The Rebecca Riots: Be Afraid of Farmers in Drag

The industrial revolution was at its worst. We’ve all heard of the disease-ridden squalor of the city slums, and the onerous labour conditions of the mines, mills and factories, but agricultural labourers had it worst of all.

Forget rosy movie portrayals of Persil-white sheep, amber waves of grain, butterflies, promising milk maids, and farmers uttering aphorisms in a Bristol accent — forget all that. The reason British cities grew so rapidly in that era is because however terrible urban social conditions were, rural conditions were worse.

“There comes a time when people have had enough,” Martin Luther King would say the following century. All across the UK, working people had had enough of the industrial revolution; while an unholy trinity of governments, their handful of landed and moneyed electors, and an economist influentially but wrongly concluding that profits were not made until the last hour of the working day, strove to frustrate all workers’ efforts to improve their living standards.

It was a time when cavalry sabres cut down unarmed and peaceful protesters at St Peter’s Field, Manchester; when Chartists were transported to Australia; when people openly asked whether, when revolutions had recently erupted in Belgium, Spain, Russia, France for the second time, Texas and all across South America, a British revolution was out of the question.

In the country, few farmers owned their land, but rented it from absentee landlords for high rents that reflected market conditions rather than the land’s productivity. A tenth of their income had to be tithed to the local vicar, regardless of whether they were “church or chapel.” A series of wet harvests in the late 1830’s had driven them to the brink of bankruptcy. Taxation was heavy, and without representation, the only means they had of changing government policy was to have a riot. So in west Wales, that’s what they did.

Rebecca Riots: Thomas Bullin

Not many people can claim to have caused a riot. Thomas Bullin could boast two. The issue was the turnpikes that were mushrooming across the country. Supposedly operated by local-community trusts committed to use the money raised by tolls to maintain a stretch of road, a trust was permitted to “outsource” (as we would say today) its duties to a “toll farmer” such as Bullin. The toll farmers then frequently sought to maximize revenue by increasing tolls and erecting further turnpikes along its stretch of road. By the late 1830’s, the western Welsh shires of Pembroke, Carmarthen and Cardigan had ten thousand miles of road maintained by twenty-three trusts.

A toll for a horse and cart could be as much as six pence. A return journey would cost a shilling. But having to be paid every four miles, on average, when a farm labourer’s weekly wage was typically about ten shillings, they represented a crippling drain on farmers’ already meagre profits.

Carmarthen itself was surrounded by eleven trusts. Complaints of overcharging were rife, and incidents of traffic refusing to pay and barging through the barrier were not unknown.

Then Thomas Bullin added to his many operations the final untolled road out of town, the one farmers used to collect fertilizer. With the erection of a gate at Efailwen, people couldn’t even raise crops without paying tolls. They couldn’t hire labourers from out of town without subsidising the tolls the labourers incurred. When the harvest was in, they couldn’t take their produce to market without paying tolls. Farmers were working; the government, the landlords and the toll farmers were pocketing their income.

May 1839, a crowd of about seventy descended upon the Efailwen gate during the night, smashed it and set the toll keeper’s house on fire. Bullin seemed undismayed. He promptly rebuilt it, and within a month, farmers again had to pay a toll to collect their fertilizer, and another one to bring it back to the farm.

This is the point where the Rebecca riots took on an atmosphere of carnival; a big joke with a serious point that marks them out from other social unrest in Britain, and grace them — initially, at least — with a humorous romance. It’s difficult to get worked up about farmers in drag.

Notices hammered onto chapel doors announced a public meeting. At least, that’s what the organisers called it, because anybody was entitled to hold a public meeting. The place was a barn at Glynsaithmaen farm in Maenochlogddu. The topic for “debate” — the necessity of a toll gate at Efailwen — was a joke in itself. As if anybody was going to argue for it.

It was a time when communities often preferred to hand out rough justice to those deemed guilty of outraging the community’s values. No village party rivaled forcing a miscreant to sit painfully astride a wooden beam, and parading him through the crowd. Through hoots and derision, he’d be abused and punched, pelted with mud and stones, and carried to the pond for a “bath.”

And cross dressing has always been a staple of British humour, from Shakespeare’s players to pantos to modern drag queens. So for such “justice” parties, some men would don their wives’ skirts and bonnets, all to add to the atmosphere of a great, big laugh. So, the “public meeting” at Maenochlogddu, intoxicated by the prospect of standing up to their oppressors, was a raucous, jovial, drunken affair, for which some men donned their wives’ skirts and bonnets.

Nobody knows the origin of Rebecca. Some historians, who tend to see pregnant symbolism in everything, have pointed to Genesis 24:60: “And they blessed Rebekah, and said…let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them,” indicating primarily that one can prove pretty much anything by reference to the Bible A less-tortuous explanation is that one man present, Thomas Rees, calling himself Twm Carnabwth, borrowed clothes from a woman named Rebecca, and the name just stuck.

Bullin seemed less confident at the second time of replacement. In July, he erected a simple chain across the road. Doubtless, the local blacksmith appreciated the free iron. Following which, Bullin was dissuaded from erecting a fourth barrier. Strike one for “Rebecca’s daughters.”

The Rebecca Riots Flare Up Again

Things went quiet after that. As long as the farmers could raise their crops without tolls, they were prepared to live resentfully with the others. But 1842 saw a sharp drop in agricultural prices, and tolls became an issue again, starting with another of Bullin’s gates at St Clears.

Within weeks, not a single tollgate existed in the whole of southwest Wales. Soldiers sent to restore control invariably arrived too late, Rebecca’s daughters having swiftly completed their destruction and dispersed into the night.

But the carnivals were turning ugly. Toll keepers were roughed up. Houses burned. Landlords received threatening letters commanding them to reduce their rents. Most prosperous families moved into their town houses, away from their country estates. People who campaigned for social reform found their efforts undermined by the violence.

There was much public speculation about Rebecca: who was she? Was there more than one Rebecca? Did Rebecca even exist? Theories abounded that Rebecca was a man of high office, sympathetic to the cause, or connected to the nonconformist movement. A lawyer, a politician, a priest, a gentleman found it difficult to plead on the farmers’ behalf without becoming the focus of suspicion and rumour.

Rebecca Riots: Sacking the Carmarthen Workhouse

June 19th 1843 was the turning point. A public meeting signed a petition and about 1800 protesters marched through Carmarthen to present it to the mayor. Their numbers swelled rapidly as townsfolk, marooned within the huge circle of toll gates, tagged along.

But as the rally filed past the hated and feared workhouse, unruly elements smashed their way in and began ransacking the place. Furniture, files and papers were tossed out of the windows. The inmates were “released” — evicted from their only food and shelter.

Little known to the rioters, a unit of dragoons was in town, having arrived from Cardiff the day before. They surrounded the workhouse while the rioters were still inside, and opened fire. Without means of escape, the rioters had little choice but to surrender. Seventy were jailed. A dozen were transported to Australia. Rioters couldn’t expect impunity any more.

None the less, the violence did continue. The following month, the Monmouthshire Merlin reported that a six-pounder cannon and a twelve-pounder howitzer had been dispatched from London (although one can only wonder how anybody expected to manoeuvre them down narrow country lanes in the dark rapidly enough to be of any use). The same article noted that eight toll gates had been destroyed within the previous week.

The week before, it had reported that a group of 120 rioters had approached a tolled bridge over the Tywi River near Nantgaredig. They had disturbed two anglers, who immediately obeyed the mob’s order to depart. Another man suspected of having volunteered as a special constable was horse-whipped. A passer-by attempted to run away, but was pursued by the crowd, and also horse-whipped. The tollkeeper himself was beaten up, forced to swear by everything holy that he would never engage as a tollkeeper again, and the tollhouse was demolished. Crowds also destroyed another three gates that week.

A killing was inevitable sooner or later. That happened on September 11th at Hendy Bridge in Pontarddulais: seventy-five-year-old Sarah Williams was shot in the head. The public judged it a cowardly murder. Rebecca’s daughters weren’t cool any more, and the movement fizzled out.

The sacking of the Carmarthen workhouse had attracted national attention, however. The Times of London published the sympathetic journalism of Thomas Foster, leading to a royal commission of enquiry that amalgamated each county’s turnpike trusts and halved the tolls.

By the end of the 1840’s, railways snaked across southwest Wales. Although tolls would not disappear on Welsh roads until the 1890’s, a modestly priced ticket bypassed them all, more rapidly than road traffic ever could.

What’s more, any country dweller dissatisfied with his life could now easily abandon it. All aboard the iron horse! All aboard for the big cities! Swansea! Cardiff! Birmingham or Manchester! All aboard, for the comparative prosperity of the slums.