The tumult was so great and the participation so universal that even the marketplace
shut down. Cornish historian Hamilton Jenkin described how this "extraordinary
agitation" not only continued in Redruth but spread westward away from the
agricultural land and deeper into mining country. It reached its most violent intensity at
the Hayle Copper Works, the Wheal Alfred mine, and in their attendant villages. Jenkin,
At the mine about 800 labourers at the surface (male and female), chiefly
young people, where the torrent bore down everything that stood in its
way. Were I to attempt to describe it I could no find words sufficient to
draw in colours strong enough. All labour for some days was suspended,
and the underground labourers (equally as numerous as those on the
surface) seemed to be struck with the same power – but being more
advanced in years I think they appeared to have a greater mastery over
their passions than the others had.149
Many Cornish Methodists had begun to think that there something to be feared in these
powerful events. It was not just vicars like Polwhele who were suspicious of revivalist
extravagance. Polwhele’s Wesleyan interlocutor Samuel Drew said of revivals that good
148 Quoted in W.R. Ward, ‚Popular Religion and the Problem of Social Control,‛ in Popular Belief and Practice,
eds. C.J. Cuming and Derek Baker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 245.
149 Rule, ‚Risky Business,‛ 167
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