548 Ch. 14 • The Industrial Revolution

Bread riots in England, 1830.

justice, created to give the impression that the laborers were numerous and
organized enough to force the landowners to renounce—as a few did—use of
the machines. Authorities weighed in to make arrests, exiling some people
to Australia, and executed nineteen men. Other similar attacks occurred
between 1839 and 1842 in Wales when poor people attacked tollgates and
tollhouses in the “Rebecca riots,” which were also named after an imaginary
redresser of social wrongs. In Portugal, women played a major role in an
uprising in 1846 that followed a government attempt to enclose land and
force peasants to register land they owned.
Rural poverty weighed heavily, especially on the continent. The Prussian
political theorist Karl von Clausewitz, traveling in the Rhineland during the
brutal winter of 1817, came upon “ruined figures, scarcely resembling men,
[prowling] around the fields searching for food among the unharvested and
already half rotten potatoes that never grew to maturity.” Conditions of rural
life in Eastern Europe may even have worsened since the eighteenth cen­
tury. Russian serfs and Balkan peasants still lived in wooden huts. In Swe­
den, the small red cottages of farming families were notoriously cramped;
many people depended on their parishes to provide assistance in hard times.
Rural people drew warmth from fireplaces during the day and from animals
with which many shared quarters at night. There were few windows because
they let in wind and rain (in Sweden, some windows were still covered with
animal membrane), or because farmhouses had been built that way to
reduce the tax on doors and windows, as in parts of France. A traveler
described the hovels in which Romanian peasants lived: “holes dug in the
earth, over which a propped roof is thrown—covered rarely with straw, gen­
erally with turf.”