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The rioters main target were the numerous tollgates erected by the various turnpike trusts established at the end of the eighteenth century. The rioters, men dressed in women's clothing and known as the Daughters of Rebecca, would attack and destroy the tollgates.
The protest movement attracted widespread support and it was not long before the attacks widened, the Carmarthen Workhouse was attacked and both landowners and magistrates were threatened. These events were given wide coverage in the main newspapers including The Times , which maintained that the root cause of most of the trouble lay in the lack of education of the Welsh people.
Social reformers of the time considered education as a means of dealing with social ills, and it was widely believed that ignorance was the cause of the period's social problems.
Therefore, in March , William Williams, the Member of Parliament for Coventry but originally from Llanpumsaint in Carmarthenshire , tabled a measure before the House of Commons, calling for an inquiry into the state of education in Wales. The Government agreed the following July and R. Vaughan Johnson were appointed to undertake the inquiry.
The three commissioners visited every part of Wales collecting evidence and statistics. The work was completed by 3 April , and Lingen presented his report to the Government on 1 July of that year in three large volumes. It is impossible to overemphasise the importance of this report for social historians of mid nineteenth century Wales, because of the wealth of information contained in it on not only the appalling state of the education system in the country, but also on everyday life and work in both the industrialised and rural areas.
It also contains direct comment on the religious and moral standing of the people of Wales.
But the report caused a furore and a great deal of agitation in Wales because of the arrogant remarks of the three non-Welsh speaking Anglican commissioners regarding the Welsh language, Nonconformity and the morals of the Welsh people in general. Since the predominance of Welsh was one of the main reasons for the report it would have been reasonable to expect the commissioners appointed to oversee the inspections to have a knowledge of the Welsh tongue.
And the condition of the schools themselves was under equal scrutiny:. Publication of The Report of the Commissioners of Enquiry remains one of the most important moments in Welsh history, and it is questionable whether or not the Welsh language has yet managed to break free from the disapproval of the commissioners. It led to an outcry. Gareth Evans, '"A barrier to moral progress and commercial prosperity": Derfel's play opens in Hell where the Devil decides that the Welsh people are too good and are becoming more godly by the hour thanks to the influence of non-conformity.
Commissioners Lingen, Simons and Vaughan Johnson spoke no Welsh, were not even educationalists and, importantly, had no experience of the type of fervent non-conformity to be found in Wales. A number of assistant commissioners were appointed and, by and large, these were the men who toured the schools, towns and villages.
The questions they asked, the passages of literature usually the Bible they required children to read and the problems that were meant to worked out in the head of each child were framed in English - many of the school teachers had difficulty understanding them, let alone their pupils. While the non-conformist Sunday Schools - where education was offered in Welsh - were, in the main, praised in the report, the ordinary day schools were certainly not.
It was hardly surprising when pupils were expected to work out subtraction problems such as "Take from ," in their heads, with an answer expected within a few seconds. And the condition of the schools themselves was under equal scrutiny:. But there were other issues of concern for the commissioners.
They had also been charged with making a study of the moral state of the country and it was a task they were happy to carry out. When looking at the morals of the nation the Anglican vicars, many of whom felt isolated and apart from the parish in which they lived, were quite content to help out with comments that were little more than a little condemnatory:.
The Treachery of the Blue Books or Treason of the Blue Books was the publication in of the three-volume Reports of the commissioners of enquiry into the. View digital versions of the Blue Books of This report's comments on the state of the education system in Wales caused a furore in the country. As a result .
When the report was published it was scathing and sweeping in its findings. Welsh children were poorly educated, poorly taught and had little or no understanding of the English language. They were ignorant, dirty and badly motivated.
Welsh women were not just lax in their morals - many of them being late home from chapel meetings! To reinforce the power of the established church and to make English the required mode of teaching and expression in schools is the main thrust of the report. When Y Frythones came to an end in , it was decided to revive Y Gymraes. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience.
Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. This report caused outrage among Welsh women when published in Here's an extract from the books: Women and teaching History blog: