The design of the present work may be stated in a few words. It is simply to place before the inhabitants of Madeley, and those interested in its history, the various phases through which it has passed in its progress from feudal times to the present. Strangers often come and seek for information which they do not always get: and much that is known by old people of Madeley and its traditions would be lost unless noted down at once. It will be seen that our information extends from the notice we get in Norman times, when tillers of the soil, swineherds, fishermen, a miller or two, and foresters, composed the population, the profits of whose labours were reaped by a priest and the monks of Wenlock Priory. After the Dissolution it will be seen that the mansion was sold to the Brooke family, particulars of which we have given, both in the earlier and later parts of the work. MADELEY. There is a touch alike of poetry and of meaning in the name. Our ancestors were delineators of natural scenery, verbally, and by the use of names. Taking possession of primeval lands and uncleared forests, driving their aboriginal owners before them—in one or more syllables they were wont to give the history of a place, or the more distinguishing features of a country, and word-pictures then current come down to us little altered, having coiled up within them considerable sense and by-gone meaning. Tradition, no less than the popular and generally accepted etymology of the name, informs us that Shrewsbury was originally the place of shrubs; that the dusky crow croaked at Crawley, and the chattering daw built its nest at Dawley. The broc or brag—Anglo-Saxon terms for the badger, once numerous along the Severn Valley—gave us the Brocholes. To reynard we are indebted, in like manner, for the modern name of Foxholes—a place near to the latter, where this animal flourished when Madeley Wood, now covered with cottages, was what its name implied. Little local or archæological lore is required to know that Madeley Wood was the wood bordering on the meadow, or that Madeley is a name derived from meadowly, or mead—a term still used in poetical productions of the day. In like manner, Mad-brook, a little stream on the borders of the village, meandering through meadow land, was Mead or Meadow-brook—as one of our smaller English rivers is called the Medway, from like circumstances, and as Brockton on Madbrook was formerly Brook-town—the town or enclosure on the brook. A tolerable estimate of Madeley, in one of its early phases, and as it appeared to the commissioners appointed to carry out the Domesday Survey, at the time it formed part of the manor belonging to the Abbey of Much Wenlock, may be gleaned from the following extract:—