Petticoat Heroes

Gender, Culture and Popular Protest in the Rebecca Riots

Rhian E. Jones

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783167906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The wave of unrest which took place in 1840s Wales, known as 'Rebeccaism' or 'the Rebecca riots', stands out as a success story within the generally gloomy annals of popular struggle and defeat. The story is remembered in vivid and compelling images: attacks on tollgates and other symbols of perceived injustice by farmers and workers, outlandishly dressed in bonnets and petticoats and led by the iconic anonymous figure of Rebecca herself. The events form a core part of historical study and remembrance in Wales, and frequently appear in broader work on British radicalism and Victorian protest movements. This book draws on cultural history, gender studies and symbolic anthropology to present fresh and alternative arguments on the meaning of Rebeccaite costume and ritual; the significance of the feminine in protest; the links between protest and popular culture; the use of Rebecca's image in Victorian press and political discourse; and the ways in which the events and the image of Rebecca herself were integrated into politics, culture and popular memory in Wales and beyond. All these aspects repay greater consideration than they have yet been accorded, and highlight the relevance of Rebeccaism to British and European popular protest – up to and including the present day.

1

Introduction

The series of events known as the ‘Rebecca riots’ has made a more permanent and positive mark on history than many other nineteenthcentury protests. In the generally gloomy annals of popular struggle and defeat, Rebeccaism is celebrated in Wales and beyond as a success story. It has been recorded as a ‘freeing of the toll gates’, a single-minded and respectable campaign against demonstrable injustice, carried out in a spirit of ‘popularity and joke’, ‘frolic and good-humoured insubordination’.¹ The colourful and picaresque nature of events, their seizing of national press and parliamentary attention, and the iconic figure of ‘Rebecca’ herself, have secured them a significant place in Welsh history and folk tradition.² The riots have received cultural commemoration as the subject or background of novels, plays and even musical compositions.³

Rebeccaism is no exception to the rule that some of the bestremembered aspects of any protest movement will be those which made the deepest impression on the contemporary public imagination. The story of Rebecca as maintained in popular memory is that the imposition of toll charges for the use of Carmarthenshire roads generated mass outrage, which found its expression in moonlit attacks on toll gates by farmers on horseback in outlandish female dress. These ‘riots’ burst into view in 1839 and raged throughout the summer of 1843, only to melt away following government intervention that constitutionally demolished the hated turnpikes and their tolls. Official and popular references to the movement after 1844 present it as something surprising – highly uncharacteristic of the usually placid and lawful rural Welsh – and as an affair which, being motivated solely by problems with the imposition of turnpike tolls, was quickly laid to rest by the government of Robert Peel, whose Commission of Inquiry and subsequent amelioration of the system via the 1844 Turnpike Act effectively put an end to matters.⁴

Despite this story’s vividness, and the familiarity it has gained through retelling, the impression of Rebeccaism as a single-issue campaign, straightforwardly addressed by central government, does not do the movement justice. Confusion and obscurity still surround significant aspects of Rebeccaism: its leaders and organisers – if there were any – are still largely unknown, and even the origin of its name remains the subject of debate. Rebeccaite activity addressed a range of popular grievances beyond the issue of toll gates, and did so using an equally broad range of symbolism, costume and ritual. Evidence given to the government’s 1844 Commission of Inquiry makes it clear how many problems underpinned the movement – not least land ownership, poverty, social tension, the New Poor Law, and the payment of Church tithes – and unrest and disorder under the auspices of Rebecca persisted long after the Turnpike Act. Rebeccaite iconography continued to appear in protest up to and including the present century, becoming a general signifier of popular discontent in ways often far removed from its original function.

The term ‘Rebecca riots’ itself, although it has become their customary designation, gives a misleadingly limited impression of events and does not adequately express how varied and complex was the range of activities associated with Rebecca. In this book I will use the alternative term ‘Rebeccaism’, as did David J. V. Jones in his 1989 study, to convey the idea of a social movement which was more than simply ‘riotous’, broader than a single-issue campaign against toll gates, and loosely bound together by references to the name or image of ‘Rebecca’. This movement encompassed not only attacks on toll gates but also protest against high rents, tithes, evictions, workhouses and the New Poor Law, in forms ranging from property damage to threatening letters and mass demonstrations. As such, Rebeccaism fits the historical and sociological definition of a ‘social movement’ as a ‘sustained, intentional effort to foster or retard broad legal and social changes, primarily outside the normal institutional channels endorsed by authorities’.⁵ Contemporary sources show that the term ‘Rebeccaism’, and its variants, were in fact in use at the time: the Radnorshire MP John Walsh wrote of his surprise at hearing a rumour that ‘the Rebeccaites had broken out in Shropshire’; in Llanelli, William Chambers reported that the toll gates of his trust had been ‘Rebeccaized’; while the High Sherriff of Glamorgan, Thomas Penrice, stated that discontent over toll gates in Swansea had made him ‘afraid we shall have Rebeccaism there’.⁶

This brings us to a further fundamental question: why the name ‘Rebecca’? Two main explanations exist for Rebecca’s etymology, juxtaposing a high-minded biblical derivation with one more in keeping with the movement’s comic and irreverent tendencies. The former explanation was given by The Times correspondent Thomas Campbell Foster in his June 1843 report on Rebeccaism, in which he claimed the name was derived from Genesis 24:60: ‘And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, “Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gates of those which hate them”’. The same claim had been made a few months earlier by the Welshman newspaper, which noted that the verse had been ‘expatiated upon by many itinerant preachers’ until ‘the multitude doubtless believe they have a warrant for their lawless doings’.⁷ Foster attributed this scriptural derivation to the strong religiosity of the Welsh and the ‘fanaticism’ which they channelled into opposing turnpikes. The Swansea Journal drew on Foster’s claim when disapproving of the spread of Nonconformism in Wales, noting in July 1843:

This is a singular instance of the state of religious, or we should say, fanatical feeling in the Principality. It is curious to find the practice of dovetailing the language of Scripture to the purpose of Rebellion, so common with Cromwell’s military saints, and the gloomy Scottish Covenantes, flourishing in full force in this quiet country, and in our enlightened times. This should be a strong incitement to the Church in Wales to increased exertion …⁸

At around the same time, an address by Edward Lloyd Davies, a landlord who had been threatened with a visit from Rebecca if his rents were not reduced, rebuked the Rebeccaites for their choice of allusion:

It is said that you have imposed upon many ignorant persons, by pretending to have Scripture authority for your acts. What an abuse of the Holy Scriptures! All learned divines are agreed, that the meaning of those words is … that her posterity might be victorious over their enemies. Rebecca was really a woman, a good and pious woman, having the fear of God before her eyes.⁹

Foster’s explanation has found varying degrees of sympathy with the movement’s historians. Henry Tobit Evans’s 1910 account makes the opposing claim, namely that Thomas Rees, the first man to play Rebecca at Efailwen in 1839, named himself after the similarly statuesque woman from whom his disguise was borrowed, who was known locally as ‘Big Becca’ or ‘Great Rebecca of Llangolman’. The same origin was asserted in a letter to The Times in 1944 by a correspondent whose grandfather had been a Special Constable at the time of the riots. Both explanations are given equivalent weight by David Williams and David J. V. Jones, while Pat Molloy dismisses the ‘Big Becca’ origin story as apocryphal, arguing rather that a name imbued with ‘the authority of the Scriptures and the chapel preachers’ was required to make the movement ‘a potent force’.¹⁰ Little if any conclusive evidence has been advanced for either derivation and both seem equally compelling, not least for their illustration of the movement’s multivalent and ambiguous nature.

Between early and later historians of Rebecca, other important differences of interpretation exist. Early works such as that of Tobit Evans tended to present the riots as anomalous, confined to the anti-toll gate activities of Carmarthenshire tenant farmers over the period 1839–44, and relatively peaceful before the intervention of outside agencies led them to degenerate into violence and criminality. Tobit Evans emphasised the exceptional nature of the ‘riots’ by likening them to ‘an account of passionate Ireland … rather than of quiet, peaceful Wales’.¹¹ David Williams’s majestic and holistic study of events, published in 1955, achieved a greater understanding of the diverse discontents which motivated participants. However, he continued to view the activities of Rebeccaites as ‘entirely an affair of small farmers’, and followed his predecessors in disparaging the movement’s latter phase as ‘deviation’ or ‘degeneration’ consequent on its corruption by a ‘lunatic fringe’ of violent extremists.¹² In 1988, David Howell outlined the movement in similar terms, depicting the discomfort felt by farmers at the increasing violence of Rebeccaite activity as a catalyst for their turning to more open, constitutional and ‘respectable’ forms of expressing their grievances.¹³

The brilliantly illuminating 1989 study by David J. V. Jones, Rebecca’s Children, was the first to place events in a longer chronological perspective and to view the movement as having arisen naturally from the particular society and culture of contemporary south-west Wales. This helped to qualify the prevailing perception of events as something anomalous and extraordinary. Jones argued that Rebeccaism’s tendency towards violence and petty crime could be more profitably explained by viewing it within the wider context of rural Wales, its social attitudes and extra-legal activities, rather than blaming it on the movement’s ‘corruption’ by criminal or militant elements. He also observed that strands of the activity associated with Rebecca recurred up until the late nineteenth century, despite the conventional demarcation of 1839–44 which is reproduced in mentions of the movement as late as 2011.¹⁴ In addition, by establishing Rebeccaism as ‘larger than we thought and less respectable’, Jones introduced the question of how its size, diversity, and ability to lend itself to the expression of abstract popular concerns, not only enabled it to spread beyond its initial sphere of influence but also produced internal tension, instability and fragmentation. Jones also noted the involvement in several disturbances of farm labourers, who were motivated variously by social ties with their employers and by shared resentment of the New Poor Law, tolls and tithes, as well as the assistance given to rioters by colliers in south-east Carmarthenshire in July 1843.¹⁵ The movement’s growing demographic complexity and collaborative nature further militates against a simplistic description of it as an affair of middle-class farmers or an atypical and limited protest aimed at a single specific target. Jones instead presents Rebeccaism as a geographically and chronologically varied movement, concerned broadly with the defence of traditional rights of rural communities and with popular opposition to injustice. From this perspective, Rebeccaism may be seen as forming part of the dislocation, conflict and resistance generated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain by the shift from a society regulated by paternalist obligations, the authority of popular custom, and what E. P. Thompson dubbed a pre-existing ‘moral economy’, to an economy, politics and society informed by industrial capitalism.

I am indebted to Rebecca’s previous historians, especially Williams and Jones, for their accomplished mapping of the movement’s scope and significance, but there are other avenues, of equal interest, which still await exploration. In particular, history has so far tended to gloss over gendered aspects of the events, and what insights they may have to offer on contemporary images of women and on contemporary ideas about women and men. The leading figures and the majority of participants in Rebeccaite activity were male, but women were also highly visible in the movement, not only as supporters but also symbolically in the images ‘Rebecca’ drew on for support and the kinds of women with whom ‘she’ was compared and contrasted. ‘She’ defended women against the strictures of the New Poor Law, and was presented in ways which showcased the spectrum of identities in which women could figure in Victorian society and culture. The idea of Rebeccaite protesters as ‘men dressed as women’ should be challenged and qualified, since the intricacies of Rebeccaite costume involved far more than the adoption of female disguise by male rioters. But the neglected dimension of what Rebeccaism revealed about contemporary women, both literal and figurative, deserves addressing too. Additionally, the links between protest and popular culture, the use of Rebecca as an abstract character in press and political discourse, and the ways in which the events and the image of Rebecca have been integrated into popular memory and culture, all repay greater consideration than they have yet received. These concerns form the basis of my own revisiting of the movement. In the two and a half decades since Jones’s study was published, advances have been made in social and cultural history, drawing on insights from the neighbouring fields of symbolic anthropology and discourse analysis, which can usefully be applied to the study of Rebeccaism. This book’s rethinking of Rebeccaism examines the movement with the view that its use of symbol, ritual and costume is vital in providing a fuller understanding of how these events were experienced both by participants and by those in wider popular culture and society. This interdisciplinary perspective builds on previous work on Rebecca, but hopes to supplement it by illuminating and analysing previously unexplored aspects of the movement’s social and cultural impact.

The following chapter looks at the social, political and economic conditions which gave rise to Rebeccaism, and at the events of its best-known phase in 1839–44. Chapter 3 looks at the place of writing on Rebeccaism within broader historiographical trends. It then considers the attention given more recently within cultural history to the study of symbol and ritual content, which has demonstrated how techniques from social and cultural anthropology can decode otherwise incomprehensible past texts. Rebecca’s intriguing oral-visual repertoire is one such text, which would have held meaning and coherence for participants despite how curious it may appear from a modern perspective. As James M. Jasper writes of modern and historical social movements, ‘Humans always have multiple motivations, which is why we need a cultural perspective to make their actions intelligible’.¹⁶

Chapter 4 considers how the appeal and power of Rebeccaism stemmed from its basis in contemporary society and culture, with the symbolic and ritual frame of reference of Rebeccaite activity derived from that of local festival, popular custom and civic ritual. The movement drew on local tradition and custom while also responding to shifting political and economic circumstances, particularly those affecting the use and ownership of common land.

Chapter 5 looks in greater detail at the symbol and ritual used in Rebeccaite activity, including the widely noted adoption of feminine clothing by male protesters. While previous studies have interpreted this only as a method of disguise, or as an allusion to the social and community roles of women, Rebeccaite crossdressing also reveals something of the contemporary experience and performance of masculine identity. In addition, considering cross-dressing in the context of what has until now been left unexplored – the equally theatrical use of masculine signifiers, and the presence within Rebeccaite costume of several binary oppositions – suggests that the contrast of feminine and masculine was intended to express a further binary, as part of a ritual intended to create a liminal space for participants to carry out extraordinary actions. The chapter then explores how Rebecca’s identity became increasingly stylised, abstract and recognisable as it gained prominence in the public imagination. This familiarity allowed it to be adopted by individual males outside of protest activity, and enabled Rebecca and her actors to function as models of aspirational masculinity.

Chapter 6 looks at the relationship of Rebecca to contemporary images of women and changing ideas about female sexuality, and how these issues related to the operation of the New Poor Law introduced in 1834. The appearance of Rebecca herself can be shown to reflect, or actively to draw on, the various images of female power and agency which were available in south-west Welsh society and culture. Meanwhile, the attempts by Rebeccaites to oppose the bastardy clauses of the New Poor Law, in which they upheld the rights of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, formed part of popular resistance to the centralising Victorian state’s attempts at imposing social discipline upon pre-existing cultural attitudes that had granted women greater rights and agency.

Chapter 7 further analyses Rebecca’s image as it appeared in the national press and in public and political discourse within Wales and beyond. Rebecca’s use in protest as a symbolic representative of ‘her’ movement allowed her to take on a similarly symbolic identity in wider public discussion, but this identity was fluid and multivalent, and not limited to its specific use in protest. Rebecca’s establishment as a popular cultural heroine (or anti-heroine) is shown in the variety of roles and narratives in which she could be cast, each with an associated constituency and set of moral standards and each reflective of particular contemporary attitudes. This treatment of Rebecca can be used to illustrate the complexities of gendered rhetoric in political satire and commentary, as well as demonstrating the range of feminine identities available in Victorian popular discourse.

Chapter 8’s assessment of Rebeccaism’s political and cultural aftermath considers which details of the movement lasted longest and most vividly in public consciousness, and the reasons behind this. An examination of how Rebeccaite grievances were presented and processed in the 1844 Commission of Inquiry reveals the systematic prioritising of toll gates over other factors. In subsequent references to Rebeccaism in popular and official rhetoric throughout the nineteenth century, this narrowed focus then allowed the government to present itself as having satisfactorily resolved the unrest through its legislative changes to the turnpike system. Conversely, this same focus enab...