Jones · 1800
Mary Jones and her Bible
A fifteen-year-old girl from a hill farm above Llanfihangel-y-Pennant walked twenty-six miles barefoot for a Welsh-language Bible — and the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in consequence.
Draft entry · awaiting review
Mary Jones was born in 1784 in Llanfihangel-y-Pennant, a farm village under Cadair Idris in Merionethshire. She was the daughter of a weaver, learned to read in a Sunday school run on a circulating-school model, and from age ten saved every penny she could earn — six years of egg money and small piecework — to buy a Welsh Bible of her own. There were almost none to be had. Welsh-language Bibles were a small scholarly print run, mostly the property of chapels and gentry.
She heard that the Reverend Thomas Charles of Bala kept a small stock. In the summer of 1800, aged fifteen, she walked the twenty-six miles from Llanfihangel-y-Pennant to Bala, barefoot to spare her shoes, with the savings tied in a cloth at her waist. Charles had three Bibles and three buyers ahead of her. He gave her one of his own.
Charles was so struck by the journey that he raised it before the Religious Tract Society in London four years later, asking why such a girl should have to walk so far for the Word in her own language. The question was the founding question of the British and Foreign Bible Society, established in 1804. The Society printed Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Irish, Manx, and within a generation, in two hundred languages worldwide.
Mary Jones lived another sixty-four years and died in 1864. Her Bible — kept battered and read for life — survives in the Cambridge University Library. Y Beibl Cymraeg, in her hand.