by Alis Hawkins
Appropriately enough, a reply arrived from his wife on the day when Margaret’s bones – and those of her poor, unwanted child – were given a proper burial in the Treforgan plot. In her letter, Mrs Bowen thanked me for my consideration in writing to her husband and informed me that he had been gratified to receive the information, especially as he was unlikely to act as coroner again.
‘Did you know Bowen wasn’t well?’ I asked my father.
‘Anybody setting eyes on the man could see he wasn’t well,’ was his somewhat tactless response.
A week later, my father received a visitor. Although it was unusual for him to entertain at Glanteifi, I did not think too much about it until my presence was required in the library.
The visitor – introduced by my father as Pomfrey, a fellow magistrate and a friend of Bowen’s – greeted me with an over-jovial demeanour that told me my father had made him aware of my failing sight. He managed to restrain himself from assuring me that my other faculties would grow to compensate for my inability to see but I sensed that it was a close-run thing.
‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ Pomfrey said, after neglecting to do so for several minutes. ‘Leighton Bowen is unwell – unlikely to recover, poor devil, according to the medical men. Which leaves this part of the world in want of a coroner. Urgently. There’s just been an unexplained death over on the coast.’ He hesitated. ‘Point is, Bowen says we should ask you to do it. Apparently, despite –’ I caught a hand waving, presumably in the direction of my deficient eyes, ‘– you have a talent for weaselling out the truth in these matters. Bowen says you speak perfect Welsh, as well.’ From his tone, he might have been suggesting that I was fluent in Hottentot. ‘So, will you do it?’
‘You’re asking me to take up the post of coroner for the Teifi Valley?’
‘Well, that’s not in the magistrates’ gift, obviously. There’ll have to be an election, by and by. But, pro tem, yes.’
I blinked. ‘I presume you’ve discussed this with my father?’
‘Indeed I have not! You’re of age. Your being a barrister more than qualifies you for the role, as does Bowen’s recommendation. I simply asked your father whether I could trespass on a few moments of your time.’
I inclined my head. ‘I beg your pardon. I’ve become accustomed to being treated as if I’d lost my wits instead of my sight.’
I saw a movement that I assumed was his own bow of forgiveness and the tension in the air fell somewhat.
‘I’ll do it on one condition,’ I said.
‘And that is?’
Since the end of my investigation, I had resisted my father’s attempts to pull me into the administration of the estate whilst, at the same time, failing to take the necessary steps to fit myself for practice as a solicitor. I had, in short, frittered my days away in frustrated futility. John Davies, on the other hand, had had no choice but to return to clerking and to the inquisitions of an employer whose curiosity must be satisfied without trespassing on confidences. I wondered whether he was as bored as I had been since our association had come to an end.
‘It must be understood,’ I said, ‘that I will appoint my own coroner’s officer. You see, Mr Pomfrey, it is essential that I work with somebody who understands that, though I cannot see properly, I am far from blind.’
The Unitarian Manse,
Ipswich
My dear Mr Probert-Lloyd
May I return your wishes for a prosperous and happy new year? Though eighteen hundred and fifty-one is a week old, your letter arrived only yesterday so I hope you will forgive the tardiness of the greeting.
I consider it a great kindness that you should write and give me such a detailed account of the outcome of your investigations. All the more so as I imagine it must be onerous to write using the apparatus you describe, especially as you cannot, then, read what you have written. I must confess that, often, on re-reading something I have composed, I am entirely unsatisfied with it and am forced to begin afresh.
It is kind of you, also, to permit me to ask any questions that I may have concerning your enquiries. However, I prefer not to bring those times to mind if I can help it. What is past is past and we must look to the future if we are not to run mad.
You were perceptive enough to suggest that I might miss the frank interchange that men are accustomed to engage in concerning the issues of the day and I must confess that, since Nathaniel’s passing, I do, often, long for such robust conversation. I, therefore, accept your invitation to engage in epistolary exchanges of that nature with great gratitude. Perhaps being physically separated from the author of the views I will express may make them more acceptable to you simply as opinions on the government of our nation and not the opinions of a woman.
As you have been kind enough to suggest the notion, perhaps I can leave it to you to suggest the first topic of conversation?
I must confess, I am a little uneasy as to the reaction of whoever will read my words to you but I must trust that you will choose your lector with care for their opinion of you, not to mention the opinion they may form of your humble correspondent,
Lydia Howell.
The Rebecca Riots in None So Blind
In an early chapter of None So Blind, Harry balks at trying to explain the Rebecca Riots to Gus and simply allows him to think of them as criminal acts of tollgate destruction. But the causes of the Rebecca movement were a little more complicated than that – so why didn’t I get Harry to explain?
I could have persuaded him to talk about the plight of tenant framers – how, after the Napoleonic wars, incomes had fallen while costs rose, leaving many near destitution. I could have allowed him to explain the Byzantine system of tithes, county rates, parish rates and church rates which farmers were subject to and which left little money for basics like tea and soap. But that wouldn’t have worked, in terms of narrative, because a) living through the 1840s, Gus would have known the basics already, and b) it’s unlikely that he would have been interested in the bits he didn’t know.
In West Wales as in London, the assumption held sway that, in matters of the law, those of lower social class would appear as the defendant while it was the right and duty of those higher up the social scale to sit in judgement on them. But, for Welsh farmers, its effect was more corrosive as the presiding magistrate might very well have an interest in the case he was trying and the resulting harsh judgements gave the people of West Wales more to feel aggrieved over than their metropolitan counterparts.
And, as in matters of law, so in religion. Nonconformity was prevalent in west Wales and created tensions along sectarian/class lines. Eighty per cent of the Cardiganshire population attended Nonconformist chapels but they were, nevertheless, still obliged to contribute to the upkeep of the Anglican church and its ministers via the tithe and the parish rate.
Harry and Gus would have agreed on one thing, however. The much-vaunted electoral reforms of 1832 hadn’t changed the lives of tenant farmers as much as the reformers might have hoped. Granted, some of the more successful tenants now qualified for the vote, but they could only vote for the candidates who presented themselves and the political system – certainly in West Wales – was still heavily biased towards the Landed Interest. No wonder the farmers felt that direct action was the only way in which their voices would be heard.
Initially, Gus asks whether the riots were about bread and I could, plausibly, have had Harry reply, ‘No, potatoes.’ Gus might have accused him of being facetious but, actually, the humble potato was partly responsible for the desperate situation that lay behind the riots. In contrast to contemporary west Wales, which finds itself being stripped of its young people by a combination of poor employment prospects and a shortage of affordable housing, the early nineteenth century saw a steep rise in population. As in Ireland, people resorted to potatoes instead of bread as a staple carbohydrate because a family living on potatoes only needs a quarter of the acreage that it would take to support them if they were relying on grain for
bread.
So, the available land could support more people but, inevitably, more people quickly resulted in an increasing pressure on other resources. At one end of the agricultural spectrum, prosperous farmers could take on a second tenancy, depriving another family of a living and forcing young people to wait well into their twenties to marry; while, at the less prosperous end, labourers and their families eked out a meagre living on ever more marginal common land, and an unlucky few were starved into the workhouse. These imbalances caused resentment between neighbours and outraged Rebecca.
What Gus might have asked, if he was the kind of person to scoff less and wonder more, is why tollgates had suddenly become the focus for mass action. It wasn’t as if they were new – the turnpike trusts that had made themselves responsible for improving and maintaining west Wales’s roads had been in place for decades.
The answer is Thomas Bullin.
Bullin was a ‘toll farmer’ – a species of person who bought the right to collect tolls on turnpike roads – and had secured collection rights on almost every trust whose gates were attacked by Rebecca. Bullin was a gift from the gods to the gentlemen trustees. He took the burden of day-to-day responsibility from them and did so at very handsome rents as he bid far higher than anybody else for the privilege of separating the farmers and carriage owners of west Wales from their money. But Bullin demanded something from the trustees in return. In order to recoup his initial investment, he persuaded them to let him increase the number of tollgates at key points. It was one of those new gates, at Efailwen in the foothills of Pembrokeshire’s Preseli hills, that was Rebecca’s first target.
Put in place just as the lime-carting season was about to begin in May 1839, the new Efailwen gate enraged the local farmers and, within a week, it was pulled down to the accompaniment of all the carnivalesque elements that came to define Rebecca: men with their faces blacked, many dressed as women, riding out after dark to the accompaniment of much noise from makeshift instruments and the discharge of guns, to conduct a mock trial of the offending tollgate, followed by its complete, almost ritual, demolition.
Lime carting gets only a passing mention, from John, in None So Blind (though it forms a significant strand in the next book in the series) and it requires some explanation.
The soils of Cardiganshire and northern Pembrokeshire tend to be acidic and benefit from treatment with alkaline slaked lime to redress the balance and promote crop growth. Lime was carted northwards from the rim of the Pembrokeshire coalfield and westwards to the coast, where it was shipped to numerous coves with beachside lime kilns which turned raw limestone into quicklime. Farmers would take their carts to the kilns and bring back the quicklime to slake and spread on their fields. And, of course, there was a toll on lime carts; their narrow wheels and heavy load were very damaging to the roads. As John points out, the combined price of lime and tolls meant that the Efailwen farmers were caught in an age-old farmers’ bind: penniless now if they did pay out, penniless later if they didn’t.
Once the lime cart-catching Efailwen gate had been removed, along with certain others in the immediate vicinity, there were no more actions in 1839 but ‘Rebecca’ was now irrevocably linked with the destruction of tollgates. According to folklore, the name Rebecca was adopted by a cottager called Thomas Rees. Known locally as Twm Carnabwth, Rees was a Nonconformist lay preacher and a prize fighter who persuaded his neighbours that they need not put up with Thomas Bullin’s new gate.
Why Rebecca? The romantic version is that when Twm Carnabwth was looking for a womanly disguise for his nocturnal sorties, the only garment large enough was the nightdress of a big, stout widow called Rebecca. However, historians have examined the parish registers for the period and looked in vain for any woman of that name amongst Twm’s neighbours.
Given the nineteenth century farmer’s Nonconformist fondness for using the Bible to guide his every step, the more likely explanation, and the one Harry gives Gus, is that the name was suggested by a verse in the book of Genesis: ‘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 gate of those which hate them.’
When the second outbreak of rioting began in November 1842, at St Clears, a dozen miles from Efailwen (also caused by Thomas Bullin’s erection of a new gate) the precedent had been set and the name Rebecca was immediately appropriated. And, this time, ‘the Lady’ as Rebecca was sometimes known, began a campaign that did not stop at the destruction of a local gate or two. Unchecked by an overall leader, the riots quickly spread like a contagion in all directions and, by the time the actions finally came to an end almost a year later, outbreaks had extended all the way from Rhayader in the north, to the Glamorgan coalfield in the south. Rebecca-ism represented a colossal act of civil disobedience – the most significant rebellion on Welsh soil since Owain Glyndwr’s uprising more than four hundred years earlier.
And, as Harry points out to Gus, it did not go unnoticed in the halls of Westminster. Fearing that the agitation would be taken up by the miners, iron workers and Chartist agitators in the south Wales valleys (potentially sparking a conflagration that might end in a French-style revolution) the magistrates and the government moved to quell the uprising as swiftly as they could; only to find that they were powerless. Despite drafting in Metropolitan police officers, a troop of the Fourth Light Dragoons, the yeomanry and armed marines, only one Rebeccaite action – a well-advertised daytime gathering in the centre of Carmarthen that turned into an attack on the workhouse – was successfully suppressed. On all other occasions, the rioters had been and gone before the forces ever got word that they were abroad.
The march on Carmarthen is a good illustration of why Harry was unhappy with the label ‘tollgate riots’. Of the 530 documented attacks carried out by Rebecca-ites, only about half were on tollgates. And it’s the nature of at least some of the remainder that provided me with the idea that lies at the heart of None So Blind.
As far as I know, there were no Rebecca bands intent on controlling the behaviour of young women but the prevailing social attitudes at the time mean that it’s not an implausible idea. Though many of the non-tollgate attacks were on the property and persons of gentry and clergy (and were related, in one way or another, to the grievances Harry failed to explain to Gus) a good number were perpetrated against the Rebecca rioters’ own neighbours. Magistrates’ informers were intimidated, just as Harry and John are, and those who spoke out against Rebecca or refused to ride with her were punished, as Williams of Waungilfach finds to his cost. Farmers who bid for second tenancies or mistreated their servants or the cottagers who lived on their farms were visited and advised to desist – again, William Williams gets a taste of this. Minor local issues were blown up into acts worthy of retribution and personal scores were settled under the banner of Rebecca. As Harry says, ‘once people unaccustomed to power have felt its potency, they are apt to begin wielding it indiscriminately.’
And it’s maybe these other actions that illustrate, more clearly than the tollgate riots themselves, the origins of the Rebecca movement. John, quite rightly, says that, ‘Rebecca was the ceffyl pren by another name’; so what was the ceffyl pren?
Like its English equivalent the ‘Skimmington ride’ and the Scottish practice of ‘riding the stang’, the practice of carrying the ceffyl pren is a kind of folk justice which has been recorded since early Medieval times. However, in Harry and John’s Teifi Valley, it was an article of faith that the ceffyl pren had been authorised, if not actually instituted, by Hywel Dda, the tenth-century king and lawmaker of Deheubarth, a kingdom more or less contiguous with modern Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. As such, it was felt to be the ‘law of the land’ in a way which parliament’s law could never be, imposed on the people, as it was, without their consent.
In the 1830s the ceffyl pren was enjoying something of a revival in the Teifi Valley and so it probably felt natural to Twm Carnabwth that he shou
ld use it for the entirely novel idea of trying an inanimate object – a tollgate – for its transgressions against local decency. And these roots in the ceffyl pren must have conferred on the Rebecca movement a certain kind of folk-legitimacy, bolstering the enthusiasm with which men initially joined the riots.
As keen-eyed readers will have noticed, in None So Blind, Harry and John describe slightly different versions of the ceffyl pren and there were, in fact, still other variations throughout the region. Those visited by the ceffyl pren were sometimes made to ride the pole ‘horse’ and were paraded around the village. At other times and in other places, an effigy of the offender might be used – and subsequently burned – instead.
For anybody wanting to find out more about the Rebecca Riots, the three most comprehensive works on the subject are:
The Rebecca Riots: A Study In Agrarian Discontent by David Williams
And They Blessed Rebecca: Account of the Welsh Toll Gate Riots, 1939-44 by Pat Molloy.
Rebecca and Her Daughters, Being a History of the Agrarian Disturbances in Wales Known As ‘The Rebecca Riots’ by Henry Tobit Evans and G.T. Evans
Questions for Reading Groups
In an early chapter of None So Blind, Harry says that ‘once people unaccustomed to power have felt its potency, they are apt to begin wielding it indiscriminately.’ Do you think that’s true?
The tradition of the ceffyl pren developed over centuries before it became the highly orchestrated affair described by John. What do you think is the purpose of the rioters’ cross-dressing, face-blacking and cacophonous ‘rough music’?
What does None So Blind say about the position of women in nineteenth-century West Wales? What are the different ways in which women in the novel strive to gain and use power?