136 DUDLEY.

me she did not know the gentleman, but she had frequently seen the pick and spade with which the hole had been made !

Among the distinguished men who owned Dudley as their native place were the following: Samuel Smith, born in 1588, one of the most popular writers of pious tracts in his day, and an assistant to the commissioners for ejecting "scandalous and ignorant ministers" during the Commonwealth; Henry Sanders, author of " The History of Shenstone," of which he was curate, and subsequently master of the Grammar School at Hales Owen. And the many charities of the late Mr. Jos. Guest demand that his name should not be omitted from any account of this town. Among that gentleman's good deeds was the endowment of an hospital with £20,000. The only two tradesmen of Dudley of the seventeenth century whose coins (tokens) have descended to us were William Biggs, mercer, and John Finch, ironmonger.

Dissent was frightfully coerced, punished, and excommunicated, but iiot put down, at Dudley in the seventeenth century. The ppr Quakers were specially scarified. In 1666, "Thomas Payto'n, late of Dudley, tailor, a professed Quaker, taken at a conventicle of Quakers, in the said town of Dudley, a place much infested with Quakers and disorderly persona, and committed to ye gaol 10th July, and being a stubborn and incorrigible person, was at ye next sessions following tendered the oath of allegiance, which he refused to take, was indicted, and convicted of premunire." Shortly afterwards, one John Payton's house in this town was entered by officers violently at night, when they seized £32 worth of goods, and carried them into the parish church till they were sold, and Payton was fined 10s. for his wife being at a religious meeting, though she was in reality not there. Richard Baxter—I beg his pardon for placing him among the Dissenters—preached his first sermon in "the upper parish church" at Dudley; and in 1776 John Wesley preached in this town, " in the midst of Antinomians and back' sliders." There was a Baptist meeting house in New Street