmhands, home servants, artisans, industrial staff, and even the business center courses into its ranks. Its cross-class make-up, initially a power, led to fractures and divisions as labourers and farm servants, recognising the delicate variations in place and pursuits between them and the farmers who employed them, started to organise individually and articulate their very own calls for for greater wages and higher circumstances. Rebeccaism’s demographics additionally performed an element in its rocky relationship with Chartism, which was entrenched within the Welsh coal and iron cities additional east. Whereas some main Chartists cautioned in opposition to the category alliances that formed Rebeccaism, citing the failure of this technique within the earlier Reform marketing campaign, others welcomed Rebecca as a possible companion in a radical well-liked entrance.
Regardless of the place these occasions maintain in native historical past and heritage in Wales, they’re usually remembered solely as an remoted outbreak of unrest, a single-issue marketing campaign of direct motion in opposition to tollgates which, its objectives met by Peel’s authorities with the 1844 Turnpikes (South Wales) Act, subsided as immediately because it had sprung up. David J.V. Jones’ Rebecca’s Kids (1989) was the primary exploration of occasions that acknowledged them as ‘bigger than we thought and fewer respectable’. In the meantime, in broader histories coping with the early Victorian age and its transition to industrial capitalism, Rebeccaism tends to stay a footnote or curio, dismissed as a confused or reactionary ‘peasant rise up’ with little connection to the period’s wider struggles over working-class organisation, welfare, and political reform.
Rebeccaism deserves a extra vital place in British radical historical past – partly due to, not regardless of, its messier and extra militant dimensions. The research of actions like Rebeccaism, with all their oddities and contradictions, will be helpful within the context of post-industrial politics and protest. Many current struggles – from Occupy to the gilets jaunes – appear to be turning in the direction of autonomous, localised, and self-sustaining coalitions through which the normal conduits of parliamentary democracy are, at finest, incidental. May consideration to pre-modern types of protest provide a information to the current and future in addition to a deeper understanding of the previous?
Rhian E. Jones is the creator of Rebecca’s Nation: A Welsh Story of Riot and Resistance (College of Wales Press, 2024).
