ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the divergence of experience between lowland and highland, central and peripheral Britain that clearly emerged from the 1840s onwards. One of the interesting developments of the rural protest movement was the number of mass meetings held, both in secret and in the presence of the general public. Whereas the agricultural depression of the late 1870s undermined agricultural trade unionism, agricultural depression began to strain the relationship between tenants and landlords and movements by farmers and tenants sprang up. The Rebecca riots were the most spectacular manifestation of rural anger in nineteenth-century Wales. There was a whole series of disorders, beginning with the squatter disturbances in the north and west, encompassing the little known poaching affrays in mid-Victorian Wales, and culminating in the widespread anti-tithe riots at the turn of the century.
