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
