ncil recently made a Cemetery there, it was also
without a burial ground.

Bentley has but a scant population, and contains not a single inn. Its
living history seems to have centred almost entirely round the old family
mansion of the Lanes.

In 1660 a tax was levied on the fire-hearth of every dwelling-house, and
the amount collected under this grievous impost in Willenhall was
returned as 9 pounds 14s. 3d., representing 97 hearths. These figures
seem to indicate that in the reign of Charles II. the population of the
place, including the large hall at Bentley, could not have exceeded 500.

XXVI.--Modern Self-Government.

For centuries the Manorial and the Parochial forms of government ran
together side by side in this country, till these two antiquated ideas of
feudal lordship and church temporalities had to give way before the
growing democratic principle of elective representation, and they were
eventually supplanted by the modern methods of popular self-government.

In the reign of Elizabeth--say, half a century after the suppression of
the monasteries which had hitherto succoured the poor--we get the first
of our Poor Laws, accompanied by the rise of the Overseer, and by much
added importance to the office of Churchwarden, or, as he was called in
Willenhall, the Chapel-warden. The establishment of Church doles goes a
long way to explain how strenuously the community strove to evade its
liability to the poor, and it is probable that Willenhall did not
establish its small workhouse till the eighteenth century. This was
superseded when the Wolverhampton Union was constituted in 1834.

In 1776 the sum of 294 pounds 14s. 3d. had to be collected for poor rates
in Willenhall, a sum which by 1785 had grown to 548 pounds 14s. 2d., and
which for some years later averaged upwards of 500 pounds.

The Vestry, or public assembly of parishioners, would supplement these
feeble efforts at local government by choosing not only Chapelwardens,
but Parish Constables and the Waywardens. The custody of the stocks was
entrusted to the former, while the latter were supposed to superintend
the amateur efforts of the parishioners to repair their own highways,
every one being then liable to furnish either manual labour or team work
for this laudable public purpose.

Publicly elected and unsalaried Waywardens were naturally but feeble
instruments to work with; so in the early nineteenth century, when
coaching was at its ze