Welsh Journals

noted, pelting targets with a variety of missiles was the most common physical expression of community anger-direct action with its own quasi-Biblical symbolism. Replacing stones with less dangerous but nauseatingly unpleasant objects certainly added a grotesque character to proceedings. Crowd sanctions often included elements of festive ritual or ceremonial, the use of music, drums, fiddles or church bells, parading victims in procession, and the 'execution' of effigies. Eighteenth-century Welsh crowd actions clearly drew on themes of misrule; but the significance of custom for them may lie less in carnivalesque masquerade, reversal and disguise than in the assertion of expectations legitimated by tradition and communal values. During much of the century, crowd actions were complex and contested, but possessed some degree of legitimacy as political activities where relations between 'low' and 'high' were marked as much by negotiation and collaboration as by protest and opposition. The members of the riotous communities acted in the certainty that the world (and the riotous gentry) was on their side. However, their right to judge and to act was increasingly being rejected by their governors as the destructive subversiveness of the ignorant and presumptuous. Rebecca's use of disguise and reversal, highly disturbing to contemporary authorities, is also symbolic of the marginalized status of the riotous community, as their world was being turned upside down. Ultimately, the changes could not be reversed; but they did not have to be meekly accepted, either. The riotous communities eventually and painfully adapted and re-made themselves, finding new strengths and building on old ones. The enthusiastic adoption of rugby among the industrial communities of south Wales, for example, was far from a slavish copying of English public-school standards; it surely owed something to riotous traditions of parochial football.81 Historians of Welsh labour have frequently overlooked the 'Rough music' in Customs in Common; Martin Ingram, 'Ridings, rough music and the "reform of popular culture" in early modern England', Past and Present, 105 (1984), 79-113; and, for Wales from the 1830s, R. A. N. Jones, 'Women, community and collective action' and idem, 'Popular culture, policing and the "disappearance" of the ceffylpren in Cardigan, c.1837-1850', Ceredigion, 11 (1988-9), 19-39. 81 See Gareth Williams, 'Sport and society in Glamorgan, 1750-1980', in Prys Morgan (ed.), Glamorgan County History, Vol. 6: Glamorgan Society, 1780-1980 (Cardiff, 1988), pp.381-95.