Blood of the Crossing

History & the World

The Blood of the Crossing saga is rooted in real places, real migrations, and real struggles for land, survival, and belonging.

A World Built from the Historical Record

The events of The Crossing take place between 1607 and the early decades of the seventeenth century — a period of profound upheaval in Wales, England, and the fledgling English colonies of North America. Understanding that world helps illuminate why Rhys, Meg, and Elin make the choices they do.

This page gathers the historical context behind the series: the enclosures that emptied Welsh hillsides, the naming traditions that shaped Welsh identity, the brutal realities of the Atlantic crossing, and the desperate, violent world that awaited settlers at Jamestown.

The Old World

17th-Century Wales

A land under pressure

By the early seventeenth century, Wales was a country being remade by English law, enclosure, and the slow erosion of older Welsh customs around land and inheritance. The Acts of Union (1536 and 1543) had formally absorbed Wales into the English legal system, replacing Welsh customary law with English common law and making English the only language of the courts.

For ordinary Welsh farming families, this shift had profound consequences. Land that had been held and worked under Welsh partible inheritance — where holdings were divided among sons — was increasingly subject to English primogeniture and to the claims of landlords who held written title. A family that had farmed the same hillside for generations could find itself dispossessed by a man with a document and a lock.

It is this world that shapes Rhys ap Hywel. His loss is not unusual — it is part of a larger pattern of displacement that pushed Welsh men and women off the land and toward towns, ports, and eventually ships bound for the New World.

Welsh Identity

Welsh Naming Traditions

Names as lineage

Welsh naming conventions in the early seventeenth century still followed the older patronymic system, in which a person was identified by their given name followed by 'ap' (son of) or 'ferch' (daughter of) and their father's name. Rhys ap Hywel means Rhys, son of Hywel. This system encoded lineage directly into a person's name.

Under pressure from English law and administration — which required fixed surnames for legal records — many Welsh families were beginning to adopt hereditary surnames during this period, often by anglicising the patronymic. 'Ap Hywel' could become 'Powell'; 'Ap Rhys' could become 'Price' or 'Preece'. The shift was uneven and contested, and many Welsh people resisted it as an erasure of identity.

In the Blood of the Crossing series, the tension between Welsh naming and English record-keeping is not merely cultural detail — it is a matter of legal survival. A name that does not appear in the right book, in the right form, can mean the difference between a claim and nothing at all.

The Voyage

The Atlantic Crossing

Weeks at sea, no guarantees

The Atlantic crossing in the early seventeenth century was a journey of six to twelve weeks, depending on winds, season, and the competence of the captain. Ships were small, overcrowded, and poorly ventilated. Passengers — many of them indentured servants, bound maids, or desperate emigrants with little money and no guaranteed place in the colony — lived below decks in conditions that bred disease, despair, and occasional violence.

The Virginia Company organised and financed many of these voyages, maintaining passenger lists and records of those traveling under indenture or Company arrangement. But not everyone who boarded a ship appeared in the Company's books. Women traveling independently, servants attached to private households, and those who paid their own passage might be listed incompletely — or not at all. To be unlisted was to arrive without official identity, without the protections (however limited) that the Company's records provided.

For Meg and Elin, the crossing is not only a physical ordeal — it is a passage through a system designed to categorise, control, and assign value to human beings. Whether their names appear in the right ledger will shape everything that follows.

The New World

Jamestown & Colonial Virginia

Survival on contested ground

Jamestown, founded in 1607, was the first permanent English settlement in North America — and for much of its early history, it was a place on the edge of collapse. Disease, starvation, conflict with the Powhatan Confederacy, and the catastrophic mismanagement of the Virginia Company's early years killed the majority of those who arrived. The 'Starving Time' of 1609–10 reduced the settlement from several hundred colonists to fewer than sixty survivors.

The land on which Jamestown was built was not empty. The Powhatan Confederacy, led by the paramount chief Wahunsenacah, controlled a network of chiefdoms across the Tidewater region. English settlers depended on Powhatan food supplies in the early years, even as they sought to expand their foothold and assert ownership over land that Indigenous peoples had farmed, hunted, and governed for generations.

For ordinary settlers — the indentured servants, the bound maids, the landless emigrants who arrived with nothing — Virginia offered the theoretical possibility of land and freedom at the end of their indenture. In practice, the system was designed to extract labour and defer reward. Those who survived long enough to claim their headright acres often found the best ground already taken by men with connections, capital, and the right names in the right books.

The Blood of the Crossing series is set against this contested, violent, and deeply unequal world — a world in which survival required not only strength and endurance, but the ability to navigate systems of power that were stacked against the poor, the Welsh, the female, and the Indigenous from the very beginning.

Go Deeper

Read the story this history made possible.

The Crossing — Book One of the Blood of the Crossing series — available now.

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