Y Ceffyl Pren - Rough Justice in Rowen

Recently I came across a fascinating account of ‘lynching’ in Rowen in the mid nineteenth century. I was searching for something else entirely but this happened to come up, and it grabbed me, partly because of the word ‘lynch’. To modern minds lynching inevitably ends in death, but this wasn’t so before the 1880s. Instead, the verb referred to inflicting a severe bodily punishment on a person without legal sanction. It didn’t have to result in death.

The particular form of lynching that happened in Rowen is referred to by the journalist as ‘riding stang’, but it Wales it would have been called y ceffyl pren – the wooden horse. In 1880 the Manchester Evening News refers to it as ‘cludo ar ysgol’, or ‘to carry on a ladder’. The existence of the term to ‘ride stang’ shows this isn’t a custom confined to Wales. It’s reported in the Jersey Weekly Press and Independent of 18^th May, 1907 as ‘riding the stang’ in the north of England and in Scotland, as ‘Skimmington riding’ in the south of England, ‘Ceffyl pren’ in Wales, and as ‘La Coûri d’ Ane’ (running the donkey) in Guernsey. ‘Lewbelling’ was used in Warwickshire.

A skimmington ride, source.

It’s a practice shown to have existed ‘all over Europe from Portugal to the Balkans, from Italy to Scotland’, usually for the ‘remarriage of a widow or widower, especially if the new partner is of a very different age’, for a wife beating her husband, and for ‘adultery on the part of the wife’, and sometimes of the husband.[1] Alford cites other less common reasons, but usually they seem to be connected with sexual or marital conduct, bringing the private out into the public. It was also used as a preventative measure for the newly married[2], a practice which seems to have been more favoured when the custom was brought to the Americas by immigrants. Here it was known as a shivaree, a corruption of the French ‘charivari’ where the custom was ‘transformed into unifying rituals rather than punitive ones’ used to ‘integrate immigrants into a unified American culture’[3].

The practice seems to vary in small ways across Britain, but generally it seems that the offender is tied to a ladder or pole and carried about the village, to the accompaniment of banging of pots, blowing whistles and horns, and any other racket that can be produced. Meanwhile the offender is jeered and mocked, and perhaps pelted with anything unpleasant that can be brought to hand. It could have ended in serious injury; Johnson reports a Wiltshire incident of 1618 that ended in a woman being thrown into a wet hole, trodden on, buried in dirt, and beaten black and blue.[4]

The practice makes its way into fiction, too. Thomas Hardy makes use of the custom in his novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, where a landlady describes it as an ‘old foolish thing they do in these parts when a man’s wife is – well, a bad bargain in any way. But as a respectable householder I don’t encourage it.’ It is, she admits, ‘the funniest thing under the sun.’[5]

'Lucetta's eyes were straight upon the spectacle of the uncanny revel' 

from The Mayor of Casterbridge,

 scanned by Philip V. Allingham.

In this novel the practice is performed with effigies of the man and woman rather than real people. Funny to the observers, it’s nevertheless horrifying to the woman being parodied, who collapses in an epileptic fit. From this emotive telling, with the description of ‘the din of cleavers, kits, crouds, humstrums, serpents, rams’-horns, and other historical kinds of music’ on the one hand and the catastrophic collapse of the targeted woman on the other, both sides of the event can be seen.[6]

The Rowen incident is described as if it's a custom known, but perhaps somewhat rare; the fact that it’s reported in nationwide newspapers – the same story appeared in papers in Sheffield and Chester – implies it was notable, at any rate.

The Rowen incident runs as follows:

 

Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald and North and South Wales Independent, 20^th December, 1856

The road leading past y Ty Gwyn in Rowen

WELSH LYNCH LAW IN ROE WEN. – This village, which has of late obtained no little celebrity, was, on Sunday and Monday last, the scene of some confusion, which ended in Lynch law being put in requisition to make a violator of the seventh commandment to “Ride Stang,” to what used, in former times, to be the punishment of such offenders within the diocese of Bangor. Roe Wen is situated in the parish of Caerhun, of which the Bishop of Bangor takes the rectorial tithes. The case on the present occasion was as follows: – Some time back a labourer ran away with another man's wife, with whom he had for some weeks been living at Roe. On Saturday last the injured husband, having learnt the whereabouts of his wife and her paramour, came over to Roe, entered the house, and found his faithless spouse and her paramour in bed. The violator of the commandment jumped out and tried to hit the intruder with an old shoe, but missed his mark. He then dragged him towards the top of the stairs, and with a kick helped him down them head foremost. A regular fight then took place, and when the parties came out some persons who were going to a place of worship separated them. On the next day (Monday,) a great concourse assembled about the house, fully determined to carry the Bangor ancient ecclesiastical law summarily into effect. The house was entered, the offender seized, and after proclamation made in due form, he was tied upon a ladder and carried about the village amid the hootings and laughter of an immense crowd, amounting to some hundreds, whom curiosity had brought together with a view to see an incontinent offender undergoing the punishment of “Riding the Stang.” At the termination of the proceedings, when the offender was dismounted, an old mountaineer, from above Yr Allt Wyllt, mounted a tumbler which was standing opposite Ty Gwyn took off his hat and uttered the following cautionery address: – “Now Fowcyn take warning that if ever again you are found within the precincts of the parish of Caerhun as a violator of the seventh commandment, in addition to the old wholesome punishment of Riding Stang, you will be subjected to the new punishment recently decreed in the bishopric of Bangor – viz., having a fool’s cap put on your head, and a fool’s rod applied to your —, and be whipped across Bwlch y Ddaufan and up to the church of Llanllechid, and there to remain on your knees until you receive plenary absolution. God save the Bishop, his Vicar, and the baptismally orthodox Curate of Caerhun.

Y Ceffyl Pren

This seems like quite a typical performance of rough justice. No music is mentioned, but perhaps we can imagine some drumming and piping going on. Reports of the weather in the same issue of the newspaper make it sound as if it was a dreary and wet December. The street was probably wet and muddy, maybe it was raining. We seem to be missing a day in the report – the husband arrived in Rowen and confronted the lovers on Saturday, but the next day is said to be Monday. Perhaps Sunday was the day of discovery, since people seemed to be heading to chapel, and that’s why the rough justice was left until the next day. It’s interesting to see how religion intervenes, first in the intervention of the probable chapel-goers, and secondly in the constant reminder that this is happening in the Diocese of Bangor, that the offenders were violating one of the Ten Commandments, that the mob were carrying out ancient ecclesiastical law, and that in future another kind of ecclesiastical law would be brought to bear on the man. It’s fascinating to see such religious approval applied to the case, as well as the reminder of the ‘baptismally orthodox’ nature of the old church in contrast, presumably, to the unorthodox worship probably followed by the folks who broke up the earlier fight.

I’ve come across a few other references to Welsh ‘lynching’ or ‘rough justice’ over the last few days. One, the case of a woman called Mrs Job Jenkins, happened in Clynderwen, far down in the south west of Wales, as late as 1893. The Tamworth Herald reports on 28^th January of that year that four men were arrested after breaking into Mrs Jenkins’ home after midnight, and dragging her, partially dressed, out to carry her through the village. The whole story sounds rather darker than the Rowen tale. The door was knocked from its hinges, the husband pinned to the floor. The men were wearing masks. The procession was carried on by torchlight, with a band of whistles and tin kettles, and the woman had to be rescued by the police. The event was described as ‘extraordinary,’ but it follows the traditional form, with chaotic music and the punishment of a woman for ‘impropriety with a certain villager’. She had previously been harassed by women of the village, and was excommunicated from the local chapel.

The other example I found was rather more atypical, perhaps racially motivated, in the Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald for 13^th November, 1880. An Englishman, Mr Preston, was working as a boiler-maker at Penygroes. He had been called as a witness against quarrymen accused of assaulting a county court bailiff, and had also prosecuted a quarryman for stealing his watch. Who knows what he was like as a person, but it seems, rightly or wrongly, that there was reason for locals to be angry at him. When he returned from the court case over the watch, which was dismissed, he was greeted by a crowd of 500 at Nantlle railway station. A hand barrow was produced, the crowd intending to wheel him around the village then throw him in the river. During the incident Preston was kicked and stoned, until he finally found refuge in a cellar. The police weren’t able to disperse the crowd until midnight, and Preston finally emerged at one a.m.. He believed the attack was due to his being an Englishman, an accusation that the journalist hopes was false, since the ‘Welsh as a nation have ever had the credit of being hospitable to strangers’. He exhorts the principle of getting along in a ‘land where we are all Britons’. ‘What are the pastors of the neighbourhood doing that a large portion of their flock should manifest the disposition of fiends rather than the spirit of Christians?’ he asks.

Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington, Hogarth.

© The Trustees of the British Museum.

 

 

Things seem to have changed since the Rowen lynching in 1856, where orthodox religion seemed more on the side of rough justice than against it. There’s a sense in this 1880 story of the quarrying regions of the north being something of a Wild West, divorced from law, order, and religion. The threat of throwing Preston in the river is reminiscent of the ducking of women in earlier days, but Preston is a different kind of outcast, male and foreign rather than female and perverse. The outraged, probably nonconformist, crowd is accused of being unchristian, rather than acting in moral orthodox outrage.

Perhaps these kind of practices died out with the growth of an effective police force. They certainly don’t seem to come up in twentieth century news reports, and would never be tolerated today. So many social changes have happened since that time, with the growth of effective transport, better communications, better education, and exposure to other people and cultures. Perhaps it’s easier now for tensions to be dissipated, rather than grown in the petri dish of an isolated village, which would have been a very hard place to live if one did not follow the norm.

---

[1] Alford, Violet. “Rough Music or Charivari.” Folklore, vol. 70, no. 4, 1959, pp. 505–18., p. 506.

[2] Ibid, p. 507.

[3] Johnson, Loretta T. “Charivari/Shivaree: A European Folk Ritual on the American Plains.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 20, no. 3, 1990, pp. 371–87., p. 387.

[4] Ibid., p. 375.

[5] Hardy, T. (1997). The Mayor of Casterbridge (K. Wilson, Ed.). Penguin Books., pp. 257-258.

[6] Ibid., p. 277