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The Great Rising
 A demonstration led by Thomas Llewelyn, a Cyfartha miner, demanded compensation; an angry mob of workers, traders, and townspeople freed the prisoners in the local gaol and marched on to Aberdare. At the same time, at Hirwaun, a few miles away, when the Court seized a cart belonging to a local man named Lewis Lewis, miners and iron workers joined the political radicals and disgruntled tradesmen and raised the red flag of rebellion -- the first time it was to be so used in Britain. On its staff was impaled a loaf of bread, the symbol of the needs of the marchers.
The crowd, growing ever larger, and probably emboldened by drink (for beer was both plentiful and cheap, and far safer to drink than water), marched into the streets of Merthyr, raided shops and houses to seize property and goods earlier confiscated in order to return them to their owners. A troop of Scots Highlanders was sent from Brecon Barracks to restore order, and when the large crowds of rioters appeared outside the Castle Inn, the troopers opened fire.
In the resulting panic and mass confusion, over two dozen workers were killed and hundreds wounded, but the soldiers lost 16 men and were forced into retreat. A detachment of Swansea Yeomanry to restore order the following day, but the workers, described by the Cambrian as "thousands of men and women and a body of Irishmen carrying clubs" had set up camp near Cefn Coed, up in the valley, where they ambushed and disarmed the military reinforcements.
It took a week for the forces of the Crown to finally bring order to the area. Punishment was severe: Lewis Lewis, after first receiving the death sentence, was exiled for life, and poor Richard Lewis, known as Dic Penderyn was executed on a charge of wounding a highlander. On 31 July, 1831, he was hanged in Cardiff Gaol, despite the appeal of many thousands of people for his life. Lewis thus became a martyr of the Welsh working class. A popular ballad of the time ran:
I saw the Merthyr riots,
And the great oppression of the workers;
And some of the soldiers wounded. . .
But dear heaven! the worst trick
Was the hanging of Dic Penderyn.
It is recorded that the last words spoken by Richard Lewis on the scaffold were O Arglwydd, dyma gamwedd (Oh Lord, what an injustice). Forty years later, Ieuan Parker of Cwmafan, a Welshman living in the United States confessed to the charge that had hanged Lewis.
The martyrdom of Dic Penderyn is well remembered in Wales, but in England there seems to have been general indifference. An earlier event at Peterloo, in Manchester in 1829, took precedence in the public imagination over anything that happened in South Wales, as pointed out by an entry in the diary of a Mrs. Arbuthnot in June, 1831:
There has been a great riot in Wales and
the soldiers have killed twenty-four
people. When two or three were killed at
Manchester, it was called the Peterloo
Massacre and the newspapers for weeks
wrote it up as the most outrageous and
wicked proceeding ever heard of. But that
was in Tory times; now this Welsh riot is
scarcely mentioned.
In Parliament, Lord Melbourne had recognized the severity of the Merthyr riots. He advocated severe repression of all popular workers' movements as "unlawful assemblages of armed individuals," and declared that South Wales was "the worst and most formidable district in the kingdom." He later wrote to a friend that "the affair we had there in 1831 was the most like a fight of anything that took place."
It wasn't only in the industrial areas that discontent made its presence known. There were other causes of social unrest that manifested themselves in Wales, especially in the Carmarthen area, where the most tangible and visible symbols of oppression were the numerous tollgates on the turnpike roads, with their crushing fees.
Some towns were entirely surrounded by tollgates and farmers were hard hit by excessive rates on the transportation of such necessities as lime and the movement of livestock to and from market. One night in May, 1839, gates at Efailwen were destroyed when a group of about 400 people, many dressed as women, drove away the special constables gathered to protest the tollgates.
Chapter 16 Continued
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