Rebecca Riots

Between 1839 and 1843 groups of men in west and south Wales attacked turnpike tollgates while disguising themselves, often in women’s clothing, as “Rebecca and her daughters.” The protests grew from anger over road tolls but were intensified by rents, tithes, poor-law administration and wider rural hardship.

Government intervention and reform gradually brought the disturbances to an end, but the Rebecca movement became one of the most distinctive forms of popular protest in nineteenth-century Wales. Alexander Cordell uses the unrest as the central historical background of Hosts of Rebecca.