South Wales and the Rising of 1839

Class Struggle as Armed Struggle

Ivor Wilks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317240747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1984, this book provides the first full study of the carefully planned rising of south Wales miners and ironworkers in 1839 and of its collapse at the confrontation with soldiers of the 45 th regiment of Newport. It examines not only the rising itself, but the factors that made it, if not inevitable, then likely. It argues that while the workers' movement was an immediate response to the grim circumstances of the workplace, it was also deeply rooted in the centuries-old Welsh experience of repression.

This title will be of particular interest to students of Victorian political and social history and well as the history of Wales.

Part I: PROLOGUE

You men of Gwent and Gwalia

From Neath to Ebbw Vale,

Sing us a song of triumph

Out of a Celtic tale.

(Idris Davies, The Angry Summer, Faber and Faber, 1943)

O! ye who love glory, we heed not the story

Of Waterloo won with the blood of the brave,

But we dare the rough storm, in the cause of reform,

Then let the red banner triumphantly wave.

(Welsh chartist song, 1839)

Come, hail, brothers, hail the shrill sound of the horn;

For ages deep wrongs have been hopelessly borne;

Despair shall no longer our spirits dismay,

Nor wither the arm, when upraised for the fray;

The conflict for freedom is gathering nigh.

We live to secure it, or gloriously die.

(Hugh Williams of Carmarthen, ‘The Horn of Liberty’, 1839)

1	WALES: THE INDUSTRIAL NATION

The Edwardian conquests of 1282–3 marked the final stages in the reduction of Wales to the status of an English colony. In pura Wallia, as earlier in the March of Wales, government and commerce came to be dominated by settlers, for the most part from England, planted on lands appropriated for the purpose.¹ The great anti-colonial struggle of the early fifteenth century engulfed the country in civil war, but Owain Glyn Dŵr’s vision of a Welsh nation founded on the medieval institutions of Parliament, Church and University took shape, faltered and died within the space of a decade. The new penal laws of Henry IV made aliens of the Welsh in their own country (other than those who took to the hills and a life of banditry), but failed to arrest the decay of lordship in both the Principality and March of Wales.² The colonial status of Wales was finally legislated out of existence by acts of the English Parliament of 1536 and 1542.³ With the so-called ‘union’ of England and Wales – the earlier act referred to Wales being ‘incorporated united and annexed’ – the rights of the Crown’s English subjects were formally extended to all Welsh persons and, by enactments intended to eradicate all manner of traditional Welsh tenure including the practice of partible inheritance, the stage was set for the rising class of entrepreneurial gentry to establish its ascendancy over the affairs of the Welsh shires.⁴ Wales had undergone the passage from the late medieval to the early modern world.

Under the Tudor monarchy and in the revolutionary seventeenth century the gentry of Wales (whether by origin native or ‘incomer’) celebrated their release from the restraints of the old order by the avid and relentless pursuit of land and with it office and political preferment.⁵ Younger sons sought advancement in the trades and professions in London and the provincial towns of England, and even further afield in the colonies.⁶ Among the Welsh bards were those, Siôn Tudor, Simwnt Fychan, Edmwnd Prys, Tomos Prys and others, who were not insensitive to the evils of the times. They criticised the gentry for land-grabbing, for the unscrupulous exploitation of their tenantry, and for their venality in office, and they saw that their acculturation into English ways and adoption of the English language threatened the very fabric of traditional Welsh society.⁷ By the turn of the seventeenth century the poets could lament the decline of patronage; thus, for example, Owain Gruffydd (in Anthony Conran’s unforgettable translation),

And as I go, not a house I’ve seen

Ready for praise, as it once had been –

Serious song has gone from the scene,

There wants to hear me not one of the throng!

Pure Welsh they do not willingly use:

Twice better than the cywydd’s muse

Is the pampered note of the English tongue.⁸

By the eighteenth century the affairs of Wales had come to be dominated by a small number of landlords of great power and wealth. There were, perhaps, several score of them. Many were members of the peerage and had access to lucrative offices, often sinecures, under the Crown. They were part of what has been called ‘the broad, acquisitive, astute, ruthless and flexible oligarchy of England’.⁹ Below them in the social order were the county gentry, whose sedulous cultivation of their pedigrees from the chiefly houses of medieval times (the ‘royal tribes of Wales’) contrasted oddly with their equally sedulous cultivation of the manners of well-born Englishmen. They had no harsher critics than the Welsh essayists of the early nineteenth century. ‘The good days of the Principality seem to have departed with the misguided family of the Stuarts’, wrote one:

Had the higher ranks then shewn a dignified indifference to the ridicule that it became fashionable to attach to their nation, all would have been well … But instead of combating English prejudices, they fostered them; instead of aiding to elucidate national antiquities, they were themselves the foremost to bring the pursuit into contempt: they began to affect an ignorance of the Welsh language, and to echo the commonplace declamations against it that they heard elsewhere, allowing themselves to be deceived by the puerile self-sophism, that when they had forgotten the Welsh language, their own origin would be forgotten.¹⁰

Aspiring to a style of life that their small estates could not support, many of the county gentry were in financial difficulty, their lands mortgaged and their capital insufficient for agricultural improvement. Their survival as a class was possible only at the expense of the tenantry.¹¹

Throughout most of the eighteenth century the level of industrial development in Wales was low and the units of production small. Coal, lead and copper were mined, and slate quarried, extensively but not intensively. Iron was smelted often from inferior grade ores at little charcoal furnaces dependent upon adequate local supplies of timber. The Tawe and Neath Valleys were the centres of copper and brass manufacture. Flannel was produced in many districts, but it was only late in the century that the first factories were established in mid-Wales.¹² Early industry used relatively little labour, and then often on a part-time basis. The mass of the Welsh people, whether tenant farmers or cottagers and labourers, was locked into a system of peasant production on upland pastures. They were beset by an indifferent climate, poor soils, bad communications and shortages of land made all the worse by an oppressive landlordism. They lived at a level of semi-subsistence, producing all that was necessary to sustain the family but obliged to send store animals and farm produce to the market in order to pay rents, tithes and taxes. The rhythm of life was punctuated by the great droves of livestock into England.¹³ It is doubtful whether the peasantry of the lowland districts, where cereal cultivation replaced stock-rearing, was significantly more favoured. ‘The distresses of many of these people’, it was remarked in 1794, ‘… simply arise from the difficulties they must encounter in maintaining themselves, their wives (and often large families) in comfort, with what they earn, notwithstanding their labours are from dawn to night, and many of them sober, discreet, and industrious.’¹⁴ Unremitting poverty and overpopulation had to be relieved by emigration; by the middle of the century the movement of Welsh families to the rising industrial centres of Shropshire and south Staffordshire was one that was substantial if difficult to quantify.

The religious revivals in Wales in the middle decades of the eighteenth centry were appropriate to a people who could see little hope of earthly rewards. The genius of Griffith Jones created the ‘circulating’ schools and with them mass literacy in Welsh. But the literature to which the masses gained access was almost exclusively devotional in character. For the most part it was written by Anglican clergymen under the patronage of Anglican landowners and, designed to strengthen the moral fibre of the Welsh peasantry, it did so by inculcating the virtue of obedience to authority.¹⁵ Popular culture withered under the impact. In the second half of the century high culture, by contrast, was revitalised. The intellectual revival was nurtured in the cosmopolitan environment of London. The Cymmrodorion Society was founded there in 1751 to promote Welsh literature, history, agriculture and trade. It ceased to function (temporarily) in 1787. Its place had been taken by the less elitist and politically more bold Gwyneddigion, founded in 1771, and its two radical ‘tendencies’ (as we might now say): the Cymreigyddion for Welsh speakers and the Caradogion for English. Under the skilful guidance of Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr) and William Owen (later Owen Pughe) a new interest in the Welsh past developed side by side with a new concern for the Welsh future. The movement nurtured a new breed of Welsh patriots and radicals, the gwladwriaethwyr. Their roots lay in old Dissent but their thinking was profoundly affected by the experience first of the American and then of the French revolutions. ‘These new intellectuals of Wales’, Gwyn A. Williams has written,

were operating in precisely the same manner and to precisely the same rhythm as their counterparts in Europe during the age of revolution, those minority peoples emerging, in the eyes of their spokesmen, from a ‘non-historic’ existence, the Czechs, the Catalans, Serbs, Croats, indeed some Venezuelans, some Argentines and some Americans.¹⁶

Edwards Williams (Iolo Morganwg) reached far back into the Welsh past, and in the gorsedd found a concept of a self-regulating and egalitarian community that in fact owed more to the revolutionary republicanism of contemporary France than to the druidism of antiquity. John Jones (Jac Glan y Gors) wrote Seren Tan Gwmmwl (‘Star under a Cloud’) in 1795 and Toriad y Dydd (‘Break of Day’) in 1797, and thereby introduced his countrymen to the writings of Thomas Paine. In 1798 Thomas Roberts of Llwynrhudol violently attacked tithes and the Church in his Cwyn yn erbyn Gorthrymder (‘Complaint against Oppression’). Radical journals, short – lived in the tradition of most such enterprises, were launched in rapid succession, the Cylchgrawn Cymraeg of Morgan John Rhys in 1793, the Trysorfa Gymmysgedig of Thomas Evans (Glyn Cothi) in 1795, and the Geirgrawn of David Davies of Holywell in 1796. William Jones of Llangadfan in the uplands of central Wales – ‘a rank republican and leveller’ according to a contemporary – chronicled the oppressive dominion of the Saxon in his country. ‘We, the poor remnants of Ancient Britons’, he wrote in an address intended for American readers,

are confined in the mountains of Wales, cultivating an ungrateful soil, whose production is insufficient to support its occupiers. The tendency of our boasted constitution to accumulate property into few hands, and the present wretched mode of taxing the produce of labour and the necessities of life, has of late increased the number of our poor into an alarming degree, and must sooner or later reduce the labouring classes into a serv...