dispute of 1984-85 relied heavily on what has been inadequately described as 'folklore' to achieve a sense of solidarity, or less generously, enduring solidarity was maintained by exploiting the miners' traditional loyalty to their union and to their communities.1 This paper seeks to explore some of the lasting rebellious anti-establishment class orientated attitudes, over many generations, which have been perpetuated, in part, by oral tradition down to present day in the coalfield which remained the most solid in the 1984-85 dispute South Wales. Simultaneously it will relate these surviving and often hegemonic working class attitudes to law enforcement and to the mining community itself.2 Of all the industrial workers in Britain, the miners appear to have the greatest sense of their own history, their own community and indeed the legal process as it affects their industrial and social lives.3 This continuity has much to do with the fact that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries British miners were to the fore in campaigning to obtain legal protection for their trade union activities and to gain improved legislation for safety and working conditions. Indistinguishable from such campaigns was the related struggle, from the Chartist period onwards, for Parliamentary representation for the working class. This sense of their own class and industrial identity appears to be still most intense in the mining valleys of South Wales. The late Phil Abrahams of Nantyglo, a leader of the unemployed, 'political prisoner' and Communist County Councillor in the 1930s, pinpointed this continuity: