Welsh Journals

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FROM PARISH PAUPER TO UNION WORKHOUSE INMATE' (Part Two) If the depression and social unrest after the Napoleonic Wars had made Britain a difficult country to govern, such troublesome times were to continue, with some brief periods of relative recovery, into the 1840s-often known as the Hungry Forties. From 1830-itself regarded by some historians as a watershed-there were to be two particularly harrowing years for the new Whig government under Earl Grey's premiership. The long war, as so often happens, had left in its wake a very different attitude to life among ordinary people. But the Tories who had been in power since 1809 and were to retain it except for a short break until 1830, were unsympathetic to the inexorable forces of change It was against this background that the Old Poor Law was to be comprehensively examined by a Royal Commission from 1832. It reported in 1834, Grey's administration legislating the same year; so came about the Poor Law Amendment Act, surely one of the most remarkable statutes of the nineteenth century. From 1815 there were many outbreaks of violence in England; the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 was the most notorious, in which eleven people were killed. In rural Wales too, in the south-west particularly, several riots occurred. Yet Government policy was one only of repression. From 1830 the character of the riots which took place was, if anything, even more disturbing; the rejection by the House of Lords of the first Reform Bill led to riots in Bristol and Nottingham in 1831. In Wales in June of that year in its largest town, Merthyr Tydfil-which had no Parliamentary representation-untimely wage cuts by the ironmaster William Crawshay, led to an even more violent response from thousands of ironworkers, who took over the town. The arrival of troops resulted in the wounding of sixteen and the deaths of twenty people before order was restored. Four ringleaders were transported but Dic Penderyn, to this day thought to be innocent, was hung. In Monmouthshire the Scotch Cattle were understandably feared for their reprisals against anyone who they judged acted unjustly to working folk: their target was really the overwhelming power of the ironmasters. The proximity of Llangattock, one of the south Breconshire parishes under review, to the industrial areas was underlined by the reporting of a visit by the Scotch cattle to the home there of an agent,2 presumably an employee of an ironmaster. The countryside was also very disturbed in 1830. In some twenty English counties riots, rick burning or damage to machinery occurred with the most serious incidents being in Kent and East Anglia. Low wages and irregular employment were mainly the causes here; some magistrates in Norfolk even declared they would ban the use of the new threshing machine so feared was its effect on the demand for labour in the winter months,3 before recovering to impose savage treatment, whilst higher courts handed out many transportation orders and also death sentences.