When an alteration of the law settlement has released from parish bondage and vegetation those adscripti glebæ agricultural labourers, the advantage of our network of railways will be still more felt.
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STAFFORD TO SHREWSBURY.—The third line diverging from Stafford, counting the continuation of the London as a fourth, is the railway to Shrewsbury, passing through NEWPORT and WELLINGTON, where it joins the direct line from Wolverhampton, and affording, by a continuation which passes near Oswestry, Chirk, and Llangollen, [{138}] to Wrexham, Chester, and Birkenhead, another route to Liverpool, and, through Chester, the nearest way to Holyhead and Ireland.
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NEWPORT.—The first station after leaving Stafford for Shrewsbury, and immediately after crossing into Shropshire, is a small market town and borough, with a corporation, which can be traced back to Henry III. The church, of the fifteenth century, with an interior of great beauty, has been frightfully disfigured by aisles built of bricks in a common builders’ style of architecture.
This corporation offers an example which might be with advantage followed by greater men holding the same office; they have but a small income, and they apply it to keeping in order cisterns and conduits which supply the town with water.
There is a free grammar school founded by one William Adams in 1756, which has a library attached to the school and five scholarships. The best, of £80 a year, to Christchurch, Oxford.
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WELLINGTON stands at the base of the Wrekin, is the centre of the Shropshireman’s toast and the chief town of the coal and iron district, and is the point where the line from Wolverhampton makes a junction, affording the nearest road from Birmingham to Shrewsbury. It was here that Charles I., on his march from Wellington to Shrewsbury, assembled his troops, and, in order to allay the growing disaffection among them, declared that he would “support the reformed religion, govern by law, uphold the privileges of parliament, and preserve the liberty of the subject.”
From Wellington you may proceed by omnibus to Coalbrookdale, where the first iron bridge was built over the Severn, where the Darbys and Dickensons have carried on iron works for more than a century, where coal was first applied profitably to smelting iron, and where the fine iron castings of Berlin have been rivalled, and successful attempts have been made to introduce the principles of the fine arts into domestic manufactures. The firm are members of the Society of Friends. Fortunately their tenets do not prevent them from selling us coal-scuttles of beautiful design, although their wives and daughters are bound, according to the conservative principles of their sect, to wear bonnets of an unvarying and hideous coal-scuttle shape.