Mary Jones: The Long Road to Bala

In the spring of 1800, before it was light, a girl left a small stone cottage in a valley in North Wales and began to walk. She was fifteen. Her name was Mary Jones. In a purse or a bundle she carried every coin she had been able to earn and keep over six years, and she was going to spend all of it on one book.

The road ahead of her ran for about twenty-five miles over the hills of Merioneth to the little market town of Bala, where there lived a minister named Thomas Charles. She had never met him. She did not know for certain that he would have what she wanted. She only knew that if anyone in that part of Wales could sell a poor weaver’s daughter a Bible in her own language, it was Mr Charles of Bala.

The story has always been told that she walked barefoot, carrying her shoes to save them for the town. That may well be true. Shoes were precious, and many country children in Wales went barefoot as a matter of course. But it is one of the details that has grown fonder with every retelling, and we cannot prove it. What we can say is that she went on foot, alone, a very long way, for something most people reading this book can pick up from a shelf without thinking.

Then she would have to walk home again.

This is a chapter about a girl who did one thing for God while she was young. It was not a sermon or a mission or a brave stand before a king. It was a long walk to buy a book. But it turned out to be one of the most famous walks in the history of the church, and it is worth knowing how much of the story is solid ground, how much is tradition, and why a teenage girl wanted a Bible badly enough to do it.

A Weaver’s Cottage Under Cadair Idris

Mary Jones was born on 16 December 1784 in the parish of Llanfihangel-y-Pennant, a scatter of farms and cottages in a green valley at the foot of Cadair Idris, one of the great mountains of Wales. Her parents, Jacob and Mary Jones, were weavers. They had married at the parish church the year before she was born, and when they did, neither of them could sign the register. They made their marks instead. Mary grew up in a home where nobody could read.

Her father died when she was very small, about four years old by most accounts. Her mother carried on weaving to keep them both, and Mary learned the work beside her. It was a poor life. A weaver’s cottage was one room or two, with a loom taking up much of the space, a fire, a bed, and not much else.

To understand what came next, you need to know three things about Wales at the end of the eighteenth century.

The first is language. Almost everyone in Mary’s valley spoke Welsh, and many spoke nothing else. English was the language of the law courts, the gentry and the government, but it was not the language of a weaver’s kitchen or a shepherd’s hillside. A Bible in English would have been almost no use to Mary. She needed one in Welsh.

The second is scarcity. Wales had had the whole Bible in Welsh since 1588, when Bishop William Morgan’s translation was printed, and it was one of the great treasures of the nation. But printed copies were never plentiful, and they were expensive. A poor family might go its whole life without owning one. In many districts the only Bible was the big one chained or kept in the parish church, read aloud on Sundays.

The third is that Wales was in the middle of a spiritual awakening. For two generations, travelling preachers had been crossing the country, often preaching in the open air, calling people to repent and to trust in Christ. Those who responded were gathered into small societies that met in homes and simple chapels in the week to pray, sing and examine their lives together. They were called Methodists, and in Wales most of them were Calvinistic Methodists. Mary’s parents were among them. When she was six, in 1791, a powerful revival broke out at Bala itself, and its effects were felt far beyond the town.

So Mary grew up hearing that God speaks in the Bible, that the Bible was the most important book in the world, and that every person needs to know it for themselves. And she could not read a word of it.

Learning to Read

The man who changed that was Thomas Charles of Bala.

Charles was a clergyman who had thrown in his lot with the Welsh Methodists. He had seen that it was not enough to preach to people who could not read the Bible for themselves, so he set up what were called circulating schools. A teacher would come to a district and stay for some months, teaching children, and often adults too, to read Welsh from the Bible. Then the teacher moved on to the next district, and the next. Charles also threw his energy into Sunday schools, where old and young learned to read and studied Scripture together. Through these schools, thousands of ordinary Welsh people learned to read in a few years.

When one of these schools opened in the village of Abergynolwyn, a couple of miles from Mary’s home, she went. The usual account says she was about ten. We do not know her teacher’s name, or how long it took, but she learned. And as soon as she could read, she wanted to read the Bible.

There was a problem. Her family did not have one. According to the story as it has always been told, a farming family about two miles from her home owned a Bible and let her come and read it. So, week after week, she walked there and back to sit with it. Some versions say she learned whole chapters by heart so that she could carry them home in her head.

The story also says that Mary had already joined the Methodist society as a young child, professing faith at about eight. That would be very young by our standards, but in her world children were taken seriously in these matters. We cannot be sure of the age, and Mary herself left no account of how she came to faith. But what she did next shows what she believed. She believed that the Bible was the voice of God, and that it was worth more than anything she could earn.

Six Years

At some point Mary decided she would not keep borrowing. She would have a Bible of her own.

It is worth pausing on how big a decision that was. For a girl in her position, a Bible was not a small purchase. It cost more money than she was likely to see in one place for years. She would have to earn it penny by penny, and keep every penny she earned instead of handing it over for food or clothes or fuel.

She did it the way poor children always have: with odd jobs, done over and over again. The traditional account says she kept hens and sold eggs, gathered sticks for firewood, helped neighbours with their work, mended and knitted and ran errands. We do not have her accounts, and the list may have been filled out by later tellers. But the main point is not in doubt. It took her about six years.

Think about what six years means at that age. If you started saving at nine, you would finish at fifteen. Every one of those years had its own temptations. A ribbon at the fair. A warmer shawl in winter. Sweets. It is not hard to imagine the voice in her head saying that it was too far away, that she would never get there, that God would understand if she spent a little. We do not know if she heard that voice. We know she did not stop.

There is something else hidden in this part of the story. Mary was not saving for an experience or an adventure. She was saving so that she could read, every day, for herself, the words she believed God had spoken. The writer of Psalm 119 said, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path,” and “How sweet are Your words to my taste—sweeter than honey in my mouth!” (Psalm 119:105, 103). For most of us those are pleasant lines. For Mary they described something she had tasted at a neighbour’s table and could not yet have at home.

The Walk

By the spring of 1800 she had enough. There was only one place she could hope to buy a Welsh Bible, and that was from Thomas Charles in Bala.

A new edition of the Welsh Bible had just been printed. Ten thousand copies had come off the press at Oxford in 1799, paid for by an English church society, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, partly because men like Charles had begged for it. Charles was one of the people who distributed them in North Wales. But ten thousand copies did not go far in a nation hungry for Bibles, and they were being snapped up.

We do not know exactly which road Mary took. We do know the country she crossed: mountain tracks and valley roads, streams to ford, long climbs and longer descents, the great mass of Cadair Idris behind her and Bala, by its long lake, somewhere far ahead. Twenty-five miles is a long day’s walk for a fit adult on a good road. It was not a good road, and she was a girl of fifteen walking alone. Most accounts say it took her the whole day and that she reached Bala as evening fell. The story says a local Methodist family took her in for the night, and that she went to Mr Charles in the morning.

Now we come to the heart of the story, and also to the part where the versions most disagree.

The best-known version goes like this. Mary found Thomas Charles and asked for a Bible. He told her, gently, that the copies he had were all sold or promised to other people. Mary, who had saved for six years and walked a day to get there, burst into tears. Charles was so moved by her tears and her story that he gave her one of the promised copies anyway, saying that the other person would have to wait.

Another version says she had to wait in Bala a day or two until a fresh supply arrived. And there is a third version, which comes from Mary herself. Many years later, as an old woman, she told the story to people who wrote it down, and a letter recording her account is kept today at the National Library of Wales. In her telling, she came home from Bala not with one book but with three.

How three? Some later writers said Charles let her have three for the price of one. Others suggest she was buying for neighbours too. We do not know. What we do know is that more than one Bible from that trip survives. One is in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. The other, the one she kept as her own, is held today in the Bible Society’s archive at Cambridge University Library. It is a copy of that 1799 Welsh edition. On the last page of the Apocrypha, the extra books printed between the Old and New Testaments in many Bibles of the time, Mary wrote a note in English, in her own spelling. It begins, “Mary Jones His the True Onour of this Bible”, which is to say, “Mary Jones is the true owner of this Bible.” And she noted that she bought it in 1800, in her sixteenth year.

That way of counting is why some books say she was sixteen and others fifteen. In the way people reckoned ages then, your sixteenth year was the year before your sixteenth birthday. Mary turned sixteen in December 1800, so for almost the whole of that year she was fifteen.

Then she walked home. Twenty-five miles back, over the same hills, with a Bible she had waited six years for. Nobody recorded what she thought on the way. You can probably guess.

What the Walk Started

If the story ended there it would be a fine one: a poor girl, a long walk, a treasured book. But the reason the whole world has heard of Mary Jones is what happened next, and here we have to be especially careful about what is fact and what is tradition.

The facts are these. Thomas Charles was troubled by how many people in Wales still had no Bible, and how unreliable the supply was. On 7 December 1802 he was in London, at a meeting of the committee of the Religious Tract Society, a group that printed and spread Christian leaflets. He spoke about the need for Welsh Bibles and asked whether something could be done. One of the committee, a Baptist minister named Joseph Hughes, took the idea further than Charles had. If a society could be formed to provide Bibles for Wales, why not for the whole kingdom, and why not for the whole world? The Bible Society’s own history remembers his question as: “If for Wales, why not for the kingdom? And if for the kingdom, why not for the world?” Older accounts word it a little differently, but they all agree on the shape of it.

Over the next year that question grew into a plan. On 7 March 1804, about three hundred people met at the London Tavern in the City of London and founded the British and Foreign Bible Society. Its aim was simple and enormous: to print the Bible, without notes or comment, in as many languages as possible, and sell or give it as cheaply as possible to anyone who needed it. Hughes became one of its secretaries. Within a couple of years it was printing Scripture in Welsh. One of its very first publications was the Gospel of John in Mohawk, for Native American readers in Canada.

The tradition is that Mary Jones was the spark. In this telling, Charles never forgot the weeping girl who had walked to Bala, and when he stood up in London it was her story he told.

Is that true? Honestly, we do not know. Charles did write about the hunger for Bibles in Wales, and about young people walking very long distances in the bare hope of getting one. Mary may well have been one of those he had in mind. But no record from 1802 or 1804 mentions her by name. Her story first appeared in print in 1878, in a family magazine, when she had been dead for fourteen years. A Welsh book about her followed in 1879, and then in 1882 an English writer, Mary Emily Ropes, published The Story of Mary Jones and Her Bible. That little book was read by children all over the English-speaking world for a century. It is a warm, vivid retelling, but it has whole conversations that its author could not possibly have known, and some of the details people remember best come from it.

So here is a fair way to put it. Mary Jones really lived, really saved, really walked to Bala, and really bought her Bible from Thomas Charles in 1800. The Bible Society really grew out of Charles’s concern for Welsh Bibles. That Mary’s walk was the very thing that moved him is a tradition, and a likely one, but a tradition. Her story became, in time, the story the Bible Society told about why it existed. That is not nothing. Stories like hers are how people come to care about a need they have never seen.

What Came After

Mary did not become famous in her lifetime. She went on being a weaver.

In 1813 she married another weaver, Thomas Lewis, and some years later they moved to the village of Bryn-crug, near Tywyn on the coast of Cardigan Bay. Life was hard. By most accounts she had six children, and only one son, John, lived to grow up; several of the others died of tuberculosis, which killed many poor families in damp cottages in those years. John later emigrated to America. Her husband died before her, and she lived on as a widow for many years.

She kept her faith, and she kept her Bible. People who knew her in old age remembered her as a woman who loved the Scriptures and who gave what little she had to the work of spreading them. It is said that she kept bees and gave the money from her honey to the Bible Society and to missions. That detail is part of the tradition too, and we cannot confirm it, but it fits the woman everything else describes.

She died in December 1864, just after her eightieth birthday, and was buried in the graveyard of the Calvinistic Methodist chapel at Bryn-crug. Her gravestone describes her as the widow of Thomas Lewis, weaver. The ruins of the cottage where she grew up still stand in the valley under Cadair Idris, with a memorial to her beside them.

The society that her story is linked to has gone on to help translate, print and distribute the Bible in hundreds of languages, and many national Bible societies around the world trace their beginnings back to that meeting in 1804.

It is easy to make a story like this into a sugary lesson about being good. Mary’s life was not sugary. She grew up poor, lost her father as a small child, buried most of her own children and her husband, and spent her life at a loom. Her one great deed, as far as the world could see, was done at fifteen and took two days. But she understood something at fifteen that many people never understand. Jesus said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). She believed it enough to go without for six years.

And she believed something else. The Bible she wanted so much is, from beginning to end, about Jesus. Jesus Himself said of the Scriptures, “These are the very words that testify about Me” (John 5:39). The people who taught Mary to read taught her that she was a sinner who could not save herself, that Christ had died for sinners and risen again, and that anyone who trusts Him is forgiven and made new. She did not want a Bible as an ornament for the shelf. She wanted to read for herself about the Saviour she had trusted, every day, in her own language.

In Their Own Words

“Mary Jones His the True Onour of this Bible.”

— Mary Jones, written in English, in her own spelling, on the last page of the Apocrypha in her Welsh Bible, bought in 1800

Think It Through

1. Mary saved for about six years for one thing. What, if anything, would you be willing to wait that long for? What does the way we spend our money and time say about what we really value?
2. The famous version of the story says Thomas Charles gave Mary a Bible that had been promised to someone else. Mary’s own account says she came home with three. Why do you think stories like this change as they are retold? Does it matter, if the main facts are true?
3. Mary could easily borrow a neighbour’s Bible, but she wanted her own. What is the difference between knowing what the Bible says from other people and reading it for yourself?
4. Most of Mary’s adult life was ordinary and hard, and she never became famous. Does that make her one act of courage at fifteen less important? What small, faithful thing might God be asking of you now?

Read More on Ochorus

Mary Jones left no books, and there is no biography of her yet in the Ochorus library. Younger readers in your family can meet her in Brave for God: Book Four, in the chapter “Mary Jones: The Girl Who Walked for a Bible.” To hear the preaching of the Welsh awakening she grew up in, read the sermons of Christmas Evans, the self-taught Welsh preacher who was her older contemporary: start with “The Triumph of Calvary” and “The Resurrection of Jesus.” His full biography is on his author page.