ABSTRACT
The millenarianism — Owen became a dedicated follower of Joanna Southcott, one of the populist prophets whose dramatic proclamations punctuated the revolutionary decade — could evoke an echo among dissenters of liberal temper who also called for a purge. Central to the kind of millenarianism which was possessing dissenters and bohemians (both radical innovators, and both confronted by an apparently Atlantic-wide revolution), was the concept of the resurrection of the witnesses in the last days. Madoc was revived at a singularly apt moment, in the flush of zeal over the French revolution and the new liberty eisteddfods and in the first spasm of reaction in the Birmingham riots against Jacobins of 1791 and the royal proclamation against seditious writing of the spring of 1792. In the late eighteenth century, the whole area drove into its crisis of modernisation. The acceleration of industrial growth in England brought cloth factors from Liverpool and Lancashire, a quickening in the commercialisation of agriculture.
