This Proud and Savage Land

by Alexander Cordell Book 1 in the Mortymer Saga series.

First published 1987

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4.2(87)

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 and the lives built upon it. Hywel’s struggle to establish a family gives the later Mortymer novels their beginnings.
Cordell uses Hywel’s experience to show the transformation of South Wales before organised Chartism, when older rural communities were being drawn into mines and ironworks at extraordinary speed. Early combinations among workers, the destruction of valleys by industry and the widening gulf between owners and labourers point towards the conflicts that dominate Rape of the Fair Country. As a prelude to the Mortymer Saga, the novel makes industrialisation itself the family’s first inheritance.