Around Hawkesyard Before Emancipation

Was there ever such a benighted stretch of railway as the Birmingham, Cannock and Rugeley Line, L.M.S. P The grime, the smoke and reek, the glimpses of 'dumps and the offal of modern industrial conditions, the gloomy, forbidding-looking stations, and the dank fields in between are so depressing that we instinctively bury ourselves in a book so as not to see the spectres.Yet if we knew it, if Vre could but lift the veil of two hundred years, we might be conscious of spectres of a very different type. For we are on hallowed ground, even though now so defiled and besihirched that nothing seems further from it than romance. But here is the romance. In the British Museum there is preserved a list of convicted Recusants in the reign of Charles II. This list has been compiled from the returns made by the clerks of the peace in twenty-three counties during the years 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 28 and 29, of Charles II. In it we have enshrined the names of 10,236 people who, rather than conform to the Church by law established, preferred to pay a fine of £20 a month for each grown-up person thus absenting himself, though only £10 for a wife

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