SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY had been inclosed, of which only twenty were for sheep farming, the dates of inclosure being 1510 and 1576. One hundred and sixty acres of inclosed land were found in the liberty of the Duchy of Lancaster, but the whole extent was for park land. The fewest inclosures occurred in the Seisdon Hundred, 26 only, and only 3 of these for pasture. For Totmonslow Hundred there was no return. The total number of acres inclosed for pasture amounted to 148, whilst only 28 were inclosed for tillage, and the remainder was imparked. No cases of eviction were mentioned. 76 Unfortunately there is no information for Staffordshire in respect to the Inclosure Commission of 1548. The monks had, of course, been the great agents of charity before the dissolution of the monasteries in Staffordshire, and this event must have been one of the causes of the multitude of vagrants and beggars to which constant reference is made in the records of the time. And we know that the severe repressive measures adopted for solving this problem had to give place to more constructive and humane methods of dealing with the poor, methods which culminated in the great Act of 1601, which provided for the raising of a rate in each parish for relieving the impotent, setting the able-bodied to work, and apprenticing the pauper children to some useful trade. As we have already seen, there is ample evidence of the poverty of the county at this time. In 1559 it is said to be weakened by sickness. 77 In 1593 there was a serious visitation of the plague in England, and more than eleven hundred are said to have died in Lichfield alone. 78 We hear also of the decay of towns. For instance, when Queen Elizabeth visited Stafford in 1575 the burgesses complained of the decay of the town, and ascribed it to the depressed and dying state of the cap trade. 79 Again, in an Elizabethan survey of Tutbury, the writer laments the general decay and depopulation of towns, and says that there ought to be more markets and fairs ' to make men more desirous to plant their habitations in these places.' 80 Leland, who travelled through England in the years 15369, makes no mention of the Potteries. He describes Walsall as a little market town, and Burton as a place where ' there be many marbellers working in alabaster.' 8 As yet there is no mention of the great brewing industry, nor of the clothing trade, which, according to Defoe, was carried on there with great profit in I7 7 8. 82 The seventeenth century may be regarded as a time in which the way was prepared for the industrial developments of the eighteenth in Stafford- shire. By 1639 Dudley had got his second royal patent for smelting iron with pit-coal instead of charcoal, and he was carrying on his experiments with considerable success at Sedgeley in spite of fierce opposition and jealousy on the part of the neighbouring iron-masters. 83 The discovery of this new process, " See Inq. of 1 5 1 7 (Inclosures and Evictions), ed. from Lansdowne MSS. i, 1 5 3, by J. S. Leadam, M. A. Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc. (New Ser.), vi (1892), 310, 314. 77 Cal. S.P. Dom. 1547-80, p. 122. Stebbing Shaw, Hist. ofS/af.i, 333. 79 J. L. Cherry, Stafford in Olden Times (1890), quoting an old document. 80 Stebbing Shaw, op. cit. i, 45. Tutbury paid l 161. ^d. to the subsidy of 1590. See Talbot Papers in Coll. of Arms, v, 218. el Leland, I tin. (ed. Hearne, 1769), 26.
- Defoe, Tour Through Great Britain (8th ed.), ii, 365.
83 Lord Dudley, Metallum Mortis, 16, 17. 287
