IF PEACE and tranquility were what you were after, rural West Oxfordshire was not the place to visit in the turbulent 1870s.

Great poverty and and great wealth existed cheek by jowl, and a lowering discontent hung over the Cotswolds, needing only the smallest spark to flare up like a forest fire.

Exactly 140 years ago this week that spark was provided, with the small community of Ascott-under-Wychwood – to all outward appearances the very embodiment of bucolic charm – proving itself to be a tinderbox of social unrest.

To this day a group of memorial benches on the village green records the events of 1873, listing the names of 16 women — two with babes in arms — who were imprisoned for supporting their striking menfolk, who were labourers at nearby Crown Farm.

The trouble started after the farm workers joined the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union (NALU), which the Methodist preacher, trade unionist and (later) politician Joseph Arch had founded the year before.

They had originally joined a small local union in neighbouring Milton-under-Wychwood, but it quickly affiliated itself to the NALU.

Farmer Robert Harbridge responded to the union by joining a group of employers called the Oxfordshire Association of Agriculturists (OAA), which had been set up to fight the threat from organised labour.

When the workers demanded a two shillings a week pay rise, which would have taken their wage from 12 shillings to 14 (70p), he responded by sacking them all (which in those days meant literally handing them their sack of implements and telling them to go).

He then managed to take on replacement workers from nearby Ramsden. It was this action that led the women, now known as the Ascott Martyrs, to take action.

They tried to persuade the workers from Ramsden to down tools and support the strike, but the women were arrested for their efforts.

On May 20 they were brought before magistrates in Chipping Norton, charged with “obstructing and coercing John Hodgkins and John Millen with a view to inciting them to leave their employment”. The magistrates, the Rev Thomas Harris, rector of Swerford, and the Rev William Carter, vicar of Shipton-under-Wychwood, sentenced the women to prison with hard labour; nine of them for seven days and the other seven for 10 days.

Extra police were sent from Oxford to cope with what was described as a riot in Chipping Norton, as local people tried to free the women, the youngest of whom was 16 and the eldest 44. Lamps and windows were broken by the 1,000-strong mob, but the authorities succeeded at 1am in transferring the women and babies to Oxford Gaol by horse and cart.

The next day Joseph Arch, known as a “ranter” by many Church of England clergymen, preached to a crowd of 3,000 in Chipping Norton and £80 was raised to help the women, whose families were then cared for by union members from Milton-under-Wychwood.

Methodists were particularly active in this part of Oxfordshire, where there was discontent after the felling of most of the Royal Forest of Wychwood in the 1850s, and the handing-over of the enclosed land to major local andowners.

Outrage at the sentences handed down to the women from Ascott eventually led to them being pardoned by Queen Victoria.

Methodist preacher Christopher Holloway realised that part of the problem for West Oxfordshire agricultural workers was that there were too many of them, which meant employers had a buyers’ market. He organised migrations north, notably to Sheffield, where jobs were plentiful, and overseas, to New Zealand.

In this context, the memorial in Shipton-under-Wychwood to the 17 men, women and children who died in the wreck of the ship Cospatrick, which caught fire en route to New Zealand in 1874, seems particularly poignant.