A HISTORY OF STAFFORDSHIRE up from 9,874 to 38,179 in the century. Willenhall, the home of lock and key makers, contained, in 1901, 21,438 persons, compared with 3,143 a hundred years ago. Bilston, with a population of 24,034, has more than trebled itself, and the population of Tipton has risen during the same period from 4,280 to 30,543. The increase of the population of Tettenhall is only indirectly due to industrial development, as it is now the great residential suburb of Wolver- hampton. The growth of Bushbury, however, another suburb, is accounted for largely by the engineering and electrical works established there. It is worth notice that the district round Wolverhampton has maintained its up- ward movement in population despite the fact that many of the ironworks which formerly employed so many workmen have latterly either been closed, or have migrated to the coast, e.g. to Newport, on account of the heavy cost of freight, a serious item of commercial expenditure at a time when foreign competition in the iron trade becomes increasingly acute. Between Bilston and Sedgeley, and again between Walsall and Wolver- hampton, considerable tracts of unsightly mounds and pits mark the sites of mines no longer worked, either because the coal has already been exhausted, or owing to the fact that the mines have become water-logged, and the cost of drainage is too great to allow them to be worked at a profit. The town of Wolverhampton is, however, still famous for the manufacture of tin, japanned, and galvanized goods, whilst other trades such as the manufacture of bicycles and motor cars have grown up during the last thirty years, and given employment to those who have been displaced by the extinction of other industries. The case of Cannock is interesting as that of a town which began the nineteenth century with a tiny population of 1,359, which however reached 23,974 at the opening of the twentieth, having gained most of its increase since 1851, when coal was first dug on Cannock Chase. In the agricultural parts of the county the population has in the main remained stationary or slightly decreased, this decrease being due partly to the inevitable drift of the countryman to industrial centres, and partly to the increase of pasturage and consequent diminution of the demand for agricul- tural labour. In the hundred of Seisdon, with the exception of two or three places, no decrease has taken place at all. In the north division of the hundred of Pirehill there has been none, and the slight decrease in the south division chiefly occurs in villages away from the track of the railways. The same remark applies also to the hundred of Cuttlestone. The most sparsely populated, as it is also the most picturesque, region of Staffordshire is that elevated part of the county which comprehends the limestone regions extending for about forty square miles east of the Dove, and the adjoining tract of moorland with its sharp escarpments of millstone grit and its narrow valleys lying between the limestone and the coal measures. It is a district in which railways play little part, and is given up mainly to pastoral farming, carried on with difficulty in the more barren moor- land region, but with greater success in the valleys and on the uplands of the limestone hills, which produce a short sweet grass good for pasturage. There has been some difficulty as to a market in this limestone district, but this should disappear now that the North Staffordshire Railway Company has 316
