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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY continuous streets, but interspersed with blazing rurnaces, heaps of burning coal in process of coking, piles of iron-stone, calcining forges, pit-banks and engine chimneys, the country being besides intersected with canals, crossing each other at various levels, and the small remaining patches of surface soil are occupied with irregular fields of grass or corn inter- mingled with heaps of refuse of mines, or from the slag of blast furnaces. Sometimes the road passes between mounds of refuse from the pits, like a causeway raised some feet above the fields on either side, which have subsided by the excavation of the minerals beneath. These circumstances in the state of the surface and the substrata, united to the clouds of smoke from the furnaces, coke hearths, and heaps of calcined iron-stone, which drift across the country according to the direction of the wind, have effectually excluded from it all classes except those whose daily bread depends upon their residence within these districts. This separation of rich and poor, employer and employed, was one of the worst features of the district. Ijn the parish of Sedgeley, e.g., which comprised a number of scattered but densely- populated villages, there were reported to be not more than four of the gentry in the whole district, nor a single resident independent proprietor. 160 At Rowley Regis there was neither resident clergyman nor magistrate among 12,000 inhabitants; 8,000 were employed in mining or in some branch of the iron industry. 161 At Kingswinford, again, the report says that before the rapid advance of the miner the ancient gentry are being driven back and the sites of their mansions are only known by the names of the collieries and ironworks erected on them. 162 The scarcity of clergy and churches throughout the district at this time is reflected in an expression of the day, ' as few as parish churches.' The people who seemed to be most wretched were the nailers, men, women and children working together in the little domestic workshops adjoining their miserable homes. Suffering from the evils of the middleman and the sweater, as they do in a minor degree to-day, they were also largely at the mercy of the truck system, now happily stamped out among them. It is interesting to notice how the geological structure of the district affects the occupation of the people and, indirectly, their social condition. The nailers, as the report points out, are usually to be found everywhere along the line of junction between the Coal Measures and the Red Sandstone, and with any other formation, such as the limestone hills near Sedgeley. The following description of a village of nailers in 1843 is given by Mr. James Boydell, managing partner of the Oak Farm Company Works in Lower Gornal : Lower Gornal is the dirtiest and most uncivilised village in the world, yet the people have the best hearts. The people are mostly nailers, and are a very rough set. Men, women and children work together, there is no comfort at home, and both men and women go to the public houses and drink and sing together. As yet the machine-made nails were not competing with the hand-wrought article, but such competition was drawing near : I fear great injury (says Mr. Boydell) will be done to our nailing population by an invention I saw yesterday in London, by which nails of excellent quality are made by pressure. This seems likely to reduce the cost of hand made nails considerably. 160 Midland Mining Com. Rep. i (1843), vol. xiii, p. cli. 161 Ibid. clii. 162 Ibid. cli. 301