The Rebecca Riots

The Rebecca Riots took place in Wales in the 1830s and 1840s. While these events are often described as a protest against heavy road tolls, that was only a small part of the story. 

Research:

• Age of Revolution. “Rebecca and her daughters.” https://ageofrevolution.org/200-object/rebecca-and-her-daughters/
• Age of Revolution. “Tollhouse designed by Thomas Telford.” https://ageofrevolution.org/200-object/tollhouse-designed-by-thomas-telford/
• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Rebecca Riots". Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Oct. 2010, https://www.britannica.com/event/Rebecca-Riots. Accessed 26 October 2023.
• Evans, Henry Tobit. “Rebecca and her daughters, being a history of the agrarian disturbances in Wales known as The Rebecca Riots. Edited by G.T. Evans.” Cardiff Educational Pub. Co. 1910.
• Evans, Neil. “The Rebecca Riots.” Wales History. https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/society/politics_rebecca_riots.shtml
• Jones, David J. V. “Rebecca's children : a study of rural society, crime, and protest.” Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press. 1989.
• Jones, Rhian E. “Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest in the Rebecca Riots.” University of Wales Press. 2015.
• Loveluck-Edwards, Graham. “19th Century Welsh insurrection | The Merthyr Rising | The Rebecca Riots | The Chartists Revolt.” Via YouTube. 6/17/2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZRrPJ3eDKE
• Rees, Lowri Anne. “Paternalism and rural protest: the Rebecca riots and the landed interest of south-west Wales.” The Agricultural History Review , 2011, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2011). http://www.jstor.com/stable/41330097
• Rees, Lowri Anne. “The woman who dared to stand up to the Rebecca rioters.” Wales Online. 3/1/2017. https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/woman-who-dared-stand-up-12596830
• Seal, Graham. “Tradition and Agrarian Protest in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales.” Folklore , 1988, Vol. 99, No. 2 (1988). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1260453
• The National Archives. “Rebecca riots.” https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/rebecca-riots/
• Turner, Chris. “Revisiting Rebecca Riots.” Canolfan Garth Olwg. Via YouTube. 3/4/2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0VemuEEyvI

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm trace
Ev Wilson and I'm Holly Fryne. Lately, I've been seeing
a lot of people, especially in discussions of AI, kind

(00:24):
of throwing around the word ludites in a way that
irritates me, and I know there's some irony there. We've
talked a bunch of times on the show about how
language evolves and rules are made up, but the word
ludite has come to sort of mean sort of a stubborn,
backward person who's opposed to progress and technology. But what

(00:46):
the ludite protests were really about was technical advances that
were threatening people's livelihoods and leading to the production of
lower quality goods. So if we're talking about somebody who's
objection to AI is badly written articles replacing the work
of paid freelancers, ludites pretty appropriate for that. But people

(01:09):
have also used it to sort of imply that people
who have these concerns are against all technology, and that
bothers me. We've done an episode on the ludites that
was all the way back in twenty thirteen. But as
I was you know, mulling over this use of language.
I kept thinking about workers smashing machines and this semi
mythical figure of ned lud who was part of the

(01:31):
Ludite uprisings, and how some of the men who were
breaking machines during this uprising did so in dresses and
called themselves general luds wives. That brought me then to
the Rebecca Riots, which took place in Wales a couple
of decades after the Ludite uprising took place in England,

(01:52):
and there are some parallels there. That includes the smashing stuff,
also the wearing of dresses, and beyond that, there's been
kind of a similar narrowing of how these two events
are remembered a lot of the time today, the one
sentence description of the Rebecca Riots would be something like
men in dresses smashed down the tollgates to protest against

(02:16):
the really egregious fees that they were having to pay
for using the roads. But those tolls and the tollgates,
that was really just one part of it. The Rebecca
Riots took place in western and southwestern Wales from eighteen
thirty nine to eighteen forty three, primarily in Pembrokeshire, Cardiganshire

(02:36):
and Carmarthenshire. The town of Comerthen in Carmarthenshire was at
the time the fourth largest town in Wales, with a
population of about ten thousand people. It was an important
market town and sort of an administrative and political center
within the area. Also, there are seemingly countless ways that
different organizations and government bodies divide Wales into regions. Were

(02:59):
just talking about the general area to the southwest and west,
not any specific regional definition. At the time, people outside
of Wales often imagined it as sort of an expanse
of farmland where nothing much happened. And while farming was
a key part of the economy, Wales was also industrializing
really rapidly in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

(03:22):
During the Rebecca Riots, most people in this part of
Wales were working in agriculture or in domestic service, but
about ten percent were employed at iron works. Some of
those iron works were newly built. The Welsh population was soaring,
with towns that were home to iron works and other
industries growing just a lot faster than ones that weren't,

(03:45):
and there were rural areas that were nearly depopulated as
people moved into these cities and towns to try to
find work, and the Rebecca Riots were not the first
uprising to happen in Wales in the first decades of
the nineteenth century. In addition to agriculture, two of Wales's
biggest industries were coal and iron and agricultural products. Coal

(04:06):
and iron were all in high demand during the Napoleonic
Wars and the War of eighteen twelve, although Britain was
still variously at war. After these ended in eighteen fifteen,
demand for a lot of these goods started to fall.
Combined with a more general economic depression, This meant that
workers faced lost jobs and reduced wages. This came to

(04:28):
a head in Mercer Tidville with an uprising in eighteen
thirty one. Demonstrators protested against job cuts and wage cuts
and as many as twenty four people were killed after
soldiers were deployed to try to restore order. There was
also an armed uprising in Newport on the River Usk
in eighteen thirty nine. This one was connected to the

(04:50):
Chartist movement. The Chartist movement was a working class movement
that was calling for a number of political reforms Those
included universal voting rights for men over the age of
twenty one, secret ballots, elimination of property requirements to become
a member of Parliament, and payment for MPs so that

(05:10):
would make serving as an MP a lot more accessible
to more people. More than twenty Chartists were killed in
this uprising as well, and its leaders were convicted of
high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered. So while there
were contemporary discussions of the Rebecca Riots that had a
tone that was almost like a riot in Wales really

(05:31):
like Wales like, this was not really an isolated incident.
Although most historians don't describe the Rebecca Riots as part
of the Chartist movement. One of the issues involved with
the riots was representation within the government. Although the Great
Reform Act of eighteen thirty two had made changes to
the electoral system in England and Wales, only men could vote,

(05:53):
and those men had to own property or pay specific
taxes to be eligible. This meant that tenant farmers and
farm laborers, who made up most of the population in
southern and western Wales, still could not vote. Compounding this
was that most of the people who did meet those
requirements spoke English, while most of the farmers and farm
workers spoke Welsh. In some cases, these were essentially English

(06:17):
absentee landlords holding office to represent Wales, so people naturally
felt like they didn't have true representation in Parliament, and
the absentee landlords were also their own issue. Most of
the people in this part of Wales were tenant farmers,
so they did not own the land that they lived
and worked on for centuries, though families had leased the

(06:40):
same land for their entire lifetime, so they really had
some stability. They felt a sense of ownership over the
land that they were working and typically they were renting
from a landlord who lived locally. There were some social
expectations that landlords do things like donate money to charitable
causes and the church, and to we have kind of

(07:01):
a paternalistic interest in their tenants well being. This is
not at all to say that every single landowner was
generous or accommodating with their tenants, but there was an
overall perception that absentee landlords who did not live in
the area only cared about whether or not their tenants
paid the rent, not whether their tenants were dueing. Okay,

(07:24):
in the decades before the Rebecca riots. A lot of
landlords had also moved away from these lifetime leases. More
and more farmers are basically tenants at will, with leases
as short as only a year, so not a lot
of stability the possibility of having to just move over
and over and over again. In the eighteen thirties, it

(07:44):
was also just getting harder to pay rent. Most small
farmers were operating at a subsistence level, and poverty was widespread.
Common ground that had been used for grazing animals had
largely been enclosed, making it harder for people to raise livestock.
In a lot of places, the land was most suited
for raising sheep, but that lack of access to grazing

(08:05):
land meant that people were trying to grow crops instead.
Work was also harder to find, and a series of
poor harvests stretched from eighteen thirty nine to eighteen forty one.
Many tenants tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a reduction in the
rent to make up for all of these problems. Bad
harvests also meant that people had less money to give

(08:28):
to the church, and giving to the church was something
they were required to do by law. People were expected
to donate ten percent of their income to their local parish.
Before eighteen thirty six, this had been an kind payment,
so people donated part of their harvest or wool from
their sheep, or something else they had grown or raised.

(08:50):
But the Tithe Act of eighteen thirty six instead made
this a cash payment, and the amount of the payment
was based on the price of various crops a ridged
out over the past seven years. So if the harvest
was particularly bad one year, that did not immediately reduce
the amount of the tithe that people were required to pay,

(09:11):
and since that one bad year was averaged together with
six other years, that might not actually reduce the tithe
at all. To add to that, these payments were made
to Anglican parishes, but most of the people living in Wales,
especially working class people and farm laborers, were Nonconformists, so Methodists,
Congregationalists or Baptists. They didn't attend the parish church, and

(09:34):
many didn't really want to be paying a tithe to
the Anglican Church at all. So bad harvests, high rents,
cash tithe payments, all this other stuff. It meant that
a lot of people were really struggling. And then the
Poor Law of eighteen thirty four also made financial hardship
a way more frightening prospect. Before the passage of this law,

(09:56):
various relief projects were funded through taxes that were paid
by the middle and upper classes, and they were mostly
locally administered. But as the population of the UK had
increased in the wake of industrialization and other economic changes
had led to an increase in poverty, it had become
increasingly expensive to care for the poor. There was also

(10:19):
a perception among a lot of the people who had
enough money to be paying these taxes that the poor
people were just lazy and didn't want to work. So
the Poor Law of eighteen thirty four was meant to
ease the purported burden of poverty on communities. Parishes were
grouped into poor Law unions, and each one was required

(10:39):
to build a workhouse if they did not have one already.
Conditions in the workhouses were intentionally harsh and cruel to
discourage people from using them and to punish people for
their poverty. While people were housed, fed and clothed in
the workhouse, the housing was overcrowded, uncomfortable, and often filthy

(10:59):
and infested with vermin. Food was meager and uniforms were
uncomfortable and threadbare. Families were broken up and housed separately,
and while children were theoretically educated in the workhouse, they
could also be hired out as workers in minds and
on farms. There were still some other forms of relief

(11:19):
besides the workhouse, but needing help carried the risk of
winding up in one. The workhouses were also funded through
a local tax known as the poor rate, and pretty
much everyone who had enough money to not be in
the workhouse had to pay this tax, even if they
didn't really have a lot of money to spare. The

(11:40):
tollgates get the most attention in discussions of the Rebecca Riots,
and sometimes it sounds like they were the whole focus.
But really, in the face of all this, the tolls
were more like the last straw, and we're going to
talk more about that after we pause for a sponsor break.

(12:05):
The roads in Wales in the start of the nineteenth
century weren't really great. A network of roads, footpaths and
cart paths connected farms to small towns and market villages,
and then eventually to cities. Scottish engineer John McAdam had
developed the road surfacing known as McAdam around eighteen twenty,
and it was a lot more durable and efficient to

(12:28):
lay down than other earlier road surfaces had been. But
there was not a national agency that was responsible for building,
maintaining or improving the roads. This was a lot like
what we talked about happening in the US in our
episode on Kitty Knox and the bike Boom from this
past January. For a long time, road maintenance fell mostly

(12:49):
to local landowners and the results could be all over
the place. Landowners in the UK were allowed to set
up toll houses if the tolls that they collected were
used to pay for repair and improvements to the roads.
These toll houses were typically built so that the keeper
had a good view of the road and anyone who
might be approaching on it, because even before the Rebecca

(13:11):
Riots the tolls were not popular and attacks on toll
houses and their keepers were an ongoing issue. Usually there
was a gate across the road to force people on
horseback or with some kind of horse and cart to stop,
but if you were on foot or pushing a hand cart,
you might be able to go around by a smaller path.

(13:31):
An assortment of laws also empowered the creation of turnpike trusts.
These were trusts that were established by businesses or groups
of landowners to manage the tolls and the road maintenance
they were meant to pay for and when we say assortment.
By eighteen thirty six there were nine hundred and forty
two acts for new turnpike trusts in England and Wales.

(13:55):
In some cases, the trust that built the toll gate
didn't actually manage it, but they instead least that out
to somebody else. There is some suggestion that on the whole,
the creation of turnpikes and turnpike trusts did improve the
quality of the roads, but this was also a situation
that could lead to a lot of mismanagement and abuse.

(14:15):
At the same time, some of the trusts were not
breaking even. It was really expensive to build and maintain
these roads, and the cost of doing so just outstripped
the money collected from the tolls a lot of the time,
So whether they were trying to make more money or
just break even, turnpike trusts raised the price of tolls

(14:36):
and also built more toll gates so that people had
to pay the tolls more often, and eventually toll collectors
also started adding sidebars on smaller roads and paths that
kept people on foot from being able to go around
the gate on the main road, collecting tolls on foot
traffic as well. So this might have been less of
an issue if people only had to pay a toll

(14:59):
one time time to get to where they were going,
but the turnpike trusts and the toll gates that they
were putting up just proliferated. At the peak of the
Rebecca Riots, there were at least twenty different trusts operating
in southwestern Wales, and there was a gate or a
bar about every four miles. Camarthen, where a lot of

(15:19):
people took their goods to market, was basically surrounded by
twelve gates that were controlled by five different road trusts.
Different trusts also set up gates on the same turnpikes,
and then all of them would all charge their tolls
to the people who tried to pass. As the Rebecca
Riots were going on, One newspaper reporter took a fifteen

(15:43):
mile trip from Camarthen to Pontardalas and encountered eleven different
gates on the way. This affected farmers and farm laborers tremendously.
They often had to pass through multiple gates to get
two and from their fields and two and from market.
Farmers in this part of Wales also used lime extensively

(16:04):
to try to improve their soil, usually transporting it in carts. Initially,
some trusts had exempted lime carts from the tolls, but
when that stopped, farmers found that they were paying almost
as much in tolls as they were for the lime
they were carrying, and there was really no other option.
Farmers and laborers had to use the roads to do

(16:25):
their work. A farmer deciding to just not treat the
soil with lime anymore because the tolls made it too
expensive might wind up with a bad harvest as a result,
and that would have its own financial consequences. So the tolls,
combined with the high rents and the poor laws and
the tithes and the poor rates and everything that we
talked about before the break, eventually working people just felt

(16:47):
like they were drowning. In May of eighteen thirty nine,
a new toll gate was built in a vile wind
on the border between Commercentshire and Pembrokeshire, on a road
that a lot of people used to cart their lime
back to their arms from the coast. It was built
on the order of the Whitland Turnpike Trust, which had
contracted Thomas Bullen as toll collector. Bullen was involved in

(17:09):
a lot of the gates that were put up during
this period. On May thirteenth, a large group of locals
attacked and destroyed the new gate and set the toll
house on fire. The next day, handbills were posted around
the area calling for a meeting to discuss quote the
propriety of its tollgate. The Whitland Turnpike Trust rebuilt the

(17:31):
gate and in June the demonstrators destroyed it again in
broad daylight. At this point there were not professional police
forces in Western Wales, and special constables had been brought
in to try to guard the gate after that first incident,
but when they saw the demonstrators coming, they all fled.
This toll gate was once again rebuilt and members of

(17:52):
the Castlemartin Yeomanry and soldiers from the town of Brecken
were called in to help try to protect it, but
on July seventeenth of eighteen thirty nine, the gate was
once again attacked and demolished. Although other attacks had been
carried out by men in dresses, accounts of This one
included the first written reference to the Daughters of Rebecca

(18:13):
or myrrhead Rebecca, which would become one of the most
memorable parts of the uprising. The men wore dresses, sometimes
combining them with false beards and horsehair wigs. In the
words of a nineteen ten book on the riots by
Henry Tobot Evans quote, it was decided at a vilewind
and Whitland that the rioters should be clothed in women's dresses,
with blackened faces and fern in their white caps. Their

(18:36):
arms were to consist of sticks, pikes, spades, hatchets, old swords, guns,
in fact, any weapon they could get hold of. The
leader to be called Rebecca was invariably to be mounted
and accompanied by a bodyguard. All their doings were to
be conducted under the superintendence of Mother Rebecca, and all
arrangements and commands were to be made and given by her.

(19:00):
There are two different stories about where the name Rebecca
came from. One is that a man called Toomcarnabooth or
Thomas Reeves had a hard time finding a dress that
would fit him. This was a real person. He was
definitely involved in the Rebecca riots and he was a
large man who was locally well known as a pugilist.

(19:20):
In this version, he finally did find a dress that
belonged to a quote, tall and stout old maid, and
that person was named Rebecca. Some historians find this to
be the less likely of the two origin stories, in
part because Toomcarnabooth was known to be active in these
protests in eighteen forty two, not so much in eighteen

(19:42):
thirty nine, when this name was first used. The other
possible origin is from the Book of Genesis, chapter twenty four,
verse sixty. Rebecca was the wife of Isaac and the
mother of Jacob and Esau, and this verse comes from
the account of how she was chosen to be Isaac's wife.
Isaac's father, Abraham, had sent a servant to the place

(20:02):
of his birth to find a wife for Isaac. The
servant prayed to God for a sign directing him to
the right woman, basically saying, quote, when I ask a
woman at this fountain for water, let the one who
offers me and my camel's water be the woman God
has chosen to marry Isaac. Rebecca comes to the fountain,
the servant asks for water, and she offers it to

(20:24):
him and his camels. Skipping ahead a little bit, they
go to the home of Rebecca's father, where the servant
tells him that he's a servant of Abraham, who God
has blessed with wealth, and that he's come to find
Abraham's son Isaac a wife. She and her family agree
to the marriage, and then later, when she is leaving,
her family blesses her and says, quote, thou art our sister,

(20:49):
be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let
thy seed possess the gait of those which hate them.
Regardless of origin story play, the role of Rebecca was
a mark of honor. There was also an almost theatrical
element to these demonstrations, with mother Rebecca portrayed as elderly
and blind, riding a white horse and finding her way

(21:12):
blocked by a gate. The assembled men in dresses the
daughters of Rebecca would answer that nothing should block an
old woman's way, and then they would tear the gate down.
So a note on the blackening of the faces. None
of the sources I found really gave a specific explanation
for the demonstrators rationale and doing this. Blackened faces were

(21:35):
also part of a sort of mock trial and public
humiliation in Wales called the cafil Prenne or the wooden Horse,
in which a mob of men wearing dresses with their
faces blackened would tie somebody who had committed some kind
of an offense to a wooden frame and then parade
that person around the town. So this might have just
been something that people were used to doing in this

(21:57):
kind of public protest already. There's some speculation that in
the case of the Rebecca Riots, this was to make
the Rebeccaites harder to see at night, but since they
were also described as wearing white dresses, that doesn't totally
add up. It may have been more about disguising the
demonstrator's identities. Various illustrated newspaper reports from the time don't

(22:19):
portray the rioters in what we might think of as
blackface or in any way that resembles the minstrel performers
that were becoming popular in the US around this same time,
but there have been more recent reenactments of the riots
in which participants do look like they're in blackface. Around
the same time as the gate in Ivalwin was being

(22:40):
repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, another new gate was attacked and
destroyed at Flamboidy in Camarthen Sure. In that case the
gate was not rebuilt, and after the third time the
gate was destroyed at Ivowwan it was not rebuilt either.
For a while, no more toll gates were attacked by
large groups of men in dresses being led by Mother Rebecca.

(23:04):
There were, however, ongoing theft's attempts to evade the toll
and assaults on tollkeepers and the gates on a much
smaller scale. Large scale riots returned in November of eighteen
forty two, and we'll get to that after another quick
sponsor break. As we said before the break. After the

(23:32):
toll gates had been destroyed at Ivowin and Flamboidi in
eighteen thirty nine, they were not rebuilt. There was this
sort of pause in Rebeccaite demonstrations in Wales, although general
unrest was still ongoing. Then in eighteen forty two, agriculture
prices declined sharply, and that October a new gate called

(23:53):
the Mermaid was built on the Lime Road in Saint
Clear's and Carmarthenshire. On November eighteenth, Rebecca It attacked it
and tore it down. Not long after, Rebecca Heites tore
down the gates at Pooshtrap near Saint Clear's and at
Trevaugh near Carmarthen. Demonstrations continued after that, and by December
twelfth all the gates in Saint Clear's had been destroyed.

(24:17):
There were local leaders of this movement in various towns
and nighttime meetings to organize and rally support, but there
was no one Rebecca who was the key to all
this across all of Wales. In addition to planning out
which tollgates to attack next, these meetings looked at other
issues farmers and workers were facing. Rebeccaites encouraged one another

(24:40):
to withhold their rent or to pay only the amount
they thought was reasonable. This eventually became contentious, with Rebecca
Heites attacking landlords whose behavior they thought was predatory, but
also sometimes attacking other farmers who refused to participate in
these rent protests or signed leases that the Rebecca Eight
thought were unfair. As attacks on the gates escalated in

(25:04):
late eighteen forty two, magistrates called for help. Royal marines
were deployed from Pembroke Dock and police were called in
from London, but they really couldn't stop these demonstrations. By
March of eighteen forty three, every gate being managed by
the Whitland Road Trust had been torn down, and in
one town an armed mob had forced a toll collector

(25:26):
and his wife out into the street naked and then
tore down part of their house. The gates around Carmarthen
were destroyed in May. Then on June nineteenth, demonstrators tried
to destroy Camarthen's Workhouse, releasing the people being housed there,
throwing beds and bedding out the windows and demolishing what
they could. It's not clear how many people were involved

(25:50):
in the attack on the workhouse. Estimates range from hundreds
to two thousand, and it seems to have been a
somewhat spontaneous assault. Unlike most of the Rebecca tests, the
crowd included women and children, and aside from one man
dressed as Rebecca, people were wearing their regular clothes. They
were planning to march to Gildall Square to take their

(26:10):
grievances to the magistrates, but along the way part of
the crowd split off to attack the workhouse. In response
to the workhouse attack, the light dragoons were deployed under
the command of Colonel James Frederick Love, and authorities read
the Riot Act. That's the text that was read alowed
to demonstrators, ordering them to disperse their face criminal charges.

(26:32):
Sixty people were arrested and eleven were convicted. After this,
this was really when the Rebecca Riots started to get
attention outside of this region of Wales. Eventually, the riots
were well known enough that the imagery associated with them
was being used to connect to other issues. The satirical
magazine Punch carried an illustration in eighteen forty three that

(26:54):
blended Irish nationalism with the riots, depicting Daniel O'Connell and
the Repeat Association as Rebecca Rioters. The Repeal Association was
advocating for the repeal of the Acts of Union of
eighteen hundred, which had dissolved the Irish Parliament and created
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In this cartoon,

(27:15):
Prime Minister Robert Peel is a toll collector and men
in dresses are attacking a gate with slats that are
labeled Church rate, Union tides and poor laws. Sometimes this
is reprinted with the caption cutoff as a straightforward illustration
just of the Rebecca riots, but the caption makes the
connections to Peel O'Connell and the Repeal Association completely clear.

(27:38):
The Time sent reporter Thomas Campbell Foster to Wales and
he reported on the disturbances for about six months. Most
of the local newspapers in Wales were really critical of
the rioters, although some of them did also print letters
that had been written by Rebecca Itites. Overall, though, Foster's
reports were more sympathetic to all the social and economic

(27:59):
issues that were at the heart of the riots, although
without condoning the rioter's actions. I also want to know
that I haven't read through Foster's reporting. I'm kind of
relying on sources that have described it as more sympathetic,
at least relatively speaking. But not long after this, Foster
also went to Ireland to report on the Great Famine,

(28:20):
which started in eighteen forty five, And while there were
aspects of that reporting that were sort of similarly sympathetic
to the hardships that Irish people were facing, it could
also be really disparaging and reflect a lot of anti
Irish bias. So while I read a lot of sort
of summaries that described this reporting as like more sympathetic.

(28:40):
It would not be surprising to me at all if
some of those same threads were present in his reporting
on Wales. He was an English reporter, presenting himself as
an impartial outside observer in both cases, but he was
still definitely coming at it from an English perspective, and
English society saw itself as superior to both Ireland and Ways,
as well as a long list of other countries. So

(29:03):
many authorities also started taking stronger actions to try to
stop the protests after the Carmarthen riots, but initially military
units that were sent to the area to try to
keep order weren't very effective at doing so. Basically, marching
soldiers were loud and visible, so rebecca Itites were easily
able to avoid them, and a common pastime among locals

(29:25):
was feeding the soldier's false information about which gates were
likely to be attacked next. They definitely come across as
pretty bumbling at this point in the story. In the
summer of eighteen forty three, there were overall fewer attacks
on the toll gates, but the attacks themselves tended to
be a lot stronger and more violent, and then beyond

(29:47):
just the Gates. Rebecca Itites also sent threatening letters to
landlords and debt collectors, and they committed other acts of
arson and vandalism. This included burning crops and haystacks and
outbuildings as well was damaging trees. By August of that year,
rebecca It's were also holding mass meetings to discuss and
push for political changes. Sometimes there were thousands of people

(30:10):
in attendance. Also, there are a lot of accounts of
men dressed as Rebecca doing things like forcing men to
marry the mothers of their children who had been born
out of wedlock, or if that was not possible, forcing
those men to support those children, or punishing men who
had abused or abandoned their families. So in addition to

(30:31):
sort of fighting back against all of these social and
economic issues in Wales, kind of maintaining a social order
within the Welsh laboring and farming classes. The riot's only
known death took place in September of eighteen forty three.
That was when Sarah Williams, tollkeeper in Hindi Gate near Swansea,

(30:51):
was shot. Some modern descriptions of Williams's death say she
was young, but newspaper reporting from the time just scribe
her as seventy five. An inquest was convened and a
jury ruled that her cause of death was unknown, despite
a surgeon testifying about evidence that she had been shot
in the chest. Authorities offered a reward of five hundred

(31:15):
pounds for information on who had killed her, but a
culprit was never identified. She was very obviously shot, and
I've seen some analysis of this that has like concluded
that it was a case of jury nullification, somebody, you know,
trying to protect the actual culprit, something like that. Eventually,
the UK government deployed eighteen hundred soldiers and two cannons

(31:37):
to Wales and sent more police officers from London. Colonel
Love's attempts to keep order clearly had not been effective,
so Major General George Brown was also dispatched to start
overseeing the effort. Love had mostly responded to riots and
demonstrations after they were already happening, but Brown started trying
to station police and soldiers all around the world region

(32:00):
and to just be more proactive. Arrests really increased over
the autumn, and the number of incidents at the tollgates
dropped sharply. However, since a lot of the tollgates had
been destroyed and then either replaced with chains or not rebuilt.
A lot of people were just passing by the tollgates
without stopping to pay anything. A Royal Commission was convened

(32:24):
to investigate the toll roads in October of eighteen forty three,
with MP Thomas Franklin Lewis presiding. This commission issued its
report in eighteen forty four and didn't find that there
was widespread or systemic mismanagement of the toll system or
wrongdoing by the toll trusts. But the commission did find

(32:45):
some issues like multiple trusts all putting their own toll
houses along the same road, and trusts building toll gates
and then expecting the local community to repair and maintain them.
In response to this, Parliament passed Lord Cauday Act, or
the Turnpike South Wales Act in eighteen forty four, which
simplified the toll system, reduced the number of toll houses,

(33:08):
and regulated the turnpike trusts. The large Rebeccaite demonstrations had
really ended by the time this law was passed, and
trials of people who were arrested in connection to them ended.
In early eighteen forty four. Although rioting was punishable by hanging,
mostly Rebeccaites were convicted of lesser charges. Some of them

(33:29):
were transported to Australia. In the decades that followed the
Rebecca Riots, some of the issues that had led to
the unrest improved, at least to some extent. The development
of railways in Wales made it easier for people to
travel and to transport their goods. Gradually, the toll gates
were removed, with the last toll gate of this era

(33:49):
ceasing operation in eighteen ninety five, although a number of
toll roads and toll bridges have come and gone since then.
There were also changes to the poor laws, and the
corn Laws were repealed in eighteen forty six. We didn't
talk about the corn Laws at all in this episode,
but these were tariffs that were generally seen as favoring
rich landowners over working people, and in times of scarcity

(34:13):
they could make food prohibitively expensive for poor people to buy.
They were repealed in part because of the effects of
the Great Famine in Ireland. The riots also became the
subject of fiction and theater, starting even before they ended.
As examples, there was a play called Rebecca and Her
Daughters that was staged at Royal Amphitheater, Liverpool. In eighteen

(34:34):
forty three, Elizabeth Amy Dillon published a novel called The
Rebecca Rioter, a Story of a Kila life in two
volumes at eighteen eighty. Dylan Thomas wrote a screenplay called
Rebecca's Daughters in nineteen forty eight that eventually became a
film much later in nineteen ninety two. There are also

(34:55):
a couple of different bands that have named themselves the
Rebecca Riots, including an acoustic folk trio out of Berkeley,
California in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands.
There's a wooden sculpture commemorating the Rebecca Riots in Saint
Clair's which was commissioned by the Saint Clair's Council and
unveiled in March of two thousand and eight. It depicts
three men in dresses, one on horseback, breaking down a fence.

(35:19):
The men and horses are carved from cedar and the
fence is ash. Some of the toll gates from this
era are also still standing and in some cases are
being lived in as homes. Yeah, there are a couple
others that are more like museums community spaces. We will
wrap it up with a quote from the introduction of
that nineteen ten book we've referenced a couple of times.

(35:41):
This introduction was written by Gladys Tobat Evans. Quote. Rebeccaism
was the spirit of revolt which filled the whole nature
of the peasant against the tyranny of the government, the
oppression of the masses by the classes, the fostering of
the individual rights at the expense of they at large.
Rebeccaism was the embodiment of the peasants anger and righteous

(36:04):
indignation at the trampling underfoot of his rights and his feelings.
Rebeccaism was the spirit of a nation asserting itself against
the wrongdoings and evil actions of the few, that is,
the Rebecca Riots. Do you have a bit of listener mail?
I do. This is from Sarah, and Sarah wrote, Holly
and Tracy. I just listened to your recent episodes on

(36:27):
mourning Dove. I found it incredibly informative, thought provoking, and
it was actually relatable to the goings on in our library.
Recently we had Emma Noise or author of Baby Speaks Salish,
give a talk about her experiences as a member of
the Synix Band of the Confederated Tribes of the Callville Reservation.

(36:47):
She spoke about coyote stories, the importance of listening, and
her discussion about her language was more than interesting. I've
been listening to your podcast for years now, and every
episode as a learning opportunity. Thanks for all the hard
work and for the thoughtfulness that goes into episodes such
as this. A brief description of the book, quote Baby
Speaks Salish as a one of a kind manual created

(37:10):
by a mother seeking to share more call the Okanagan
Salish language with her daughter than she herself was exposed
to as a young girl. Created for caregivers and the
language curious, this book provides simple examples for how to
integrate more Salish words into adult and child interactions. This
book can be purchased in some local bookstores in Spokane, Washington.

(37:32):
It's also online at from here Spokane dot com. Thanks Sarah,
Thanks so much, Sarah. I had not heard about this book,
but I love this idea and it also gives me
a moment to say. Our colleague Whune Lance Twitchell, who
is host of the podcast The Tongue Unbroken, which is

(37:55):
coming back for a new season in the beginning of
twenty twenty four. Has also written a book which is
called Kuhanti. And this book was written in conjunction with
ling It language speakers and is written only in the
indigenous language without translations. So it's like a book written
in that language for kids, which is an idea I love.

(38:19):
And I was so happy when I learned that Hune
had gotten it published. So thank you Sarah for this
email for giving me a chance to name drop that
if you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcast or history podcasts at iHeartRadio
dot com and we're all over social media at mist
in History, and you can subscribe to our show on

(38:42):
the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever or you listening to
your favorite shows.