The Ceffyl Pren in South Wales

The previous chapter has shown that it was not merely the disenfranchised that employed rough music rituals. All classes operated in the context of ‘a society thoroughly drenched in ceremonial and celebration’ and acted out the issues of the day to the discomfort of their opponents. However, the enthusiasm of the better classes for using communal justice practices to penalise individual wrong-doing declined during the nineteenth century. It became apparent that rough music not only could provide the cognitive tools to mobilise crowds against morally deficient individuals but also against their betters and against what they believed was morally deficient authority. Thus rough music became a campaign tool employed during food crises, labour disputes, Chartist agitations and the like, a traditional and cohesive tool amongst groups not yet politically enfranchised and not yet endowed with a distinctive ideology. Small wonder then that authority, hitherto generally tolerant of rough music, began to depreciate it and to see within traditional ceremonial a challenge to their authority. Nowhere was this challenge more apparent than in south Wales.

Discontent in Wales sprang from many causes: overpopulation, the unemployment that followed the end of the Napoleonic War, low agricultural prices and so on. In Cardiganshire in particular, the problems were further exacerbated by the threatened enforcement of the 1812 and 1815 Enclosure Acts, which authorised the enclosure of 10,000 acres within Crown manors.