1. This Proud and Savage Land
In 1800 sixteen-year-old Hywel Mortymer leaves rural mid-Wales for the furnaces, pits and raw industrial settlements of the south. The promise of wages quickly gives way to a world of exhausting labour, child workers, explosions and disease, where ironmasters and coal owners command both the landscape…
2. Rape of the Fair Country
Iestyn Mortymer grows to manhood in the iron country of South Wales as furnaces, pits and company power reshape the valleys. The Mortymers live among miners and ironworkers whose wages, housing and safety depend upon employers able to dominate whole communities. Love, family loyalty and personal…
3. Hosts of Rebecca
The Mortymer story moves from the iron districts into the unrest associated with the Rebecca Riots, when rural communities in west and south Wales attacked tollgates and challenged taxes and local burdens they regarded as intolerable. Jethro Mortymer becomes caught between family obligation, poverty and the…
4. Song of the Earth
Mostyn Evan and his family, miners turned bargees, work between the furnaces of Cyfarthfa and the Neath Valley in an industrial society built on coal, iron and dangerous transport. They face powerful coalmasters, conflict with Irish navvies, cholera and the coercive side of illegal union organisation,…
5. Beloved Exile
After the Chartist crisis, Iestyn Mortymer is convicted at the Monmouth Assizes and sentenced to transportation. His path instead carries him into Afghanistan, where imperial politics and local resistance draw him into the First Anglo-Afghan War. The distance from Wales changes the scale of Cordell’s saga…
6. Land of Heart’s Desire
Iestyn Mortymer survives exile and the Afghan war and begins the dangerous journey back towards Wales. Durrani, a granddaughter of Dost Mohammad Khan, is drawn into his fate, while the power struggles surrounding Mohammad Akbar Khan make escape from Afghanistan inseparable from the politics of a…
7. The Love That God Forgot
By the later nineteenth century the Mortymer world has been transformed by the wealth and scale of Welsh industry. Tom Mortymer, heir to a prosperous tinplate concern, rejects the life planned for him and chooses instead a more precarious existence with Jen Wildflower, a Romany woman…