In the 1740s, when cattle plague struck central England, an educated boy would pray rather than, like people in the Middle Ages, blame it all on witches and find a "witch" to bear the guilt.
Joshua Wedgwood had been born and raised in Staffordshire. Like many apprentices, he had begun making pottery at the age of nine alongside his elder brother in the family workshop their father had left behind. Yet the cattle plague had instantly robbed many people of the most important possession of a farming family—their cattle—forcing them to seek work in factories.
Staffordshire was also an industrial area, but once grown, Wedgwood had gone to Birmingham. It was indeed a noisy, filthy, chaotic, unplanned city, yet its freedom from regulations and the restraints of old guilds, along with its brain-boiling creativity, had made it one of the centres of the Industrial Revolution's "Enlightenment."
At the time, Birmingham had no large steelworks or manufacturing plants. It consisted mainly of independent tradesmen. Many runaway apprentices fled there; some, like Wedgwood, continued the trades they had learned before, while others became merchants. The Boulton family was still in the buckle business then. Manufacturers would ride out on horseback themselves, carrying a pair of pistols on their belts in case they encountered bandits along the way.
Even if they were not Robin Hood, they still entertained thoughts of robbing the rich to aid the poor. Along the road, these manufacturers might join forces with textile makers from Manchester, cutlery makers from Sheffield, or potters from Staffordshire to deal with highwaymen.
It was not as wild as the American West, but the roads were certainly nothing like those described in Pride and Prejudice, where a girl and two elderly couples could casually travel about in their own carriage. Public security under one's