Our Mothers' Land

Chapters in Welsh Women's History, 1830-1939

Angela V John

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783162871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume marks the twentieth anniversary of the first publication of this groundbreaking book. It reflects the pioneering research of its contributors to the development of modern Welsh women's history. The eight chapters range widely across time (1830-1939) and place, from exploring working class women's community sanctions and the perils facing collier's wife to the very different lifestyles of ironmasters' wives. They also tackle the idealised images of respectable Welsh women in periodicals and the tragic reality of those who took their own lives as well as showing us the transgressive actions of suffrage rebels. They examine how women carved out space within movements such as temperance and track the fluctuating fortunes of women's employment and domestic life from the Great War to the eve of the Second World War. This volume makes available once more a book that has become a classic in its field and a vital part of the historiography of modern Wales. This expanded edition also brings us up to date. It reveals the research and publications of the last two decades and comments upon the extent to which Wales has moved beyond being the familiar 'land of our fathers'. Written in a lively and accessible style, it nevertheless draws upon a wealth of research and expertise and should appeal to both the academic community and to a much wider readership.

1

Women, Community and Collective Action: The Ceffyl Pren Tradition

ROSEMARY A. N. JONES

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Welsh women often occupied a conspicuous position in their respective communities, particularly in relation to popular protest. Indeed, the militancy of women was almost proverbial: contemporary reports on food riots, enclosure disturbances and attacks on bailiffs and other officials invariably attest to the commitment and vitality of female participation. At that time, social protest (unlike the formal electoral process) was essentially a community affair; and, to a considerable extent, collective values and solidarities united the interests of women and men in political terms. During the course of the nineteenth century, however, opportunities for female participation in the public arena were gradually eroded. Demands for adult male suffrage and the advent of a more formalized, male-dominated labour movement ensured that ‘traditional’, community-based forms of protest were increasingly replaced by more ‘modern’ and institutionalized strategies. Moreover, this effective marginalization of women, in political terms, was reinforced by wider social, cultural and economic shifts: in particular, a gradual separation of the spheres of home and work assigned many women to a far less public and visible role within the community.

But while these observations may be true in general terms, important elements of continuity were also evident. A preoccupation on the part of social historians with formal political institutions has tended to distract attention from the persistence of earlier political forms and, therefore, the continued importance of women. Although most women exercised no formal public or political power, the apparent domesticity and insular nature of their lives did not preclude participation in wider neighbourhood affairs. In fact, it is clear that women were often actively involved in public displays of communal solidarity and spearheaded demonstrations against individuals who contravened established social norms. In this respect, they played a central role in structuring popular values at a neighbourhood level.

In order to assess the role of women in the day-to-day affairs of their immediate communities – as well as in more overtly political expressions of communal solidarity – historians must examine less formal strategies and networks for the regulation of community affairs and the formation and reaffirmation of collective political consciousness. This chapter seeks to discuss in detail one such network: namely, the ceffyl pren or ‘wooden horse’, a highly ritualized community sanction used to punish ‘deviant’ behaviour. It served as an effective moral policing mechanism in the public surveillance of sexual or marital behaviour. It also provided a useful model for popular protest movements and inspired the Rebecca riots of 1839 and 1843–4, during which bands of aggrieved farmers, dressed in female attire or other elaborate disguises, attacked one of the tangible symbols of their exploitation and impoverished condition – the infamous toll-gate system. Moreover, by studying the ceffyl pren over an extended period, useful pointers can be drawn to wider social forces and changes. In particular, it may be observed that ‘folkloric’ traditions such as the ceffyl pren often reflect deep-seated shifts of power, in gender as well as political terms, and can assist in our understanding of the means whereby gender values and relations are constructed and reinforced.

The ceffyl pren must be viewed as part of a wider European phenomenon, since most closely knit, face-to-face communities sanctioned some type of informal, collective denunciation of ‘aberrant’ behaviour. Historians usually refer to these community sanctions by the collective and, at times, amorphous label charivari – the French charivari constituting, in the main, a humiliating parade backwards on a horse or donkey.1 Most parts of the British Isles evolved similar public shaming rituals.2 In Scotland and the north of England a custom known as ‘riding the stang’ was a popular method of punishment. Offenders were mounted on a pole or plank before being subjected to a censorial and sometimes painful ride through the neighbourhood – often to the accompaniment of a ‘mock’ serenade, termed ‘rough music’. At times, a straw effigy was carried in the intended victim’s place and, in many areas, it was common for the ‘stang’ to be mounted by a prominent or witty member of the crowd, who assumed the role of spokesperson and delivered a comic ‘sermon’, usually in stanza form, on the alleged offence. In some areas of southern England, particularly during the early modern period, the highly theatrical ‘skimmington’ procession was used to express public disapprobation. This custom was usually directed at quarrelsome couples, most notably in cases where a wife sought to dominate her husband, and featured two surrogates dressed to represent the couple in question. Seated back to back on a horse or donkey, these surrogates provided a dramatic reenactment of the supposed misdemeanour: the ‘wife’, usually a man in female disguise, belaboured the ‘husband’, who sat facing the donkey’s tail, with a large ladle termed a ‘skimmington’ ladle. The procession was accompanied by a band of ‘rough’ musicians and a number of standard-bearers who carried female articles of clothing (such as smocks, nightdresses, chemises or petticoats) mounted on poles, to symbolize or, rather, to satirize ‘petticoat government’.

Rowlandson cartoon: by Thomas Rowlandson. From William Combe, The Second Tour of Doctor
Syntax, in Search of Consolation (London, 1820) (By permission of the National Library of Wales.)

Wales, too, had its public, processional shaming rituals – referred to loosely, for the purposes of this chapter, as the ceffyl pren tradition.3 In essence, the ceffyl pren was precisely what its name suggests: a ‘wooden horse’ upon which offenders were paraded, either in person or in straw effigy, and subjected to the jibes and jeers of the neighbourhood. The ‘horse’ often took the form of a makeshift pole, ladder, wheelbarrow or garden gate although, in some areas of Wales, time was spent in secretly constructing a life-size effigy of a horse made from wood and straw. This ‘horse’ was usually carried by a number of men who blackened their faces and otherwise disguised their appearance by dressing in women’s clothes or reversed jackets. Occasionally, a ‘spokesman’ (often a man in female disguise) was carried on the ‘horse’, from which he delivered a sermon or discourse denouncing the victim’s alleged offence.

As a rule, the ceffyl pren procession was staged at night and was repeated either for three consecutive nights or on the same night each week for three successive weeks. It was invariably accompanied by a good deal of noise and disruption, such as raucous yelling and hooting, the beating of drums, blowing of horns, firing of guns and, in particular, some form of ‘rough music’ – that is, a cacophony of discordant sounds produced on a variety of improvised instruments, such as pots and pans, kettles, tins and tea-trays. On occasions, a few satirical verses, ridiculing the victim’s behaviour, were specially composed. If an effigy was paraded, it was usually ritually ‘executed’, amidst loud applause, by burning, hanging or shooting. When the offender was carried in person, he – or she, for women were often singled out for punishment and treated in an equally brutal manner – was subjected to a good deal of physical and verbal abuse. Having been forcibly dragged from their homes, the victims of such attacks were frequently pelted with mud, stones, addled eggs and manure before being severely beaten, whipped or ducked in a local pond or river.

A wide cross-section of the local community usually participated, men and women, young and old. Although in some areas youth groups assumed a conspicuous role, it seems that their actions often met with the tacit approval of (or were sometimes actually instigated by) the community at large. An element of consensus and collective acquiescence seems to have been an essential prerequisite of most ceffyl pren demonstrations. Such incidents were not usually provoked by personal malice or a desire for revenge. In many instances, the strength of neighbourhood approval was expressed at a formal ‘mock court’, which either took place prior to the event or formed an integral part of the ritual. During its deliberations the alleged offence was subjected to vigorous public scrutiny, often by means of an elaborate parody of official court procedure. At Laugharne in 1851, for example, a female farm servant suspected of poisoning her mistress and a fellow servant was subjected to just such an ordeal: once sentence had been announced, her effigy was suspended from a mock gallows and ceremonially burnt.4

The ceffyl pren’s stated purpose was usually to force offenders to reform their ways; but, in some instances, particularly when the ceremony was repeated night after night or was buttressed by a wider social boycott of the offending party, the overriding aim was to force the victim to flee the neighbourhood altogether. Betsi Gibbs, the suspected Laugharne poisoner, was forewarned that a ‘mock’ execution would be staged outside her home ‘every night for one month’ unless she consented to leave the village immediately. These threats were reinforced by a concerted campaign which ensured her total exclusion from the social and cultural life of the neighbourhood. As the local press reported:

In the first place she has been ‘sent to Coventry’ by the whole village, high and low, rich and poor, and by way of getting rid of her hated presence the shopkeepers resolved to starve her out, by refusing to supply her with provisions upon any terms. Both herself and her relations were forbid [sic] to go near the dwellings of any of the residents …5

Not surprisingly, Betsi Gibbs fled Laugharne a few days after these sanctions were introduced.

In small, tightly integrated, face-to-face communities, where disputes between individuals could prove disruptive to the wider social or economic unit, such sanctions proved an effective form of social control. They were the product of a highly autonomous and self-regulatory approach to community affairs and were dependent upon widespread acceptance that the ‘private’ behaviour of individuals should be subject to scrutiny by ...

Table of contents

• Half title
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Another Chronology
• Two Decades of Development: Introduction to the New Edition
• Introduction to the 1991 Edition
• 1: Women, Community and Collective Action: The Ceffyl Pren Tradition
• 2: Beyond Paternalism: The Ironmaster’s Wife in the Industrial Community
• 3: The True ‘Cymraes’: Images of Women in Women’s Nineteenth-Century Welsh Periodicals
• 4: ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’? Women and Suicide in Carmarthenshire, c.1860–1920
• 5: Counting the Cost of Coal: Women’s Lives in the Rhondda, 1881–1911
• 6: From Temperance to Suffrage?
• 7: ‘The Petty Antics of the Bell-Ringing Boisterous Band’? The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1890–1918
• 8: Munitionettes, Maids and Mams: Women in Wales, 1914–1939