A few Black Country places such as Wolverhampton, Bilston and Wednesfield are mentioned in Anglo-Saxon charters and chronicles and the forerunners of a number of Black Country towns and villages such as Cradley, Dudley, Smethwick, and Halesowen are included in the
Domesday Book of 1086. At this early date, the area was mostly rural. A monastery was founded in Wolverhampton in the Anglo-Saxon period Another religious house,
Premonstratensian Abbey of Halesowen, was founded in the early 13th century. A number of Black Country villages developed into market towns and boroughs in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, notably Dudley, Walsall and Wolverhampton. and metalworking was important in the Black Country area as early as the 16th century spurred on by the presence of iron ore and coal in a seam thick, the thickest seam in Great Britain, which outcropped in various places. The first recorded
blast furnace in the Black Country was built at West Bromwich in the early 1560s. By the 1620s "Within ten miles [16 km] of Dudley Castle there were 20,000 smiths of all sorts". In the early 17th century,
Dud Dudley, a natural son of the Baron of Dudley, experimented with making iron using coal rather than charcoal. Two patents were granted for the process: one in 1621 to Lord Dudley and one in 1638 to Dud Dudley and three others. In his work
Metallum Martis, published in 1665, he claimed to have "made Iron to profit with Pit-cole". However, considerable doubt has been cast on this claim by later writers. An important development in the early 17th century was the introduction of the
slitting mill to the Midlands area. In the Black Country, the establishment of this device was associated with
Richard Foley, son of a Dudley nailer, who built a slitting mill near
Kinver in 1628. One attraction of the region for glass makers was the local deposits of
fireclay, a material suitable for making the pots in which glass was melted. In 1642 at the start of the
Civil War,
Charles I failed to capture the two arsenals of Portsmouth and Hull, which although in cities loyal to Parliament were located in counties loyal to him. As he had failed to capture the arsenals, Charles did not possess any supply of swords, pikes, guns, or shot; all these the Black Country could and did provide. From
Stourbridge came shot, from
Dudley cannon. Numerous small forges which then existed on every brook in the north of Worcestershire turned out successive supplies of sword blades and pike heads. It was said that among the many causes of anger Charles had against Birmingham was that one of the best sword makers of the day,
Robert Porter, who manufactured swords in
Digbeth, Birmingham, refused at any price to supply swords for "
that man of blood" (a Puritan nickname for King Charles), or any of his adherents. As an offset to this sword-cutler and men like him in Birmingham, the Royalists had among their adherents Dud Dudley, now a Colonel in the Royalist army, who had experience in iron making, and who claimed he could turn out "all sorts of bar iron fit for making of muskets, carbines, and iron for great bolts", both more cheaply, more speedily and more excellent than could be done in any other way. In 1712, a
Newcomen Engine was constructed near Dudley and used to pump water from coal mines belonging to Lord Dudley. This is the earliest documented working steam engine. An important milestone in the establishment of Black Country industry came when
John Wilkinson set up an iron works at
Bradley near Bilston. In 1757 he started making iron there by coke-smelting rather than using charcoal. In the middle of the 18th century,
Bilston became well known for the craft of
enamelling. Items produced included decorative containers such as patch-boxes, snuff boxes and
bonbonnieres. The iron industry grew during the 19th century, peaking around 1850–1860. In 1863, there were 200
blast furnaces in the Black Country, of which 110 were in blast. Two years later it was recorded that there were 2,116
puddling furnaces, which converted
pig-iron into
wrought iron, in the Black Country. By the 19th century or early 20th century, many villages had their characteristic manufacture, but earlier occupations were less concentrated. Some of these concentrations are less ancient than sometimes supposed. For example, chain making in
Cradley Heath seems only to have begun in about the 1820s, and the
Lye holloware industry is even more recent. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, coal and
limestone were worked only on a modest scale for local consumption, but during the Industrial Revolution by the opening of canals, such as the
Birmingham Canal Navigations,
Stourbridge Canal and the
Dudley Canal (the
Dudley Canal Line No 1 and the
Dudley Tunnel) opened up the mineral wealth of the area to exploitation. Advances in the use of
coke for the production of iron enabled iron production (hitherto limited by the supply of
charcoal) to expand rapidly. By
Victorian times, the Black Country was one of the most heavily industrialised areas in Britain, and it became known for its pollution, particularly from iron and coal industries and their many associated smaller businesses. Industrialisation led to the expansion of local railways and coal mine lines. The line running from Stourbridge to Walsall via
Dudley Port and
Wednesbury closed in the 1960s, but the Birmingham to Wolverhampton line via Tipton is still a major transport route. The
anchors and
chains for the ill-fated liner
RMS Titanic were made in the Black Country at
Netherton. Three anchors and accompanying chains were manufactured; and the set weighed in at 100
tons. The centre anchor alone weighed 12 tons and was pulled through Netherton on its journey to the ship by 20
Shire horses. near Stourbridge In 1913, the Black Country was the location of arguably one of the most important strikes in British trade union history when the workers employed in the area's steel tube trade came out for two months in a successful demand for a 23 shilling minimum weekly wage for unskilled workers, giving them pay parity with their counterparts in nearby Birmingham. This action commenced on 9 May in Wednesbury, at the Old Patent tube works of John Russell & Co. Ltd., and within weeks upwards of 40,000 workers across the Black Country had joined the dispute. Notable figures in the labour movement, including a key proponent of
Syndicalism,
Tom Mann, visited the area to support the workers and Jack Beard and
Julia Varley of the
Workers' Union were active in organising the strike. During this confrontation with employers represented by the Midlands Employers' Federation, a body founded by
Dudley Docker, the
Asquith Government's armaments programme was jeopardised, especially its procurement of naval equipment and other industrial essentials such as steel tubing, nuts and bolts, destroyer parts, etc. This was of national significance at a time when Britain and Germany were engaged in the
Anglo-German naval arms race that preceded the outbreak of the
First World War. Following a ballot of the union membership, a settlement of the dispute was reached on 11 July after arbitration by government officials from the Board of Trade led by the Chief Industrial Commissioner Sir
George Askwith, 1st Baron Askwith. One of the important consequences of the strike was the growth of organised labour across the Black Country, which was notable because until this point the area's workforce had effectively eschewed trade unionism. The 20th century saw a decline in coal mining in the Black Country, with the last colliery in the region –
Baggeridge Colliery near
Sedgley – closing on 2 March 1968, marking the end of an era after some 300 years of mass coal mining in the region, though a small number of open cast mines remained in use for a few years afterwards. Other industries thrived, however. Manufacturers like
Rubery Owen,
Chance Bros,
Wilkins and Mitchell,
GKN,
John Thompson (company) and many more prospered from the post-war boom in Britain, with the West Midlands motor industry being a key driver of the economy. Wages rose faster than the national average, and unemployment remained low into the late 1970s. It was only in the late 1970s and 1980s, as global shocks and political change affected British industry, that the region began to become deindustrialised, with the years 1979-1982 witnessing the closure of large employers such as
Bilston Steel Works, Round Oak,
Patent Shaft Steelworks, Rubery Owen,
Birmid Industries and others in quick succession. The population of the Black Country changed from one of the most prosperous industrial working-class regions in the country, to one of the most deprived. As the heavy industry that had named the region faded away, in the 1970s a museum, called the
Black Country Living Museum started to take shape on derelict land near to Dudley. Today this museum demonstrates Black Country crafts and industry from days gone by and includes many original buildings which have been transported and reconstructed at the site. ==Geology and landscape==