eserves of Cannock Forest. We may picture the few
hinds constituting the scanty population, tenanting cottages which were
mere hovels, and most of them like Gurth--the swineherd of Scott's
"Ivanhoe"--wearing round their necks the iron collars, which were the
badge of Saxon serfdom, and like him driving their herds into the woods
each morning, and returning at nightfall with their charges grunting and
gorged with beech-mast and acorns.

While to their lowly dome
The full-fed swine return'd with evening home;
Compell'd reluctant, to the several sties,
With din obstreperous, and ungrateful cries.

The trade and callings of an English serf were as limited as his other
opportunities in life; and others beside the swineherd found it in the
adjacent woodlands. For there were certainly woodcutters and charcoal
burners; and if the local iron ore were exploited, who shall say there
were not then Willenhall smiths who fashioned bolts and bars, even if
they had not arrived at the intricacies of locks and keys?

Here we are but emerging from the twilight of history.

VII.--A Chapel and a Chantry at Willenhall.

In the earlier centuries of our national existence, the history of a
parish follows that of its church, the ecclesiastical fold into which its
inhabitants were regularly gathered, not only for every religious
purpose, but for every other object of communal interest or of a public
nature.

But, as previously explained, Willenhall was not a parish; it was but one
member of that wide parochial area ruled from the mother church of
Wolverhampton, several miles distant.

Yet at an early period Willenhall seems to have boasted a chapel-of-ease,
for the Calendar of Patent Rolls, under date 1297, contains an allusion
to "Thomas de Trollesbury, parson of the church of Willenhale." Dr.
Oliver, in his history of the town, says that Wolverhampton church was
rebuilt about 1342, and he evidently attributes the erection of
Willenhall chapel to the same date, as being the outcome of the same
devout spirit of church building. But this is nearly half a century
later than the allusion just quoted from the Patent Rolls, and Dr.
Oliver's reference may possibly be to the founding of a chantry chapel by
the Gerveyse family, who set up one of these mass-houses in Willenhall
about a dozen years after one had been established at Pelsall.

Let it not be imagined that this new church was either a large or a