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 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 This was superseded when the Wolverhampton Union was constituted in 1834.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 14s. 3d. had to be collected for poor rates in Willenhall, a sum which by 1785 had grown to £548 14s. 2d., and which for some years later averaged upwards of £500.
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with; so in the early nineteenth century, when coaching was at its zenith, this antiquated and ineffective system was superseded in Willenhall, as in many other places, by an elected Highway Board, charged with the duty of
looking after all highways and common streets, ancient bridges, ditches, and watercourses. In a dilettante sort of way this Board was also a sanitary body.
In 1734 Willenhall is recorded to have suffered from a plague called the “Bloody flux,” which carried away its victims in a very few hours after the seizure. It is stated in the Parish Registers that there were buried in this year 82 persons, which was 67 in excess of the previous year. The population then was under 1,000.
Cholera and other epidemic scourges having made it apparent that beyond preserving the peace and mending the roads, the paramount duty of local self-government was to protect the people’s health, Willenhall in 1854 showed itself alive to this fact by adopting the new Public Health Acts and calling into being its first Local Board.