stand as evidence of origin, what are we to say to the November election of the Lord Mayor.?[1]
To return to the iron-workers and their characteristics. They can hardly be spoken of as one trade, but rather as many trades depending on one staple product. The various branches of it are very local. The great blast-furnaces and rolling-mills and foundries do indeed attract strong vigorous men from all parts; but the trades which partake of the nature of a handicraft (or rather, which did so partake before everything was machine-made) are carried on each in its own town or village from father to son, generation after generation. There are nailers and chainmakers at Dudley and Gornall; japanners at Bilston; locksmiths at Willenhall; bit and spur-makers at Walsall (where there is a large trade in saddlery also); and there is great rivalry between the villages, and rough jokes on each other abound. The Gornall nailers are the universal butt. To say a man comes from Gornall is as much as to say he is an oaf and a blockhead. "Gornall donkeys" they are called, and it is a well-known and well-understood insult to bray when a Gornall man passes by. "Who put the bulldog i' the cradle and the babby i' the kennel?" is the proper greeting to a Bilston visitor (I think it refers rather to the miners than to the japan-workers). The Willenhall locksmiths hold theirs to be the first of trades, as it requires so much more skill and delicacy than others, such as nail or screw-making; but their neighbours declare that the Willenhall
- ↑ The day of election of Lord Mayor has been altered at various times. Formerly the election took place on the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude (28th October). In 1346 it was changed to the feast of the Translation of Edward the Confessor (13th October). Twenty years later (1365) an order was made to revert to the old custom; but the order was soon ignored, and the election took place as a rule on the 13th October until the year 1546, when the election was ordered to take place thenceforth on Michaelmas Day (29th September), which custom has remained unchanged to the present time. (Royal Commission on London Government, 1893, vol. ii., p. 24.)—G. L. Gomme.
