A HISTORY OF STAFFORDSHIRE 



coming as it did at a time when the wood supply of Sussex, Surrey, and Kent 

 was seriously diminished, was bound to lead eventually to great industrial 

 developments in South Staffordshire where the coal and ironstone lay side by 

 side. The manufacture of the iron into finished goods was also going on in 

 the district. Henry Powle, who wrote an account of the iron trade in 1 677, 

 points out how the ' sow ' iron made by the iron-workers in the Forest of Dean 

 found its way up the Severn into the Staffordshire forges, and so to the work- 

 shops of Wolverhampton, Sedgeley, and Walsall, where it was made into the 

 hardware goods for which the district was already becoming famous. 84 The 

 nail trade had become localized in Staffordshire towards the end of the six- 

 teenth century, and the cost of nails, so typical an item of mediaeval accounts, 

 was now no longer credited to the village blacksmith. Since 1565, when 

 Shutz, a German, introduced 'slitting mills,' which prepared the rods 

 for the nailers, this industry steadily developed, and in 1584-5 a Bill was 

 brought into Parliament to regulate the trade by statute, and to make nailing 

 a separate employment in Staffordshire, Worcestershire, and Salop. 86 



Nail-making, which included the manufacture of nuts, bolts, rivets, and 

 screws, was purely a domestic industry till the eighteenth century, and though 

 the nail industry is now carried on largely in factories, there is still a con- 

 siderable, though declining, amount of work done in the miserable little work- 

 shops that adjoin the homes of the nailers in the neighbourhood of Sedgeley 

 and Dudley and in some other districts. The conditions of these people seem 

 always to have been bad, their hours long, and their pay poor. In an ' Essay 

 to enable the Necessitous Poor to pay Taxes,' 86 it was stated that nailers 

 worked from four in the morning on Monday till late on Saturday night, 

 receiving for their work 3^., or less if the iron were bad. In 1760 screw- 

 making began to be organized on the factory system, but little progress was 

 made till the inventions of Whitworth in 1840, and the domestic system 

 went on practically unchanged till 1861 in all other branches, despite 

 numerous inventions between 1760 and 1841. The nut and bolt trade, now 

 practically a factory industry, was the next to succumb, and at the present 

 time only certain kinds of nails are made in domestic workshops, and chiefly 

 by women, children, and old men. 87 



It is interesting to notice the relative wealth and importance of the 

 Staffordshire towns at this time. In the assessment for ship-money, 1635, 

 the whole county was assessed at 2,000. Lichfield contributed far the 

 most, viz. 100 ; Walsall came next with a payment of 25 ; Stafford, not 

 yet the seat of the boot and shoe trade, paid only 20 ; and Newcastle 

 under Lyme i6. Ba The position of Walsall is interesting as evidence 

 of the growing industrial prosperity of the South Staffordshire towns, 

 and because it still stands second in the list of Staffordshire cities, though 

 Wolverhampton and not Lichfield ranks first in point of population and 

 general importance. 



Two years later, and again in 1665, when the plague was raging in 

 London, the Walsall authorities took the most serious precautions to preserve 

 the immunity of their town, as may be read in an old record of the regula- 



84 W. A. S. Hewins, Engl. Trade and Finance (1892), 14, 15. 



"Ibid. 1 6. "Ibid. 17. "Ibid. 19. 



w J. Langford, Staff, and Warvi. Past and Present, 429. 



288 



