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 tried by artists and smiths, that the ironmasters and ironmongers who had complained that the author’s iron was not merchantable, were silenced until the twenty-first of King James.”  “At the then parliament all monopolies were made null, and divers of the ironmeasters endeavoured to bring the invention of making iron with pit-coal within the compass of a monopoly; but the Lord Dudley and the author did prevail, yet the patent was limited to continue but fourteen years.”

This exception in the Statute of Monopolies, which incontestably proves the claim of the Dudley family to the honour of having invented the art of smelting iron with coal, runs in the following terms:—­“Provided also that this Act shall not extend to, or be prejudicial to, a graunt or priviledge for the melting of iron ewer, and of maling the same into sea coals or pit coals, by His Majesties letters Patent under the Great Seale of England, made or graunted to Edward Lord Dudley.”