Heritage Blog farm rioters banished; story preview

Heritage story preview: Essex farmworker flogged

Essex farmworker flogged, treadmilled, pardoned, then he vanished from Devil’s Island penal colony

Farm rioter William Acres from North Essex was banished to the Devil’s Island penal colony, flogged and treadmilled. But he vanished after his pardon… Read his shocking true story now.

Farmhand William Acres, 22, worked on a farm in Walton Le Soken, North Essex, until, in 1831, a newly invented threshing machine took over his job and those of eight other workers… Powered by three horses, it required only three workers to operate. This resulted in impoverished and angry farmhands ready to riot and wreck the machines that cost them their jobs.

Early threshing machines were used to thresh and separate grain from stalks and chaff. This freed farmers and their labourers from a slow, laborious process that had endured for thousands of years.

Long days on the convict colony’s brutal treadmill for rule-breaking

But 70 percent of farm labourers lost their jobs as machines spread across the agricultural landscape. William Acres and his mates from the Soken villages of Essex, special places with ancient privileges, were angry. They joined rioters who burned haystacks and vandalised the threshing machines.

The lawbreakers were hunted down, tried and transported to Tasmania. Farm rioters were put in penal colonies for up to 14 years and brutally punished for any misdemeanours. They lived on the edge of civilisation in a place they called Devil’s Island.

What happened to William Acres and some of the other 2,096 farm protesters as convicts is now revealed in a new release on Ancestry-Stories.com, the online home for family history short stories. It’s a seven-minute read: Farm rioters banished, flogged and treadmilled.

Does your family tree include an ancestor who might have been transported “Down Under”? A useful website for your research is Claim A Convict, which has a searchable database. Keep looking and let us share your ancestor’s story with the rest of the world.