Acts of Parliament were successfully promoted by persons who were interested in Turnpike Trusts, giving them statutory powers to make and regulate roads. The Trustees of these Turnpike Roads in South Wales were authorized to raise moneys by tolls sufficient to pay the interest upon the debts incurred in making the roads and keeping them in repair. In order to raise this money tolls had been largely increased; payments of these charges were frequently demanded; side-bars on the roadsides had been multiplied improperly, and every means adopted by the trustees to swell their revenues. Strangers to the localities, who were professional toll renters, became tenants of the gate houses, farming the tolls, and exacting the utmost from the discontented public. Many practices were followed by these persons which no law could justify. In Carmarthenshire alone there were twelve different Trusts, and although the amount of the tolls was limited by the statutory powers given, there was no such limit as to the number of gates at which they could be levied on the public. No reason existed why the Turnpike Trustees should not, if they so desired, have established a turnpike gate and demanded a toll at intervals of one hundred yards throughout the county of Carmarthen. They interpreted and administered the law as they thought fit, and there was no appeal from their decisions.
Resistance to the payment of such tolls broke out in Carmarthenshire in the spring of 1843 on the riotous demolition of some of the turnpike gates. The Trefechan gate in the Whitland Trust was first attacked. From this district the resistance spread to the other counties of South Wales. The leader of the movement concealed his identity under the name of "Rebecca"; his followers called themselves the "Children of Rebecca" in allusion to the Scriptural text, "Let thy seed possess the gates of those which hate them." Parties of five or six hundred men, mostly mounted, armed with pickaxes, sledges, hatchets, and guns, rioted through the
