Black Country History

There are Black Country towns and villages mentioned in the Domesday Book e.g. there was an Anglo-Saxon monastery at Wolverhampton (1) and a Norman castle in Dudley (2)  You can still visit the castle’s extensive ruins which have Dudley Zoo in its grounds.  The area was initially rural but the beginnings of industrialisation were apparent with coal mining carried out from medieval times.  Metalworking was important in the Black Country area as early as the 16th century with the first blast furnace built at West Bromwich in the 1560s.  All of this was possible because of the ready availability of iron ore, limestone and especially coal which was present in a seam 30 feet thick, the thickest in Great Britain, which outcropped to the surface making mining easy even with simple technology.  It was common for people to have an agricultural smallholding and to supplement their income by working as nailers or smiths and by the 1620s it was said that “within ten miles of Dudley Castle there were 20,000 smiths of all sorts”.  Shown here is Turner's apocalyptic view of Dudley in 1862, Dudley Castle and St. Thomas Church can be seen on the skyline but the canal has been moved to aid the composition: we must allow Turner some artistic licence.  The overall impression of industrial squalor is clear.

Dud Dudley, born in 1599 is an important character in the history of Black Country.  His parents were Edward Sutton, 5th Baron Dudley and Elizabeth Tomlinson (Edward Sutton's mistress - with whom he had at least 11 illegitimate children).  They lived at Himley Hall, then a moated manor house. Dud was born in 1599, Edward looked after his children well and educated them before employing them in the management of his extensive properties.  Dud Dudley was educated at Balliol College Oxford and in 1619 his father had him take charge of an iron furnace at Pensnett; it was there that Dud Dudley began experimenting with smelting iron with coal rather than charcoal and in 1620 his father, Lord Dudley obtained a patent for the process from King James I.

Dud Dudley was a pioneer in the iron industry, setting up one of the first forges to successfully use coal to produce iron by melting iron ore in bellow assisted furnaces, although only in small quantities.  Iron had been traditionally produced using charcoal from the wood but there were concerns at the rapid depletion of the forests.  A law by James I in 1584 infact forbad the building of further iron mills, furnaces or fineries to preserve England remaining oak tree for building royal navy ships.

 There were vast coal and iron ore deposits in the area, so coal would seem to be the obvious fuel for smelting iron.   His book Metallum Martis, or, Iron made with pit-coale, sea-coale, &c. and with the same fuell to melt and fine imperfect mettals and refine perfect mettals (3) published in 1665, is important because it is the earliest written refence to the use of coal instead of charcoal in smelting.  The success of his work was limited because of the high sulphur content of the coal: any iron smelted with this coal would also contain sulphur.  The iron may have been good enough for producing cast iron but not good enough for making the important high quality wrought iron where the high sulphur content could embrittle it leading to fracturing on subsequent working.   Only much later was the use of coal in a  furnace totally achieved by James Beaumont Neilson who in 1828 used a hot air blast which greatly increased the hearth temperature and enabled the sulphur to be removed as calcium sulphate slag. 

Sadly for Dud Dudley his work did not lead to widespread adoption of his ideas in his lifetime due not only to the problems with sulphur in the coal but also due to destruction to his factory at Cradley by the "Great May Day Flood" which caused much damage in the entire area and multiple lawsuits by the charcoal ironmasters who also instigated a mob of rioters  to destroy his factory.  In spite of this he is still seen as the "grandparent" of coal-based metallurgy.  In the late 18th century this inspired Abraham Darby, whose great grandmother, Jane, was Dud Dudleys sister, to successfully use coke  in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire.  The use of coke, derived from coal by a roasting process, removed much of the sulphur and allowed production of good quality wrought iron.  

You can find much more detailed information on Dud Dudley and his historical impact here. 

Particularly significant for the Black Country itself was the establishment of an iron works near Bilston by John Wilkinson in 1757.  He started making iron there using coke rather than using coal itself or charcoal from wood. This development was followed by others and thereafter iron-making spread rapidly across the Black Country.  Another significant invention by Henry Cort in 1783 was the development of grooved rollers which enabled "round iron" to be produced for the growing chain making industry rather than square section bar previously produced by slitting iron slab.

The iron industry grew during the 19th century and in the mid-1860s: there were 200 blast furnaces in the Black Country and over 2,000 puddling furnaces, which were used to converted cast pig-iron into wrought iron.  Also the first Black Country plant capable of producing steel by the Bessemer process was constructed at the Old Park Works in Wednesbury and later, in 1882, at Spring Vale in Bilston, a development followed in 1894 by open-hearth steel production at the Round Oak works in Brierley Hill.

An inportant development of the 18th century was the construction of canals to link the output of the Black Country coal mines, which previously could only be used locally, to the rest of the country, they also enabled the transport of the finished metal goods manufactured from the locally produced iron and steel.  Important examples are the Brindley canal which starting in Birmingham and traversed the heart of the Black Country eventually joining up with the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, the Birmingham Canal Navigation serving the eastern part of the region, and the Stourbridge and Dudley canals.  These eventually allowed access to the river Severn thus enabling transport more widely to the rest of the UK.   The great extent of the Black Country canal network  can be seen from the diagram.   An interesting example of direct loading of the output of mines to canal narrowboats are the subterannean tunnels at Wren's Nest, Dudley, where limestone was mined.  Rather than laboriously taking the mined limestone up a mineshaft to the surface the limestone was lowered further underground to a canal tunnel running under the workings.  This is explained in Sian Macfarlane's excellent book on "the folklore of the subterranean" available here, (4) which contains much on the Wren's Nest mine as well as Black Country mining in general and the superstitions associated with them.

 In the 19th century local railways were built which progressively took much of the transport of goods from the canals.  Industries rapidly developed based on the ready availability of coal and minerals.  Clay, often appearing with the thick coal seams, was used in the production of ceramic pipes, crucibles and engineering bricks, limestone from the Wrens Nest area of Dudley was used as a flux in iron and steel making, and dolerite hard rock quarried from Rowley Hills for road making.  The Black Country can claim to be the first industrial landscape with a wide range of metal working industries being developed; chain making and nail making being of particular interest in that they were in effect cottage industries with nails or small chain made in back-yard smithies, usually by women.  Their terrible working conditions  are described in the book by Sherill in 1897 called 'The White Slaves of England'  (5) additionally much detailed information on the women chainmakers of the Cradley Heath area and the 1910 chainmaker's strike can be found at the University of Warwick modern records centre (6).  A video (7) of ladies recounting their chain making experiences and the strike really brings all of this to life.   If you need any further persuading you can read a grim report (8) on child labour in the nail making industry of the Sedgley area  in 1841 by R.H. Horne.

Heavy chain when made in factories were often produced by a team of only three men, a chain smith and two sledgehammer men; these were paid piecework i.e. by the type, quality and amount of chain produced rather than by the hour.  The heaviest anchor chain may have needed a larger team of men or later a steam hammer however.  They would start early in the day, maybe 6.00 a.m. and after 6 hours or more of hot and exhausting work would go home to tend to their allotments, racing pigeons or whippets.  For the heavier chain a two handed hammer ( a "tew onded ommer" in local parlance), shown in the images was used. The videos by Ron Moss, the curator of Mushroom Green Chain Shop, explains very well the history and manufacture of chain in the Black Country and the living conditions of the chainmakers and their families.  You can see a shorter film of heavy chain making here and of the lighter chain making which was more often carried out in back yard smithies called chainshops here.   It is quite possible that if your ancestor came from the area of the Black Country where coal was readily available they were either miners, chain makers or nail makers.  This is particularly so for Pennsylvania and other areas of the east coast of the USA: wages were pitifully low for chain makers in the Black Country in the 19th century and emigration to an area of the 'new world' which had need of their skills and had plentiful supplies of coal, iron ore and other minerals, was attractive.

Another important development of the early 17th century was the introduction of glass making to the Stourbridge area driven by the availability of sandstone, limestone, coal and fireclay for making the pots in which the glass was melted.  (See the page on the Huguenot settlers  for more information on Stourbridge glass making).

In addition to the metal-working and glass making industries, fire brick manufacture was developed in Amblecote, leather goods in Walsall and enamelling in Bilston.

References

(1)   Wolverhampton. Kemble. University of Cambridge. Accessed 7 July 2025. https://dk.robinson.cam.ac.uk/node/74

(2)  Dudley Castle Castellogy. Castellogy. Accessed 7 July 2025. https://castellogy.com/sites/sites-west-midlands/dudley-castle

(3)  Metallum martis, or, Iron made with pit-coale, sea-coale, &c. and with the same fuel to melt and fine imperfect mettals and refine perfect mettals.  Dudley, Dud, 1599-1684.  London : Printed by T.M. for the authour, 1665.

(4)  Macfarlane, Sian (2023) The folklore of the subterranean: the spectres of the underground in Dudley tourist sites. In: Folklore, People, and Places: International Perspectives on Tourism and Tradition in Storied Places. Routledge Advances in Tourism and Anthropology . Routledge, London, pp. 169-185. ISBN 9781032316932 (hardback); 9781003374138 (ebook) 

(5)  Sherrill, Charles H. The white slaves of England, being true pictures of certain social conditions in the Kingdom of England in the year 1897. 1897. Internet Archive. Accessed 7 July 2025. 

(6)  The women chainmakers of Cradley Heath - University of Warwick. University of Warwick. Published 16 August 2022. Accessed 7 July 2025. https://warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/collections/digital/tradeboard/chainmakers

(7)  Nothing to lose". YouTube. By TheGobbledygook1. Published 27 January 2025.

Accessed 7 July 2025. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JSlpnRIUsI

 (8)  Horne, R.H. "To Her Majesty's Commissioners, Upper Sedgley, 26th May, 1841." In First Report of the Commissioners for inquiring into the Employment of Children in Mines and Collieries; and in the Trades and Manufactures in which numbers of Children work together, not being subject to the regulation of the Factory Acts. Parliamentary Papers, 1842, XVI, Appendix to First Report of Commissioners, Trades and Manufactures, Part I, Reports and Evidence from Sub-Commissioners, M 1-M 100. 

(9)  Chain making, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-chain-making-1983-online

(10)  Chain maker, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-chain-maker-1975-online

(11)  Stourbridge fireclay - a vital component for the glass industry. Website Stourbridge.com. URL https://www.stourbridge.com/stourbridge_fireclay.htm Access Date 12 July 2025

(12)  "Walsall Leather Museum". Wikipedia. Last modified 1 November 2023. Accessed 7 July 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walsall_Leather_Museum.  "Black Country". Wikipedia. Accessed 7 July 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Country

 (13)  Bilston Enamels. The Wolverhampton History & Heritage Society. http://www.historywebsite.co.uk/Museum/metalware/bilston.htm. Access Date 12 July 2025

Bibliography

1. Chain & Anchor Making in the Black Country by Ron Moss. Sutton Publishing 2013. ISBN 978-0-7509-4221-8

2. The Black Country Album: 50 Years of Events, People & Places by Graham Gough. The History Press 2012. ISBN 978- 0-7524-7974-3

External Links

3. Life on the Cut in the Black Country  at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EJ63hqEmQ

4. Dudley in the Past Dud Dudley  http://www.historywebsite.co.uk/articles/Dudley/DudDudley.htm