Although he inherited the residue of his father's estate in 1622, this was to lead to a series of lawsuits in Chancery, and the remainder of his life was blighted by legal actions (either as defendant or plaintiff), debt and periodic imprisonment.
During the Civil War period Jones was also imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes, complained about the privations visited on Wales by the King and Parliament, and spent a great deal of time petitioning various political figures such as Endymion Porter.
[2] Perhaps unsurprisingly given his experiences, Jones was eventually to disown the legal profession, writing from prison on such subjects as "The Judgments of good Kings on unjust Judges".
Edward Lhuyd, in his Archaeologia Britannica, and others relate a story that Jones and Vaughan, who were regular correspondents, had made an arrangement that the survivor of the two would inherit the other's library.
[4] This became a characteristically massive undertaking; William Owen Pughe, compiler of an important early 19th century Welsh-English dictionary, regarded Jones' Welsh vocabulary as "the most valuable" up to that point "due to its copiousness".