Okay, so since this happened in South Wales during the coal boom and you hogs are good little materialists, I'm going to tryto convey the conditions that led up to the political moment in

Wales had the misfortune of existing next to England, and over the course of their shared history the English have made many attempts to invade Wales. For the most part this was unsuccessful, with the most successful bash of it being the Norman invasion of 1067 which spread as far as ynys Môn (Anglesey to the Anglo wankers) before being driven completely out in 1165 nearly a century after they began their attempted invasion. But the English will never back away from uppity foreigners demanding national sovreignity and in 1277 the conquest of Wales began. This time the English succeeded and King Llewelyn the Last lived up to his name. This occupation wasn't taken lightly and the majority of the 427 castles present in Wales were constructed during the colonisation to protect wealthy landowners from the frequent peasant uprisings.

In 1536 Henry VIII brought into effect the act of Union, a series of laws that would codify the cultural suppression of Wales and Scotland under English occupation. One of the laws that was brought into effect forbade the use of Welsh, Fines and even imprisonment and torture awaited those caught speaking it. Ultimately Banning the language didn't work and there are still many native speakers to this day (many Tory politicians aren't pleased about it).

Small aside: it's during this period that the stereotype of Welsh being sheep-shaggers first emerged, under English rule theft was punished by execution whereas beastiality was punished by a flogging. It was commonplace for peasants caught rustling sheep to lie and claim they were buggering them instead to get a lesser sentence. One of the reasons that was given for suppressing the use of the Welsh language was that it made people who spoke it into criminals and lowered the intelligence of its speakers, much of Britain was largely farmland so thus the Welsh were stereotyped as incompetent cattle thieves. The context for the "your people fuck sheep" jabs faded in time but the stereotype remained.

Skipping ahead once again, this time to the 19th century. John Critchton-Stuart, the 2nd Marquess of Bute (please don't laugh) was a wealthy leach landowner who owned most of South Wales at the start of the 1800s. In 1812 he had surveys ran of the Rhondda Fach (pronounced Ron-va vark) and other parts of his territory where surface deposits of coal had been found. The result of the finding were that there was a large amount of anthracite the so-called steam coal so essential for fueling Britain's burgeoning industrial revolution and all he needed was a supply of wage-slaves Colliers to dig it out for him. With that in mind he sold off a bunch of his land to fund his mining operations. These early mines were what is referred to as bell pits image reference but as they neededto dig deeper, the scattered bell pits were later abandonded in favour of a handfull deep-cast mines image reference. The pay was shit and the working condictions were somehow worse than in the workhouses, the Marquess of Bute got disgustingly rich off the whole thing. All across Wales, other Bastards landowners were watching with hungry eyes.

Enter William Crawshay II. His dad (William Crawshay senior) inherited the Crawshay estate in 1810, including Cyfarthfa (Pronounced Cuh-Varf-Vuh) where the family owned a massively profitable iron works. Being a Londoner, William Crawshay didn't want to be anywhere near Wales, so he sent his son there to oversee the glorified slave driving employment oportunities. Let's put this on the table right here William Crawshay II was about as much a parasitic leach as his dear old dad but of a completely different type. You see, William Crawshay II was anti-truck (a movement against company stores) which made him deeply controversial amongst his fellow dickheads up-and-coming businessmen for treating his workers merely as untermensch as opposed to disposable automata. Turns out owning both the mines that extract coal and iron from the works and the largest steelworks in Wales is highly profitable (who would have guessed) and soon he became even more grossly wealthy and became known as the Iron King of Merthyr.

In 1823 mister Iron King in all his bullshit decided to have a fucking castle constructed "Penydarren House", between the landscaping of his 158 acre (639403 square meters) to his liking and commissioning some bigass decadent castle like the lead poisoned despot he aspired to be, he ran up a cost of £30,000 (in today's money £3,509,343.38). So in 1830, he decided some cutbacks needed to be made. Specifically, he decided to cut salaries in both his mines and ironworks. During a depression. In an already impoverished part of Wales. Right about the time that workers were starting to get funny ideas like "chartism" and "lynching toll owners". Would you believe that some historical revisionists try to paint him as a principled and intelligent man?

Suffice to say, the workers would be pissed with getting a pay cut to their meager wages at any time, least of all during a depression. Requests were made to William Crawshay whose only response was to write articles in local newspapers about how lowering the wages was actually a big brain move and he won't consider raising them, I doubt any of his workers read the articles to learn why they should simply starve for their capitalist overlords, because instead of conceding defeat in the marketplace of ideas, they instead began to protest. The final straw came, on the 31st of May when a rally held by striking miners was met with demands to disperse by a small detachment of soldiers from a garrison in Brecon. Enraged by their poor treatment and eager to get their shit back, steelworkers began raiding debtors lots taking their possessions back and burning any records of debt they could find. A lamb was slaughtered and its blood used to stain a sheet which was placed upon a pole topped with a loaf of bread, a symbol of the slogan of the protests changing from Caws a Bara (cheese and bread) to Bara neu Waed (bread or blood) and I Iawr â'r Brenin (down with the King).

This got Porky a little scared and there was talk of the military being called in to deal with these protests, these rumours would turn out ot be true as the 93rd Regiment of Foot were deployed on the 1st of June with orders to protect essential buildings (the homes and properties of Crawshay and other powerful figures like the High Sheriff of Glamorgan) and disperse the protests by any means necessary. Coincidentally, while British soldiers were arriving to put down this protest, the protesters made contact with the striking miners at Merthyr colliery. Since the protests were for similar reasons to the strikes, the two groups decided to protest together.

This unified block of workers was too much for the 93rd regiment to disperse and they were soon forced to retreat back to the essential buildings they were told to protect.