Book
Hosts of Rebecca
First published 1960
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 clandestine violence of men who disguise themselves as Rebecca’s daughters.
Cordell places the riots within a wider crisis of food, rent, tolls and unequal authority, so that protest grows from daily hardship rather than abstract politics. The movement’s disguises and night attacks give the novel an adventurous surface, but its central concern remains the pressure exerted on ordinary households by an economic system they cannot control. The book continues the Mortymer Saga while giving the Rebecca Riots a distinct social and political identity.
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