Product Code Database
Scotch Cattle was the name taken by bands of coal mining in 19th century South Wales, analogous to the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania, who, in disguise, would visit the homes of other local miners who were working during a strike or cooperating with employers against the local mining community in other ways and punish them by ransacking their property or attacking them physically.
They were featured in Alexander Cordell's book, set in this era, Rape of the Fair Country against a backdrop of the Newport Rising of 1839, Chartism and militancy in the South Wales Valleys of the mid 19th century. Some members of these bands were probably idealists, but some also were merely looking for a chance to loot property from the groups' targets—or even, in some cases, from bystanders. Such groups may have been active as early as 1808, although their activity cannot be confirmed before 1822; the last confirmable reference to a Scotch Cattle raid dates from 1850. As late as 1926, however, pickets in that year's great strike dressed themselves as Scotch Cattle.Francis, Hywel, "South Wales", The General Strike, 1926, ed. Jeffrey Skelley (London, Lawrence and Wishart: 1976) pp. 232-260. , p. 251
After announcing their presence by blowing on horns and rattling chains, the Herd members would smash the house's doors, windows, and furniture and burn fabric items in a bonfire. If the homeowner resisted, he would be beaten severely. Firearms were used on occasion, but usually without serious effect; in one incident in 1834, however, a miner's wife was killed by a visiting Herd, a crime for which one man, Edward Morgan, was later executed and two imprisoned. Herds also on occasion looted truck system, which were always a target of miners' ire for their allegedly unfair price levels and monopoly on local business. Less idealistically, the Herd might also raid and attack the homes of uninvolved families that happened to be located near the target home or business—and even some official raids were probably motivated more by the desire to plunder the target's house than the need to enforce solidarity.
A more recent historian has argued that the activities of the Scotch Cattle represent an application of pre-industrial methods of rural community discipline or charivari to an untried industrial context, where such techniques eventually proved unsustainable.Rhian E Jones, "Symbol, Ritual and Popular Protest in Early Nineteenth-Century Wales: the Scotch Cattle Rebranded", Welsh History Review 26 (2012), pp.34-57
|
|
