The “Industrial Revolution” that changed the face of a large part of England is generally stated to have commenced about 1770, when machinery began to displace hand-labour and so drove the workers out of their homes into factories. About the same time came the construction of canals connecting the chief waterways and centres of population, and the slow improvement of the roads. But none of these important changes greatly affected the outward appearance of our villages until about forty years later, when, as the title of this chapter indicates, the steam-engine replaced the water-wheel in the factories, and when coal began to make its influence felt all over the country. Simultaneously there grew up a system of macadamised roads and stage-coaches, which gave place in thirty or forty years to railways. For a century coal was the dominant factor in English life, but since 1910 petrol has played the main part in altering the aspect of the countryside. Meanwhile, of course, minor causes have always been in operation. The progressive enclosure of common land and the gradual grouping of the old one-acre holdings into large hedged fields continued all through the early part of the nineteenth century, in spite of violent agitation by Cobbett. Whatever may have been the arguments in favour of enclosure, the inevitable effect on village life was to squeeze the small man out of existence and to perpetuate the big farm employing workers at starvation wages. Poverty stalked through the little cottages, many of which were unfit for human habitation. The cruel game-laws did not prevent the rapid increase of poaching, and the woods were sprinkled with man-traps and spring-guns, which sometimes claimed a gamekeeper for victim instead of a poacher. And, while economic conditions were rapidly abolishing the old self-supporting village community, changes in the means of transport brought machine-made goods to its doors, thus destroying at one blow the independence of the village craftsman and the rustic character of village architecture. Too scattered, too cowed, and too poor to organise a successful revolt, many of the villagers found their consolation in the little barn-like chapels erected by the Primitive Methodists and other Nonconformist bodies in the early part of the century. Usually severe and uncompromising, often ugly, these buildings represented a revolt against the partnership of squire and parson with its iron grip on village life. The dignified brick meeting-houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were of another type, the flamboyant Gothic chapel of Victorian days had not been conceived, but the village Bethel of 1810 or so is a standing witness to the cottager’s grievance against the ruling class of his day. Very little cottage-building was done, for though the population was increasing very fast, it was migrating from country to town in order to be near the new factories.