The story of Mary Jones and her Bible inspired the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Mary Jones (16 December 1784 – 28 December 1864) was a Welsh Protestant Christian girl who, at the age of sixteen, walked twenty-eight miles across the countryside to buy a copy of the Welsh Bible from Thomas Charles because she did not have one. Charles then used her story in proposing to the Religious Tract Society that it set up a new organisation to supply Wales with Bibles.