When Rebecca Came to Rhayader: Toll Gates, Salmon and the Long Afterlife of Rural Protest

There are episodes in the history of a small town which, for a few weeks or months, draw it into something much larger. Rhayader experienced one of those moments in the autumn of 1843. Men came out after dark, disguised themselves, blackened their faces, carried guns, axes and saws, sounded horns and systematically attacked the turnpike gates surrounding the town. They called themselves the daughters of Rebecca.

The Rebecca Riots are generally associated with Carmarthenshire, Cardiganshire and Pembrokeshire, where attacks on turnpike gates had begun before the disturbances reached Radnorshire. Rhayader, however, developed a particularly concentrated episode of its own. This was not accidental. The town stood where roads converged from Builth and Penybont, Llanidloes and St Harmon, Llangurig and Aberystwyth, and from Cwmdeuddwr and the country west of the Wye. To enter or leave Rhayader was very often to encounter a toll gate.

The events of 1843 and 1844 would make a substantial story on their own. What makes Rhayader more unusual is what happened afterwards. Rebecca did not disappear with the reform of the turnpike system. During the second half of the nineteenth century her name was adopted by organised salmon poachers on the Wye and Elan. Men again disguised themselves, marched by night, carried spears and torches and challenged those employed to enforce the law. Crowds sometimes turned out to watch them. By the beginning of the twentieth century newspapers could still refer to gangs at Rhayader as the “Rebeccas”, confident that their readers would understand the reference.

There were, in effect, two Rhayader Rebeccas. The first attacked gates. The second attacked restrictions on the river. They were not one continuous organisation, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise, but the second inherited the name, much of the theatre and something of the spirit of the first.

A Town Surrounded by Gates

The best explanation of why Rhayader became such a centre of unrest came from the official inquiry held after the disturbances.

Harry Lingen, a barrister who sometimes lived at Rhayader, told the Commissioners that there were six entrances into the town, with a gate at every entrance and another toll bar in addition. Rhayader, as he put it, was effectively surrounded. Three of those gates stood on roads which he considered to be in a deplorable condition, and one, the old road towards Llanidloes, had been so neglected that Lingen had himself taken legal action over it. The Commissioners separately recorded five gates and one bar belonging to the Radnorshire Trust closely surrounding the town, together with two gates belonging to the Rhayader and Llangerrig Trust. Two of the Radnorshire gates remained on old roads towards Aberystwyth and Llanidloes which had become of much less importance after the creation of the newer route through Llangurig. The roads had been largely abandoned by the trust, yet the gates remained.

This gets to the heart of the grievance. Farmers and travellers were not objecting to the abstract idea that roads had to be paid for. They objected to the way the system worked around Rhayader. Tolls could be collected on roads which were badly maintained, on roads which had lost much of their purpose, and on roads towards whose upkeep the surrounding parishes were themselves contributing.

For the farming communities around Rhayader the accumulated cost mattered. Animals had to be moved. Produce had to reach market. Lime had to be carried back to farms to improve the soil. Journeys which look short on a map could pass through several gates. A few pence paid once might be manageable. The same charge repeated again and again became something else.

Lingen himself did not pretend that the toll gates explained everything. He told the Commissioners that the countryside was suffering under wider economic pressures and that the turnpikes were simply the most visible object upon which resentment could settle. The gates were, in his memorable phrase, a “tangible thing” upon which people could lay hold.

The poverty behind that resentment was real. Evidence from the Cwmdeuddwr district described rural families living principally on oatmeal, potatoes and buttermilk, with little meat. Butter might be made only to be sold, because the money was needed for rent. A pig might be kept and then largely sold rather than eaten. Against that background it becomes easier to understand why the repeated demand for another toll could come to represent much more than the few coins handed through a tollhouse window.

Rebecca Approaches Rhayader

There had already been trouble before the best remembered attacks of September 1843.

David Oliver, acting treasurer of the Rhayader and Llangerrig Turnpike Trust, later told the Royal Commission that the upper gate belonging to his trust had been pulled down during August. It was rebuilt the following day. An attempt was also made upon the second gate, although the attackers were interrupted by the gatekeeper.

Whether the August attack was explicitly undertaken in the name of Rebecca is less certain. That distinction matters. Opposition to toll gates existed before every act of destruction was automatically described as Rebeccaism.

By the beginning of September there was no such ambiguity. On 2 September the Hereford Times reported that Rebecca had written to the trustees, announcing an intention to visit Rhayader and put its toll-gate abuses right if the authorities failed to do so.

A few days later a gate on the Builth to Rhayader road, about a quarter of a mile from Builth, was attacked. The gate was carried away and damaged and the tollhouse windows were broken. Contemporary reports described this as the first appearance of Rebecca in Radnorshire. The later evidence of the August attack makes that newspaper claim less certain, but this appears to be the first local incident which the press clearly identified with Rebecca.

The pace then quickened.

On the night of Friday 22 September a large party appeared at Pen-y-pistyll, close to Rhayader on the Aberystwyth road. The gate was partly demolished, the tollhouse damaged and its windows broken. The attackers were disturbed before finishing their work. According to the report, they left saying that they would return at a more convenient season.

Three nights later another gate belonging to the same line of road, near Llangurig, was completely levelled. The occupants of the tollhouse remained inside and were not harmed, although guns were fired while the gate was being destroyed.

Then, on Wednesday 27 September, three gates at Rhayader were reported destroyed, the Rhayader Old Gate, the Cwm Glan Gate and Cross Lane Gate. The contemporary account described all the familiar ceremony of Rebecca. There were horns, guns, a costumed Rebecca and upwards of 200 mounted followers.

The date is worth being precise about. A much later history placed this particular attack in October, but the contemporary report was published on 6 October and refers back to the previous Wednesday. The evidence points much more convincingly to 27 September. The sequence of that week was therefore extraordinary: Pen-y-pistyll on the 22nd, Llangurig a few days later, three Rhayader gates on the 27th, and then an even larger attack two nights after that.

The Gates at the Bridge

At about two o’clock on the morning of Friday 29 September, more than 200 Rebeccaites were reported to have gathered at the two turnpike gates adjoining Rhayader Bridge.

They came armed with guns and the tools needed for demolition. Within around ten minutes the posts had been cut through, the gates removed and the pieces thrown into the Wye.

One contemporary account made a point of saying that no other property was destroyed.

It is an important detail. Rebecca could be threatening, and firearms were carried and discharged, but these attacks were not necessarily indiscriminate. On this particular night the toll infrastructure itself was the target.

By now the authorities understood that they were dealing with something more organised than occasional vandalism. Sir John Benn Walsh, Lord Lieutenant of Radnorshire and the county’s Member of Parliament, became closely involved. Magistrates discussed whether some gates could reasonably be removed. Newbridge-on-Wye was among those against which there appeared to be a particularly strong local grievance.

Yet there was a difficulty which would recur throughout the crisis. A toll gate was not simply a wooden barrier across a road. The income from it could be pledged against the debts of the trust. Even where a gate was unpopular, or where magistrates accepted that the complaint had some merit, abolishing it could affect creditors who had lent money on the expectation that toll income would continue.

Rebecca had a simpler method. She cut the gate down.

Refusing the Toll

Not everyone who resisted the system blackened their face or went out after midnight.

At Rhayader Petty Sessions on 7 October five people were convicted of refusing to pay the toll at the East Gate. Each was fined £1 with costs. It was an early sign that the challenge to the turnpike system had spread into ordinary daytime behaviour.

By November this form of protest had become even more visible. Fourteen farmers living within a few miles of Rhayader were summoned after passing the tollhouse at the foot of the bridge without paying while the gate itself lay destroyed. Some had horses with them, others sheep or cattle. Four were fined £1 and costs, one was fined £2 and costs, while the remaining nine were discharged.

The episode brings the dispute back into everyday life. These were farmers moving animals along the roads serving a market town. The argument over turnpikes was therefore not confined to spectacular nights of horns and gunfire. It reached into the routine business of bringing livestock through Rhayader.

By the end of November newspapers reported that twenty-five people described as respectable had been convicted of evading tolls in the neighbourhood since the disturbances began.

The line between Rebecca and respectable agricultural society was not always as clear as the authorities might have liked.

The Great November Attack

The most dramatic night came at the beginning of November.

During the early hours of 3 November about 200 disguised and armed men entered Rhayader. Contemporary accounts differ on some details, which is itself a warning against forcing the evidence into a neat modern map. The East Gate was attacked, as were the gates towards the bridge and Cwmdeuddwr. Some reports identify another gate as the North Gate, others as the South. What is clear is that four gates in or immediately adjoining the town were destroyed during a remarkably organised operation.

Before beginning the demolitions, the Rebeccaites reportedly marched to the Lion Inn, where members of the Metropolitan Police were staying, and challenged them to come out and show their strength.

They did not.

The crowd then proceeded in marching order through the town. Posts were sawn through. Gates came down. A tollhouse was wrecked. Volleys were fired and cheers given for Rebecca.

The speed and discipline impressed even hostile observers. One newspaper remarked that the Radnorshire Rebeccaites appeared to have been “under tuition”, as though they had learned the methods already used elsewhere in Wales.

What happened to the tollkeepers is important. The evidence suggests intimidation, but also an effort on some occasions to separate the people from the structure being attacked. Men and women living in the tollhouses could be warned to remain inside or told that no injury was intended to them. That did not make the experience harmless. To wake in darkness to a large armed body sawing through the gate outside your home can scarcely have been anything other than terrifying.

One recently investigated tollhouse gives us an unusually personal glimpse of the people caught in this world. At Llidiart y Mynydd, on the upland road west of Rhayader, archaeological work has identified a tollhouse and farmstead attacked in November 1843 by a party reported as numbering between fifty and one hundred. The 1841 census suggests that Thomas and Ann Hughes, both about twenty-five, lived there with their young daughters Ann and Elizabeth and another woman, Elizabeth Morgan. The building appears to have combined toll collection with farming, which may have been a practical arrangement on a road where the income alone would not support a dedicated keeper.

The attack on a toll gate therefore meant an attack upon a structure which was also somebody’s home.

Police, Soldiers and a Community That Would Not Talk

The authorities responded quickly to the November attack.

The 4th Light Dragoons reached the district, Metropolitan Police were already operating around Rhayader, and men of the 7th Royal Fusiliers were subsequently stationed locally. Special constables patrolled the roads. For a time Rhayader became something close to a garrison town.

Military force was easier to obtain than evidence.

The problem was identifying the men behind the disguises. Magistrates believed that people knew perfectly well who Rebecca’s daughters were, but witnesses were reluctant to help. The very size of the local farming network worked against investigation. A stranger might be noticed immediately in a small rural community. A neighbour with a blackened face at two in the morning was another matter.

Walsh believed there was a confederacy extending through Cwmdeuddwr, St Harmon, Llanwrthwl, Cwm Elan and parts of Nantmel and Llanyre. He suspected that some substantial farmers and occupying tenants were involved. That was his assessment, not a list of people convicted in court, and it needs to be treated accordingly. What it reveals most clearly is the frustration of the authorities.

The surviving correspondence of John Davies of Gwardolau, who wrote to Thomas Lewis Lloyd of Nantgwyllt during the disturbances, provides another window into this local world. Here the events appear not simply as items in government reports but as something discussed among the estates and farms around Rhayader while it was actually happening.

The tension spread beyond the town. Rhayader became a base from which troops could be sent elsewhere. When trouble was feared at Knighton, soldiers stationed at Rhayader were requested to reinforce the authorities there.

Yet even amid the military preparations there were signs that some magistrates understood that repression alone would not solve the problem. At a meeting on 22 November they spoke not simply about punishing offenders but about conciliating those who had grievances.

Within a week, the government inquiry arrived.

The Government Comes to Rhayader

At two o’clock on Tuesday 28 November 1843 the Royal Commissioners arrived in Rhayader from Aberystwyth. They were Thomas Frankland Lewis, Robert Henry Clive and William Cripps, accompanied by their secretary, G. R. Rickards.

Proceedings began at ten the following morning.

Farmers came into town from the surrounding country. Harry Lingen, John Jones and William Davies presented the local case. The complaints were detailed rather than rhetorical.

There were too many gates. Tolls were excessive. Lime carried for agricultural purposes was charged. People objected to paying toll upon roads which they believed were being maintained from parish resources rather than turnpike money. Tithes were discussed. So was the operation of the New Poor Law, including dissatisfaction with the bastardy provisions.

The complaint about lime is particularly revealing. Lime was an agricultural improver, not a luxury. It might have to be carried for miles in considerable quantities. Passing through several gates could therefore increase the cost of improving the land itself.

The complaint about road maintenance was just as straightforward. If a farmer was already contributing through local rates towards the upkeep of a road, then found himself charged again when passing through a toll gate, the arrangement could feel like payment twice over.

This was what Lingen had meant when he described the gate as something tangible. Behind the timber barrier lay a much broader argument about who carried the economic burdens of rural society.

The inquiry also helps explain why the Rhayader system had generated such resentment. The Commissioners recorded gates remaining on roads which had become much less useful and noted the concentration of toll points around the town. Their evidence does not make every act committed in Rebecca’s name defensible, but it does make it impossible to dismiss the grievances as imaginary.

Reform, but Not Overnight

The Royal Commission reported in March 1844. Parliament followed with the South Wales Turnpike Trusts Act, which received Royal Assent on 9 August.

The legislation consolidated and reorganised the turnpike system across South Wales, addressed the debts of the trusts and changed the administration and collection of tolls.

For Rhayader, one provision was remarkably specific. Section 112 dealt directly with the road from Rhayader to Llangerrig. The part lying within Montgomeryshire was transferred into the neighbouring road system, and the Act expressly prohibited the erection or maintenance of any toll gate or toll bar, or the collection of toll, upon that portion of the road.

That provides a much clearer ending to the turnpike story than the vague statement that the riots somehow led to reform. One of the roads directly involved in the Rhayader disturbances was dealt with explicitly by Parliament.

The argument was not settled in a day. In April 1845 Radnorshire freeholders and occupiers were still petitioning the Home Secretary about the Rhayader to Llangerrig road. Reform had changed the structure, but local disputes over roads and their cost did not vanish immediately.

Nor did Rebecca disappear as soon as the Commissioners left town.

On 24 January 1844 around 200 Rebeccaites were reported at Llangurig, where the gate was once again demolished. A contemporary correspondent complained that four payable gates stood within about twelve miles on the road from Rhayader towards Aberystwyth and argued that two ought to have been enough.

Rhayader itself was nevertheless becoming quieter. By the end of January most of the London police had been withdrawn. Four remained in the town and two at Newbridge, while soldiers were still quartered locally. The Bridge tollhouse remained in ruins.

By the middle of February about fifty soldiers were still stationed at Rhayader, together with a handful of Metropolitan Police and local constables. The two gates and tollhouse at the foot of the bridge had still not been rebuilt, and no toll was being charged there.

One newspaper remarked that Rebecca’s name was by then seldom heard.

It would not remain so.

Rebecca Returns to the Wye

On the night of 29 November 1856 Rhayader was again waiting for Rebecca.

Rumours had circulated through the town that “Rebecca and her children” would appear. People gathered. Horns were heard. Shortly before ten o’clock a procession came from Cwmdeuddwr and crossed the bridge.

About eighty men appeared at first. Their faces were blackened and many wore shirts over their clothes. Rebecca led them carrying a gun and was supported by two sword-bearers. Behind came men armed with swords, spears, poles, pitchforks and firearms, marching four abreast.

They stopped outside the Lion Hotel and fired guns, then passed around the Market Place before returning towards Cwmdeuddwr Bridge. Another forty or fifty men joined them.

This time there was no toll gate to destroy.

Their object was salmon.

The party moved along the Wye and Elan, using horns, gunshots and lights as signals while men entered the spawning fords with spears. Contemporary reports estimated that perhaps thirty fish were killed.

There was violence too. A shot fired towards the steward of a local landowner struck him in the elbow, while a Rhayader sawyer who approached the river was confronted with spears and ordered away.

The old theatre had survived almost intact. There was Rebecca at the head of the procession, disguise, darkness, firearms, horns, marching order and a collective challenge to authority. Only the grievance had changed.

Historians have subsequently described this later phase as the “Second Rebecca Riots”, particularly in the work of David J. V. Jones on poaching on the upper Wye.

The timing is important. Organised attempts to protect Wye salmon increased during the following decade. The Wye Preservation Society was established in 1862, concentrating particularly on bailiffing and prosecutions during the spawning season, while a statutory Wye Board of Conservators followed in 1866.

To landowners and fishery authorities this was conservation and law enforcement. To parts of the population along the upper river it could look like the removal of an older customary freedom.

That disagreement would keep Rebecca alive.

The Second Rebecca

By January 1867 the Hereford Times could discuss the “Radnorshire Rebecca Riots” in relation to salmon rather than turnpikes.

The correspondent drew a revealing distinction. He accepted that the original Rebecca movement had arisen from genuine grievances but condemned the fishery Rebeccaites for adopting the same methods against laws which he believed to be justified. Whatever we think of his judgement, the comparison shows that the connection between the two movements was already being made by contemporaries.

The following winter more than twenty disguised men were reported spearing salmon at a ford close to Rhayader. Water bailiffs investigating the lights decided that approaching the whole party would be dangerous. One of them, Marston, later encountered several men on the road and was stabbed in the thigh with a spear, then caught again and beaten.

The later Rebecca was not harmless folklore.

In January 1876 another organised party appeared at Rhydgwair Ford near Morgan’s tanyard. Around fifty disguised men emerged, many dressed in white over their clothes, some wearing high hats covered by white handkerchiefs, others with long false beards. Their faces were blackened and they carried spears and other weapons.

When the order was given they moved towards the river. A torch was lit and men entered the water.

What followed is perhaps more revealing than the poaching itself. Spectators cheered when salmon were brought ashore. The party then moved through Rhayader carrying fish on the ends of their spears, crossed the bridge and continued to the Elan, followed by a crowd.

Rebecca had become a public spectacle.

On 25 November 1878 the diarist Francis Kilvert saw it for himself. He went to the Rhayader drill hall at half past seven intending to watch the Volunteers drill, only to find the building deserted. The Volunteers had gone to see, and according to Kilvert to take part in, the Rebecca salmon spearing below Rhayader Bridge. Kilvert went to the bridge himself and described the torchlit activity as “a most picturesque sight”.

That eyewitness account is particularly valuable because it confirms something which later appeared during arguments among the magistrates. Rebecca was not necessarily viewed as an alien gang operating against the wishes of the town. For some people she was spectacle, entertainment, protest, or something worthy of active sympathy.

Hundreds on the Riverbank

The situation became serious enough to reach Radnorshire Quarter Sessions in January 1879.

The Chief Constable reported that he could not adequately deal with the activities of “Rebecca and her daughters” at Rhayader. Three men had recently been seen in the Wye at night using spears and flambeaux, supported by around twenty disguised companions. On the banks stood an estimated three or four hundred inhabitants, rejoicing when fish were taken.

The Duke of Beaufort urged the magistrates to support the fishery authorities. More than fifty watchers were said to be available, but numbers alone were not enough if the watchers were surrounded by a hostile or sympathetic crowd.

Mr Green-Price told the court that the participants were believed to be bound together by an oath and that they considered the fishery law unjust. That was his allegation rather than proof of a formal secret society, but it gives a sense of how organised Rebecca appeared to the authorities.

He also produced one of the most memorable stories in the whole history. An illegally taken salmon had reportedly been displayed openly at Rhayader market with a label declaring it to have been bred and fed by a Herefordshire fishery owner and “butchered by Rebecca”.

When the local Volunteers were supposed to be at drill, Green-Price alleged, many had instead gone to the river to watch Rebecca. Asked what the officers had done, he replied that they had gone too.

Quarter Sessions resolved to send the Chief Constable’s report to the Home Secretary.

Forty years after the destruction of the toll gates, central government was again being asked to consider a Rhayader problem carrying Rebecca’s name.

The Winter of 1880

The following year brought some of the best documented fishery raids.

Early in January 1880, once frost had broken and salmon were again moving into the spawning grounds, a correspondent learned that Rebecca would be out that evening. By the light of the torches he counted eighteen men, fourteen guarding the bank and four working in the river, three with spears and one carrying the light.

They moved from ford to ford. Five fish were killed at The Racks close to the town, another at Rhydgwair, five at another ford and four large salmon farther downstream. One fish was estimated at between thirty and thirty-five pounds.

The police watched but failed to arrest anyone.

The same report contained a revealing example of community support. A man fined £5 after being caught with a salmon spear was said to have had the money raised for him among the inhabitants within three hours, together with a little extra so that he could replace the confiscated spear.

Other reports from the same January suggest that there may have been several expeditions rather than a single outing. The authorities could reinforce the river and still find themselves being mocked. On one occasion a dead salmon was reportedly displayed at the Market Hall with a message aimed at the police and river watchers.

The larger confrontation came in November.

On the night of 22 November a substantial band of Rebeccaites appeared around Rhayader. One contemporary account gives sixty-eight active participants, while others give somewhat different totals. Torches were lit at The Racks and several hundred spectators came out. The party worked along the Wye to Glyn Ford, then crossed towards the Elan and continued to Aberceithon Ford.

Twelve water bailiffs encountered the crowd near the railway bridge. They were greeted with shouting, hooting and stones. Several were injured. One bailiff who became separated from the others was seized and beaten with clubs and kicked. The same report says that several men intervened and probably prevented something worse.

Around twenty salmon were said to have been killed.

By the middle of December twenty-four extra police had been drafted into the district. A Press Association report claimed that Rebeccaites wearing women’s bonnets and with blackened faces were being supported by crowds running into the hundreds, and that a requisition was being prepared asking for troops.

The reported numbers varied and should not be treated as precise counts. Victorian newspaper reports of disorder could exaggerate. What cannot be dismissed is the response. Additional police really were required, magistrates were discussing the disturbances and prosecutions followed.

Sixteen people were subsequently accused of assisting the November poachers. The case was dismissed when the magistrates decided that there was insufficient evidence to prove that they had obstructed the apprehension of the Rebeccaites.

Elsewhere in Radnorshire ratepayers protested against being expected to meet the cost of the extra police sent to protect salmon.

The resemblance to 1843 was striking. There was a contested law, a large sympathetic audience, difficulty identifying offenders, extra police and an argument about who should pay for enforcement.

Into the Twentieth Century

Rebecca survived the Victorian age.

In December 1888 newspapers again reported “Rebeccaism” at Rhayader. Around thirty men, led by a man wearing women’s clothes, entered the Wye with spears and other weapons and killed salmon by torchlight.

In 1902 another outbreak brought the conflict into Rhayader Petty Sessions. Three water bailiffs employed by the Wye Board of Conservators alleged that they had been assaulted on 10 November. Eight men were prosecuted, most of them local tradesmen and labourers, including bakers, carpenters, a coachbuilder and men living in Water Lane, Bridge Street, North Street and Church Street.

The proceedings drew a crowded court. Seven were eventually committed for trial at the Assizes, while the eighth was discharged because the magistrates considered there was no evidence against him.

At the same time, local representatives pushed back against sensational reporting. A claim that hundreds had taken part in a riot was dismissed as grossly exaggerated. The Radnorshire Standard itself referred to the affair as a local disturbance rather than something deserving the name of riot.

Both points deserve to stand. The inflated stories may have been wrong, but the underlying confrontation was real.

The following winter brought further reports of a gang locally known as the “Rebeccas”. One newspaper alleged that some were navvies employed on Birmingham Corporation’s great Elan Valley waterworks. That was an allegation, not an established membership list, but it raises the possibility that the old Rhayader tradition had begun absorbing workers newly arrived in the district.

The accounts from 1903 and 1904 are full of the old mixture of grievance, humour and intimidation. Water bailiffs complained that men could take salmon almost under their noses. Fish were said to be left for poorer families. One salmon was reportedly hung from a lamp-post near the Market Hall bearing the words:

“The workman’s right, 2d per lb.”

Whether the slogan originated with the Rebeccaites themselves or was part of the folklore surrounding them, the idea is striking. The original Rebecca had asked who had the right to charge people for travelling along the road. Sixty years later another generation was asking, in effect, who had the right to the salmon passing through the river.

Rebecca’s Last Edwardian Appearance

At the beginning of December 1907 the old name returned once again.

Lights were seen on the Wye near Rhayader Bridge. Hundreds of people were reported to have gathered. Nearly thirty men identified as Rebecca and her daughters took part, some entering the river with lights and spears while others remained on the bank.

Two fords were worked and thirty-three salmon were said to have been killed, several weighing more than thirty pounds.

The Bridgnorth Journal described the “old leaven of Rebeccaism” as having been revived after several quieter years. The wording was revealing. In 1907 a newspaper could still use the word Rebeccaism in connection with Rhayader and expect its meaning to be understood.

The original toll-gate riots were then more than sixty years in the past.

Even that was not quite the end of the underlying conflict.

In November 1916 the situation on the upper Wye reached Parliament. A question in the House of Commons alleged that the sluice gate of the upper weir at Rhayader had been destroyed with explosives and that four water bailiffs had been assaulted by a gang of forty or fifty men. The episode was not described in Parliament as a Rebecca disturbance, so it would be wrong to attach that label retrospectively. What it does show is that organised and occasionally violent resistance to fishery enforcement survived after the last Edwardian newspaper reports of Rebecca herself.

What Rebecca Meant at Rhayader

There is a temptation, looking back at these events, to see only the drama.

The picture is irresistible. Horns sounding in the darkness. A figure called Rebecca at the head of mounted followers. Gates falling beneath axes and saws. Torchlight reflected in the Wye. Salmon raised from the river on spear points while crowds cheer from the bank.

But this was not theatre staged for later historians.

Tollkeepers and their families were frightened in their homes. Property was destroyed. Police faced armed groups. Water bailiffs were threatened, stabbed, stoned and beaten. The consequences could be serious.

Yet calling it all simple criminality is just as unsatisfactory.

The government’s own inquiry showed that the turnpike grievances around Rhayader were real. The town genuinely had an extraordinary concentration of gates. Some remained on neglected or increasingly redundant roads. Farmers complained of paying toll while also supporting roads through parish rates. Lime used to improve the land was charged. Agricultural depression, tithes and the Poor Law added to the pressures.

Parliament subsequently changed the system, and it did so in a way that dealt specifically with the Rhayader to Llangerrig road.

The later salmon disputes were different. The fishery laws were not turnpike laws and the men who entered the Wye in 1880 were not members of an organisation secretly preserved from 1843.

What survived was something less formal and in many ways more interesting.

Rebecca had become a local language of protest.

There was the disguise and the darkness. There was the use of numbers to make ordinary enforcement difficult. There was the theatrical humiliation of authority. There was the ability of participants to disappear back into a community from which witnesses were difficult to obtain. Above all, there was the belief, shared by at least some of those involved, that a law could be legally valid while still being regarded locally as unjust.

That helps explain why Rebecca lasted so long at Rhayader, and why the story forms such an important part of the wider history of Radnorshire.

The gates themselves eventually disappeared. The soldiers left. The Metropolitan Police returned to London. The old tollhouses became houses, farms, ruins or memories. Even today, however, parts of that turnpike landscape can still be traced. Pen-y-pistyll is recorded among the surviving former tollhouses around Rhayader, while other gates are known chiefly through maps, newspapers and evidence given before the Royal Commission.

The physical barriers went.

Rebecca did not.

She crossed the bridge from the roads to the river, and for more than half a century afterwards her name could still bring people out of Rhayader and down to the banks of the Wye.

That is perhaps the most remarkable part of the story.

Sources and Further Reading

This essay draws principally upon contemporary reports in the Hereford Times, Hereford Journal, Welshman, Cheltenham Chronicle, Manchester Courier, Brighton Gazette, Silurian, Montgomeryshire Express, Cardiff Times, South Wales Daily News, Eddowes’s Shrewsbury Journal, Radnorshire Standard, Brecon County Times and Bridgnorth Journal, covering the period from 1843 to 1907.

Particularly important are the evidence and report of the 1843–44 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the administration of the laws relating to turnpike roads in South Wales, and the South Wales Turnpike Trusts Act 1844. The latter included a provision dealing specifically with the Rhayader to Llangerrig road.

For the later salmon disturbances, David J. V. Jones’s study, “The Second Rebecca Riots: A Study of Poaching on the River Wye”, published in Llafur in 1976, remains particularly relevant. Francis Kilvert’s diary provides a valuable eyewitness description of the Rhayader salmon disturbances in November 1878; the relevant material has been discussed by the Kilvert Society.

Recent archaeological work at Llidiart y Mynydd has added further detail to the landscape of the 1843 disturbances and to the family probably occupying one of the tollhouses when it was attacked. The history of organised salmon conservation on the Wye, including the development of the Wye Board of Conservators, helps place the later disturbances in their proper context. The continuation of fishery conflict into the twentieth century is also documented in Hansard.