Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

THE SECOND REBECCA RIOTS A STUDY OF POACHING ON THE UPPER WYE fX;j. v/. DAVID JONES University College, Swansea BACKGROUND One of the problems which a social historian encounters in a study of rural crime is the frequent absence of comprehensive information on poaching. Herbert M. Vaughan in his book The South Wales Squires (1926) makes the point that the number of poaching offences that came before the courts, especially in areas where game was not extensively preserved, bore no relation to the known popularity of the crime. When one compares the table of statistics in Appendix 1 with the comments in nineteenth-century commissions concerning the hostility of tenant farmers and labourers to shooting and fishing restrictions there is little doubt of the truth of his remark. In a good number of Petty Sessional divisions there was an average of only one or two cases a year in the 1880s and 1890s, even in such notorious poaching districts as Cardigan and Cilgerran. A generation previously, Police Constable Evans in his remarkable Pennal Diary had highlighted the immunity of large numbers of notorious poachers. 2 There were many reasons for this situation: the difficulty of apprehending such people, the community support which they some- times received, various technical difficulties associated with the Game and Salmon Acts, the caution, intimidation and sympathy of some magistrates, and the whole political and moral aura which surrounded the question of game and poaching. 3 Perhaps it is significant that there is as yet no full-length study of poaching; J. Geraint Jenkins, in his new book Nets and Coracles (1974) emphasises the problems which even today prevent reliable statistics. 4 The starting points for this study were the knowledge that salmon poaching had always been widespread in Wales and the anticipation that the Border Counties newspapers might provide information lacking in the more obvious sources for nineteenth-century crime. Illegal fishing was, of course, popular along many of the major rivers in England and Wales; various commissions and Inspectors' reports testified to the organised nature of poaching along, for example, the Trent, the Lune, and the Severn, and there are accounts in the Salmon Fisheries Inquiry of 1860-61 and the Game Laws Report of 1872-73 of brutal clashes between poachers and watchers on the rivers Derwent and Eden. 5 But none of this captured the public imagination as much as the second Rebecca Riots along the Wye in Radnorshire and Breconshire. These began in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century and continued, with some interruptions, until the 1930s. In 1878 and 1879 the riots became a matter of national interest; letters and articles on the subject appeared in The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily News, The Field, Land and Water, and many other newspapers and magazines. Here the poachers of Mid-Wales were compared to Irish rebels and the Sicilian Mafia. Three years later, under considerable pressure, the government agreed to hold a public inquiry into poaching expeditions on the Upper Wye. In spite of this contemporary interest, however, the second Rebecca Riots have been almost totally neglected by Welsh historians. 7 One can understand the reason for this dichotomy; a preliminary study of Radnorshire Quarter Sessions records provided only the minimum information as to their character, and most of the Petty Session material covering the Upper Wye has been