During the period events previously recorded were being enacted, the coal
and iron industries now employing so many hands, and which have brought
so much wealth to individual proprietors, were being developed. Francis
Wolfe, who gave shelter to King Charles, is supposed to have been a
shareholder in some ironworks at Leighton, and probably at Coalbrookdale,
from the fact that an iron plate, bearing date 1609, has the initials
“T.R.W.,” and another with the date 1658 (the latter removed here from
Leighton), also bears a “W” among other initials. We read also of a
clerk of a Shropshire ironworks being the first to convey the news of the
disastrous defeat of the royal army at Worcester. We find, too, that as
early as 1332 Walter de Caldbroke obtained from the Wenlock monks license
to dig for coals at the outcrop at the Brockholes. We also learn from
Fuller, who lived and wrote in the seventeenth century, that what he
calls “fresh-water coal” was dug out at such a distance from the Severn
as to be easily ported by boat into other shires.
Iron, too, was made as we have seen from the Patent Roll, 36 Henry VIII.,
part v., where the grant of the manor of Madeley to Robert Brooke, Esq.
is expressly said to include “the rights attached to the whole of the
place and buildings that go under the one name of the Smithy Place, and
Newhouse called Caldbrooke Smithy, with its patronages in the aforesaid
Madeley.”