ABSTRACT
The columnist recognised that an insurrection had occurred; that it had mass support; and that its roots reached deep into the Welsh working-class experience. Bourgeois order in south Wales as elsewhere was sustained by a formidable apparatus of control directed, ultimately, from the Home Office in London: Lord Lieutenants and magistrates, police and special constables, yeomanry, militia and regular soldiers. Mad Edwards the Baker became one of the masters of the rhetoric of violence in the early months of 1839. Serious business was done at the weekly lodge meetings, to which admission was by membership ticket only. Public meetings had a different purpose. They were sometimes poorly attended but they were almost always reported in the local press. In response to the reports of the disturbed state of affairs in south Wales in April, a detachment of 120 men of the 29th Regiment of Foot was stationed in Newport on 2 May.
