Black Country Culture
The Black Country working class culture has similarities to other areas of the UK where coal mining and heavy industry predominated: a mordant sense of humour, particular food dishes based on offal or cheap cuts of meat (all that could be afforded by the industrial working class) and a local dialect; all of which Black Country folk are very proud. Examples of local dishes are chitterlings, groaty pudding, faggots, ham hock, grey peas and pork scratchings. If you are adventurous you can find a recipe for groaty pudding here (groats are hulled unrolled oat grains). You can find some Black Country jokes from the BBC told in a Black Country dialect here and help with the translation into more standard English here!
It is said that the Black Country dialect is closer to Old English than any other regional dialect in England so perhaps Chaucer would not have had difficulties understanding Black Country folk but for those who would, and may want to delve deeper, a dictionary of Black Country dialect called "How We Spake" by Ian Beech is very useful as is his similar list of Black Country sayings. The Black Country Society website also has a page of very useful list of dialect words.
If you would like to learn more about the Black Country more generally I can recommend:
The Wikipedia Black Country entry. Wikipedia is a great source of information on most things, including the Black Country.
A site from BBC Local which unfortunately is no longer being updated but is still useful.
The Black Country History website recording the historic objects and documents held by Museums and Archives in the Black Country.
The Pioneering Glass web site which has a great deal of information on the history of glass making, as does a pamphlet from John Hemingway.
Two, rather more academic, books by Edward Chitham: The Black Country and The Story of Dudley, extended abstracts of which you can read here and here although you will have to buy the books to get the complete story.
The many posts from Simon Briercliffe, a professional historian. If you wend your way through the current and older posts on his website you will find a great deal of fascinating information on various regions of the Black Country. Additionally you can watch a Facebook video by Simon Briercliffe about family history searching relating to the Black Country here.
Distinctly Black Country, a network site with many further links to information which in its words "aims to link people who are interested in the way the past has made the modern Black Country landscape".
Blackcountrydiscovered, a website of Erica Williams which covers a great deal of Black Country related information, blogs and comprehensive links to other Black Country related websites.
Websites which give information on particular areas of the Black Country; clicking the relevant buttons for Rowley Regis, Halesowen etc. will take you to the corresponding website. These sites of course usually contain Black Country information much broader than the specific locality...This is particularly true of the Sedgleysite.
The Black Country Living Museum
If you become tired of reading about the Black Country and would like to experience it, there is nothing as good as a visit to the Black Country Living Museum which is an outdoor museum in Dudley. There you can travel on a tram, walk into an adit (a drift coal mine) and experience the conditions suffered by child labour, see chain being made, have a canal trip on a narrow boat into limestone caves as well as visiting the many Victorian shops and other buildings which have been moved from their original locations and rebuilt at the museum. You can find a map and list of all the buildings on the museum site here. If you get hungry after all your experiences you can have proper fish and chips, cooked in beef dripping at Hobbs fish shop followed by a pint of Black Country beer at the Bottle and Glass pub opposite. These are both on the museum site; you can then visit the adjacent Archive and Local History Centre where you can research your Black Country ancestors. If you want the full Black Country pub experience without the crowds you might travel a mile or two to Ma Pardoes in Netherton, a historic pub which still brews its own beer!
Another site worth visiting is Mushroom Green near Cradley Heath where you can see chain being made in an original chain shop, (it is only open once a month so it is worth checking before before going).
To conclude: if your Brettle ancestors came from the Black Country, as they probably did, they would have lived in an industrial, heavily polluted environment, probably employed in hard and dangerous work, poor by modern day standards, with life experiences very different from today. Remember Samuel Sidney's words earlier!