Letter (draft) from William Chambers to the Independent Order of Oddfellows, September 1843 [page 1 of 4]

Description

In this letter, William Chambers suggests that the Board of Oddfellows should issue an order to all the lodges in the counties of Carmarthen, Pembroke, Cardigan and Glamorgan, expressing their disapproval at the recent unlawful acts committed in these areas.

Description by Evan D. Jones:

'The existing state of that part of the principality was probably not unknown to them. The writer, as a magistrate, had taken such steps as had put some check to the nightly excesses that disgraced it. Under the name of Rebeccaism the fomentors of disorder had succeeded in setting the law almost at defiance. The whole country was in a perfect state of terror. A turnpike woman had been murdered. Five fires which he had the previous week destroyed the produce of three farms, and in one case the house was entirely consumed, more was threatened; a horse shot; his own life threatened in a variety of ways. Except in the town itself, under the influence of the military, they were in a state almost bordering on civil war. His object in writing was to suggest the propriety of the board issuing an order to all the lodges in the counties of Carmarthen, Pembroke, Cardigan, and Glamorgan to discountenance, by their example and by all other means consistent with their duties to their country, and to their Queen, as oddfellows, such breaches of the law, and a reminder that their duty to a brother was to warn him of approaching danger and to assist him when it arrived. This would enable him to find a number of brothers whou would not desert him in an hour of need and might through the blessing of God become the means of restoring order in that hitherto tranquil country.'

Source: Evan D. Jones, 'A File of "Rebecca" Papers', The Carmarthen Antiquary: The Transactions of the Carmarthen Antiquarian Society and Field Club, Vol. I (3 & 4), 1943 & 1944, 40-41.