Long Walks & Anarcho-Primitivism –
‘Radical References’ No.5, Strawberry Moon 2023:

The Ascott Martyrs and Modern-Day Britain –
A tale of progress?

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, sixteen women from Ascott-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire were made an example of by a system of power that sought to resist inevitable change. What does it tell us about Britain today?

To mark the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, on the 21^st of May 2023, of a notable North Oxfordshire event this rather long piece explores a microcosm of local history: It’s long because, without the context of how the case arose, it’s difficult to understand what happened at the time; more importantly, by understanding what happened then, we gain a greater insight into what is happening in our own time.

In 1939, aged 81, Fanny Rathband died in Chipping Norton Workhouse. She died just a few hundred feet from where, sixty-six years before, she and fifteen other women had been part of events which would cause a national furore, involving both Parliament, government ministers, and the aristocratic establishment; and would provoke revisions to the law that would (eventually) help to modernise both people’s freedoms, and the way the courts in Britain operate.

Fanny was born Fanny Honeybone, in 1857, in the small village of Ascott-under-Wychwood in West Oxfordshire’s Evenlode valley. With its scattered tenant farms and aristocratic land-owners, the area was known for its rural poverty. The rural poor largely lived on what they could grow to eat, while the low wages they earned as labourers on local farms, in the forests, and cottage industries, paid for the rent and a meagre lifestyle.

The context

At the end of the Eighteenth Century, after the French Revolution, and fearful of similar revolts across Britain, Parliament had passed the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act in 1795. These prohibited political meetings or assemblies to prevent the people organising, and made it an offence to even imagine replacing the monarchy with a republic. This was followed in 1799 by the first Combination Act, which prevented workers ‘combining’ to form a union and press for better wages and conditions.

With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1815, Britain’s domestic economy had collapsed. 13% of the population were receiving ‘poor relief’ – which caused the system to collapse under the strain, leading to its national reorganisation in 1834 to create the ‘union workhouses’ – such as the one in Chipping Norton.

To bolster the incomes of landowners, the Corn Laws were introduced in 1815: Which kept food prices artificially high; and passed the cost of the crisis onto the working poor. Even when the Corn Laws ended in 1846, while helping some, it depressed the rural economy even further. Despite the legal ban, agricultural workers had tried to work together to improve their wages. Most famously, in 1836, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who had been prosecuted and transported to Australia for trying to organise a strike.

In the early Nineteenth Century conditions across the rural South Midlands worsened as this was the height of the land inclosure boom – taking away the common land that the rural poor could grow food on. At the same time the first wave of agricultural automation was taking place, reducing the demand for workers. Following a wave of national unrest in 1830 there were ‘swing riots’ in Chipping Norton and Banbury, where rural people destroyed threshing machines, rural workhouses, and tithe barns, as a protest against worsening conditions.

In 1871 the Trade Union Act repealed the Combination Acts, which made trade unions legal. However, at the same time the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed which made it an offence to,

“coerce another for trade purposes by the use of personal violence; by such threats as would justify a magistrate in binding a man to keep the peace; or by persistently following a person about from place to place, hiding his tools, clothes, or other property, watching and besetting his house, or following him along any street or road with two or more other persons in a disorderly manner.”

Trade unions were allowed to exist; but they could not actively organise to enforce a strike.

‘The Ascott Martyrs’

If you would like to read a detailed account of ‘The Ascott Martyrs’ I would recommend the recent book, edited by Keith Laybourn, featuring contributions form a number of authors who look at different aspects of the case.

Copies are available on-line, and from Jaffe & Neale booksellers in Chipping Norton (price £14.99).

With the prohibitions now lifted, in 1872, just twenty-or-so miles away in Wellesbourne, Warwickshire, the National Agricultural Labourers' Union was founded. The union spread to Ascott, and on the 21^st April 1873 local men went on strike for a 2-shilling a day (~15%) pay rise.

The response of the tenant farmer at Crown Farm, Robert Hambidge, was to hire labourers from villages a few miles away on the far side of the forest. On the 12^th of May, between twenty and thirty women from Ascott followed two men employed by Robert Hambidge to try and dissuade them from working that day. The farmers wife summoned the constable, and the women were persuaded to go back to the village.

On the 19^th May, Robert Hambidge brought a private prosecution under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. He made a complaint to the Reverend Carter of nearby Sarsden, who acted as a ‘clerical magistrate’ for the local Petty Sessions court. The court issued a warrant for seventeen women to appear at the next sessions hearing, being held in, what was until 2019, Chipping Norton’s police station.

The trial on the 21^st May was presided over by two non-expert ‘clerical justices’: The Reverend Carter of Sarsden, and The Reverend Harris of Swereford – both, by virtue of their positions, significant landowners.

The women had no independent legal representation. As it was a private prosecution, no formal record of the trial was kept. The Petty Sessions were the lowest court in England, and so the two justices were advised by a single clerk. Though the court procedure had been formalised in the Eighteenth Century, the method dated back to Medieval manorial courts.

The women may have been expecting a fine; or to be ‘bound over’ to prevent them repeating the act. Instead the two justices decided that they had no choice but to find them guilty and impose the sentence required by the 1871 law: Prison time with ‘hard labour’.

One of the seventeen summonsed, Jane Pratley, could not be identified as having been at the scene, and was acquitted. Nine – including two who were nursing babies – were identified as having taken part, and were sentenced to seven days with ‘hard labour’. Seven were identified as having led the action, and they were sentenced to ten days with ‘hard labour’.

Prisoners from Chipping Norton would have been taken to the railway station for transport by train to Oxford. But word had already gotten out.

By the evening two to three thousand supporters had besieged the police station – and began to stone it, breaking windows and roof tiles. The police telegraphed Oxford for reinforcements. At 10pm the Mayor of Chipping Norton read the Riot Act to the crowd – giving the authorities not only the freedom to use force, but also indemnifying them against any injuries or deaths caused. At this point the crowd dispersed.

On the morning of the 22^nd May, the sixteen women, and two babies, were put on carts sent from Oxford and taken to the prison.

Accounts of the trial, and the ‘riot’, began to appear in print almost a week later. On 31^st May 1873, The Spectator – established in 1828, and which at that time represented reforming liberalism – wrote:

“All the women thus unexpectedly condemned to a sojourn in Oxford Gaol bore an excellent character, and the punishment meted out to them for the too free use of the tongue, of which they were at the worst accused, fell as severely on them as it would have fallen on the wife of any decent workman in a manufacturing town.”

“...The worst of it is, that the labourers are beginning to feel that they cannot count on an impartial trial by magistrates of the temper of the clerical Shallows of Chipping Norton, and a deep distrust of those who administer the law is growing among them. The time is coming when there will be a cry to which the Legislature cannot turn a deaf ear for the reorganisation of the Magistracy, and the squires, with their clerical allies, have themselves to thank for the revolution that will eject them from the last stronghold of their power.”

The nine sentenced to seven days left Oxford Gaol on the morning of the 28th May. The other seven were released on the 31^st. By that point questions had been asked in Parliament, and word of the trial had spread across Britain. It gave political reformists an opportunity to question not only the application of union law, but also the anachronistic nature of local justice – that, as it had been for centuries, was largely exercised by individuals appointed by local aristocrats.

Fast-forward to today...

Reform would come, but it would take a century: Workplace picketing was legalised in 1875, and unions were given greater protection from prosecution in 1906 – a system that would persist until the crack-down on union activities in the 1970s. By 1928, all men and women had the right to vote on an equal basis. Even the ‘riot act’ would finally meet its end in 1967, and the courts of Assize and Petty Session with the creation of the Magistrate’s court system in 1980.

Yet even today, elements of that system persist: ‘Third party’ protests outside factories and offices, as with the Ascott Martyrs, are shut-down by the police using procedures from trades union legislation.

Now, as our economic situation worsens, to maintain power the government are repeating the repressive response applied in Eighteenth Century – part of a demonstrable turning of the tide over recent years, reversing the progressive changes of the last one-hundred-and-fifty years:

• Protests are being banned if they are ‘disruptive’;
• Unions are having their protections reduced, and certain workers are effectively losing their right to strike; and in the courts,
• Protesters are now routinely being denied the freedom to state to a jury the reasons for their actions, and some have been jailed for stating their concerns;



• Our right to vote is being arbitrarily manipulated to try and favour the governing party; and, finally,
• Echoing the political furore after the trial of the Ascott Martyrs, a woman is currently awaiting the decision of a government minister to decide if a judge will be allowed to prosecute her, after she held up a sign outside a court telling jurors of their right to acquit on conscience.

Still, today, a narrow ‘establishment’ interest controls many parts of our professional and political life. For example: In 2018, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of three anti-fracking protesters, who a judge decided had been ‘causing a nuisance’ by picketing a fracking site in Lancashire. The twist in the story wasn’t simply that the family of the judge had financial interests in the oil and gas industry. To show how the generational exercise of power persists in England, the judge, Robert Altham, is a descendant of Judge James Altham who presided over the Pendle witch trials in 1612.

Epilogue

On their return from Oxford the women were treated as heroes. The union had raised money for their cause and gifted it to them. But the century after the 1860s saw not an improvement, but the gradual depopulation, and eventual gentrification the rural landscape – largely excluding ‘the poor’ altogether. Of the sixteen women convicted in 1873, like so many others across Britain at that time, a quarter emigrated – to the USA, Canada, and New Zealand. Half of the women lived to the age of 69 or more, many still living locally.

Fanny Honeybone – the youngest of the ‘ring-leaders’ – married Edwin Rathband from nearby Milton-under-Wychwood in 1876. She had fourteen children, six dying before their nineteenth birthday. Edwin died in 1929, and by the late 1930s Fanny was an inmate in Chipping Norton Workhouse; where – the last of the sixteen Ascott Martyrs – she died in 1939.

Our ancestors lived through such trying lives in order to hand us the world as it is today. And that struggle continues today, because, although we might have more ‘material stuff’ in our lives: Deep down, with our own wave of automation threatening to take our jobs, and living costs driving many to perpetual debt, England has not changed that much; and right now, it’s arguably beginning to revert to the ‘Victorian values’ that the English establishment appear to so deeply cherish.

End of the page. jump to the top of the page