Welsh Journals

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Aberystwith. 16th June 1821 My Lord, I take the liberty of submitting to your Lordship a case of peculiar hardship in which the grievances appear to proceed not from individual malice but from the Dispositions of the Body of the People of a considerable District, and in which it seems impracticable to obtain either an adequate remedy for the past or protection for the future from the local Magistracy or in any ordinary manner. It may be in your Lordships recollection that in the year 1817 His late Majesty's Government on the Application of the Magistrates of Cardiganshire deemed it necessary to send a Detachment of the 38th Regiment of Foot to Aberystwith for the protection of the Commissioners acting under an Act passed in the 55th year of His late Majesty for the Inclosure of Waste Lands in the Lordship of Mevenidd in the County of Cardigan, against the Peasantry of the Neighborhood who resisted the Inclosure with a violent and organized opposition which set the civil powers at defiance. It is against the same violence rendered more daring by impunity, and more malignant by its being at present directed against an individual Englishman, for that reason stigmatized by the offenders as a Stranger, that I now entreat your Lordships protection. In the latter end of the year 1819 I purchased about 900 Acres of the Waste Lands from the Commissioners acting in the execution of the above recited Act and in that Purchase acquired a Title which cannot be impeached. Since I came into possession I have been the object of unceasing persecution. I began to improve my Property by fencing, reducing into cultivation, and building my fences were thrown down, and in the spase of 13 Months, five times successively, have Buildings been erected by me and destroyed, in spite of every precaution by Mobs, riotously assembled and in most instances disguised and armed-I have frequently been assaulted with Stones my Dwelling has repeatedly been fired at with Ball. I have been informed not in consequence of my own investigation only but from anonymous Threats conveyed to me by Letter, that the injuries which I received were the effects of a general Conspiracy consolidated by an unlawful Oath against me as an intruder, and that not my Property only but my life would be endangered Information on Oath which I have been able to obtain has been met by the most unblushing perjury and the peasantry seem to have been encouraged in their Outrages, and in the effrontery with which they defend themselves on any Accusation by an Opinion which it appears impossible to remove from their minds that the Magistrates of the Country are not cordial in their desire to bring the Offenders to Justice. These causes render all my attempts at redress by the ordinary means unavailing and unless I am entitled in your Lordships consideration to some extraordinary protection from His Majesty's Government, I fear I must submit to be an example in the 19th Century of a Subject of this Realm, without the means of prevention or redress, deprived of a valuable Property by open and lawless force. I subjoin an Appendix containing a detail of some of the injuries and acts of violence I have suffered-an illustration of the difficulties I have to contend against in the perjury of Witnesses and the consequent inadequacy of the local Magistracy or the existing Laws to protect me, and containing also at the end a proposal of some measures which I have ventured to suggest to your Lordship as likely to afford me