 The defendants unlawfully did molest and obstruct John Hudgkins and John Millen. Being workmen in the employment of the said John Hanbridge, with a view to coerce the said John Hudgkin and John Millen to quit the said employment contrary to the Act, which amended the criminal law relating to violence, threats and molestation. It is to be emphasised that the defendants were not themselves participants in the strike, but they were acting in support of those who were participating. It made it an offence for every person to do one or more of the unlawful acts, including the workers directly involved, as well as third parties, as in this case. 150 years ago, 16 women were made an example of by a system of power that sought to resist inevitable change. What does it tell us about Britain today? In 1939, aged 81, Fanny Rathburn died in Chippinorton Workhouse. She died just a few hundred feet from where, 66 years before, she and 15 other women had been part of events which had caused a national furora involving both parliament, government ministers and the aristocratic establishment, and would provoke revisions to the law that would, eventually, help to modernise both people's freedoms and the way the courts in Britain operate. Fanny was born Fanny Honeybone in 1857 in the small village of Ascot under Witchwood, which was once a cheer's even-loaded valley. With its scattered tenant farms and aristocratic landowners, the area was known for its rural poverty. The rural poor largely lived on what they could grow to eat, while the low wages they earned as labourers on local farms, in the forests and cottage industries, paid for the rent and amiga lifestyle. At the end of the 18th century, after the French Revolution, and fearful of similar revolts across Britain, Parliament had passed the Treason Act and the Seditious Meetings Act in 1795. These prohibited political meetings or assemblies to prevent the people organising and made it an offence to even imagine replacing the monarchy with a republic. This was followed in 1799 by the First Combination Act, which prevented workers combining to form a union and press for better wages and conditions. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Britain's domestic economy had collapsed. 13% of the population were receiving poor relief, which had caused a system to collapse under the strain, leading to its national reorganisation in 1834 to create the union workhouses, such as the One and Chip and Norton. To bolster the incomes of landowners, the Corn Laws were introduced in 1815, which kept food prices artificially high and passed the cost of the crisis onto the working poor. Even when the Corn Laws ended in 1846, while helping some, it depressed the rural economy even further. Despite the legal ban, agricultural workers had tried to work together to improve their wages. Most famously, in 1836, the Tall Puddle Martyrs, who had been prosecuted and transported to Australia for trying to organise a strike. In the early 19th century, conditions across the rural South Midlands worsened, as this was the height of the land enclosure boom, taking away the common land that the rural poor could grow food on. At the same time, the first wave of agricultural automation was taking place, reducing the demand for workers. Following a wave of national unrest in 1830, there were swing riots in Chipping Norton and Bambry, where rural people destroyed threshing machines, rural workhouses and tithe barns as a protest against worsening conditions. In 1871, the Trade Union Act repealed the Combination Acts, which made trade unions legal. However, at the same time, the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, which made it an offence to, coerce another for trade purposes by the use of personal violence, by such threats as would justify magistrate in binding a man to keep the peace, or by persistently following a person from place to place, hiding his tools, clothes or other property, watching him besetting his house or following him along any street or road with two or more other persons in a disorderly manner. Trade unions were allowed to exist, but they could not actively organise to enforce a strike. With the prohibitions now lifted in 1872, just 20 or so miles away in Wellsbourne, Warwickshire, the National Agricultural Laborers Union was founded. The union spread to Ascot, and on 21st April 1873, local men went on strike for two shilling a day pay rise. The response of the tenant farmer at Crown Farm, Robert Hambridge, was to hire labourers from villages a few miles away on the far side of the forest. On 12th May, between 20 and 30 women from Ascot followed two men employed by Robert Hambridge to try and dissuade them from working that day. The farmer's wife summoned the constable, and the women were persuaded to go back to the village. On 19th May, Robert Hambridge brought a private prosecution under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. He made a complaint to the Reverend Carter of nearby Saarston, who acted as a clerical magistrate for the local Petty Sessions Court. The court issued a warrant for 17 women to appear at the next session's hearing, being held in what was, until 2019, Chippie Norton's police station. The trial, on 21st May, was presided over by two non-expert clerical justices, the Reverend Carter of Saarston and the Reverend Harris of Swirford, both by virtue of their positions, significant landowners. The women had no independent legal representation. As it was a private prosecution, no formal record of the trial was kept. The Petty Sessions were the lowest court in England, and so the two justices were advised by a single clerk. Though the court procedure had been formalized in the 18th century, the method dated back to the medieval menorial courts. The women may have been expected to fine, or to be bound over, to prevent them repeating the act. Instead, the two justices decided that they had no choice but to find them guilty and imposed a sentence required by the 1871 law, prison time, with hard labour. One of the 17 summons, Jane Prattley, could not be identified as having been at the scene and was acquitted. Nine, including two who were nursing babies, were identified as having taken part and were sentenced to seven days with hard labour. Seven were identified as having led the action, and they were sentenced to ten days with hard labour. Prisoners from Chippie Norton would have been taken to the railway station for transport by train to Oxford, but word had already gotten out. By the evening, two to three thousand supporters had besieged the police station and began to stone it, breaking windows and roof tiles. The police telegraphed Oxford to reinforcements. At 10pm, the mayor of Chippie Norton read the riot act to the crowd, giving the authorities not only the freedom to use force, but also indemnifying them against any injuries or deaths caused. At this point, the crowd dispersed. On the morning of 22 May, the sixteen women and two babies were put on cart sent from Oxford and taken to the prison. Accounts of the trial and the riot began to appear in print almost a week later. On 31 May 1873, the spectator, established in 1828 at that time represented reforming liberalism, wrote, The worst of it is that the labourers are beginning to feel that they cannot count on an impartial trial by magistrates of the temper of the clerical shallows of Chippie Norton, and a deep distrust of those who administer the law is growing among them. The time is coming when there will be a cry to which the legislature cannot turn a deaf ear for the reorganisation of the magistrate, and the squires with their clerical allies will have themselves to thank for the revolution that will eject them from the last stronghold of their power. The nine sentenced to seven days left Oxford jail on the morning of 28 May. The other seven were released on the 31st. By that point, questions had been asked in parliament, and word of the trial had spread across Britain. It gave political reformists an opportunity to question not only the application of union law, but also the anachronistic nature of local justice. That, as it had been for centuries, was largely exercised by individuals appointed by local aristocrats. Reform would come, but it would take a century. Workplace picketing was legalised in 1875, and unions would give a greater protection from prosecution in 1906, a system that would persist until the crackdown on union activities in the 1970s. By 1928, all men and women had the right to vote on an equal basis. Even the Riot Act would finally meet its end in 1967, and the courts of a size and petty session were the creation of the magistrates court system in 1980. Yet even today, elements of that system persist. Third-party protests outside factories and offices, as with the Ascot Martyrs, are shut down by police using procedures from trade union legislation. Now, as our economic situation worsens, to maintain power the government are repeating the oppressive response applied in the 18th century, part of a demonstrable turning of the tide over recent years, reversing the progressive changes of the last 150 years. Protests are being banned if they are disruptive. Unions are having their protections reduced, and certain workers are effectively losing their right to strike. And in the courts, protesters are now routinely being denied the freedom to state to a jury the reasons for their actions, and some have been jailed for stating their concerns. Our right to vote has been arbitrarily manipulated to try and favour the governing party. And finally, echoing the political furor after the trial of the Ascot Martyrs, a woman is currently awaiting the decision of the government minister to decide if a judge will be allowed to prosecute her after she held a sign outside a court telling jurors of their right to acquit on conscience. Still today, a narrow establishment interest controls many parts of our professional and political life. For example, in 2018, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of three anti-fracking protesters who a judge had decided had been causing a nuisance by picketing a fracking site in Lancashire. The twist in the story wasn't simply that the family of the judge had financial interests in the oil and gas industry to show how the generational exercise of power persists in England. The judge, Robert Altam, is a descendant of Judge James Altam who presided over the Pendrel Witch Trials in 1612. On their return from Oxford, the women were treated as heroes. The union had raised money for their cause and gifted it to them. But the century after the 1860s was not an improvement, but the gradual depopulation and eventual gentrification of the rural landscape, largely excluding the poor altogether. Of the 16 women convicted in 1873, like so many of us across Britain at that time, a quarter emigrated to the USA, Canada and New Zealand. Half of the women lived to the age of 69 or more, many still living locally. Fanny Honeybone, the youngest of the ringleaders, married Edwin Raftband from nearby Milton under which would in 1876. She had 14 children, six dying before their 19th birthday. Edwin died in 1929 and by the late 1930s Fanny was an inmate in Chippinorton Workhouse, where at the last of the 16 Ascot Martyrs she died in 1939. Our ancestors lived through such trying lives in order to hand us the world as it is today and that struggle continues today because, although we might have more material stuff in our lives, deep down with our own wave of automation threatening to take our jobs and living costs driving many to perpetual debt, England has not changed that much. And right now it's ugly beginning to revert to the Victorian values that the English establishment appeared to so deeply cherish.