DUDLEY. 131

resort of thousands of visitors, with frequent excursions and pic-uics.

" The palace of the feudal victor Now serves for nought but for a picture."

The Priory was founded in the time of Henry II by one of the Paganels, for Cluniac monks. Erdswicke, who wrote a " Survey of Staffordshire" about the year 1600, mentions the two churches of St. Thomas's and St. Edmund's, at Dudley. The latter was demolished in 1646, and both parishes then used St. Thomas's church. St. Edmund's was afterwards rebuilt by Mr. R. Bradley, in 1724, and still remains—notwithstanding its restoration and reseating in 186S—a wretched specimen of that dark century. St. Thomas's is the parish church, and here we have something better, although the building was erected so lately aa 1816. It is in a commanding position, and its tower and handsome spire form a pleasing feature in the coup cPcetl of High Street. An expenditure of £24,000 on a church at the period in question, and in the town of Dudley, was certainly an act to be proud of, as also was its restoration in 1862 at a further cost of £1,500. The tower contains a ring of ten bells.

Besides these churches are those of St. James, at Eve Hill, erected in 1840; St. John's, a district church at Kate's Hill, also erected in 1840; and St. Andrew's, at Netherton Hill, built in 1830. Thus the great town of Dudley, with a population of nearly 50,000, has but five, churches, while Worcester, with a little over 30,000, possesses eighteen! How, then, can we wonder at the state of crime in the former place, which has for so many years occupied nearly one-third of the county calendar at our Assizes and Sessions, or at the desperate efforts made by Worcestershire to shake off her promontory of Dudley into the county (Staffordshire) by which it is almost surrounded? What an Elysian field would Worcestershire have been, divested of "the black country" and its criminals! But Dudley couldn't see the utility of being