a rent at which, taking the then value of money, a very
tolerable anvil could now be purchased.

When the woods of the kingdom began to be exhausted, attention was turned to
pit coal, which had long been in use for fuel in the counties where it was
plentifully found. A curious account of the first successful experiments is
to be found, told in very quaint language, in the Metallum Martis of Dudley
Dudley, son of Lord Edward Dudley (an ancestor of the late Earl Dudley and
Ward, and of the present Lord Ward, who now enjoys the very estates referred
to, and derives a princely income from the mineral treasures, the true value
of which was discovered by his unfortunate ancestor), published in the reign
of Charles II.

This Mr. Dudley was an early victim of the patent laws, which, to this day,
have proved to be for the benefit of lawyers and officials, and the
tantalization of true inventors and discoverers. The following extracts
contain his story, and enable us to compare the present with the then state
of iron manufacture:--

"Having former knowledge and delight in ironworks of my father's when I was
but a youth, afterwards, at twenty years old, was I fetched from Oxford, then
of Baliol College, anno 1619, to look after and manage three ironworks of my
father's, one furnace and two forges in the chace of Pensnel, in
Worcestershire; but wood and charcoal growing very scanty, and pit-coals in
great quantities abounding near the furnace, did induce me to alter my
furnace and to attempt by my new invention, the making of iron with pit-coal,
and found at my trial or blast, facere est addere inventioni. After I had
proved by a second blast and trial, the feasibility of making iron with pit-
coal and sea-coal, I found by my new invention the quality good and
profitable, but the quantity did not exceed above three tons a week."

After this, the inventor obtained a patent from King James I., for thirty-one
years in the nineteenth year of his reign. "But the year following the grant
there was so great a flood of rain,--to this day called the great May-day
flood,--that it ruined the author's ironworks and inventions, and at a market
town called Sturbridge, in comitatu Wigorniae, one resolute man was carried
from the bridge in the day time." "As soon as the author had repaired his
works, he was commanded to send all sorts of bar iron up to the Tower of
London, fit for making of muskets and carbines, {127} and the iron being so