rbyshire witness put it:

'When the boys have been beaten, knocked about, and covered with
sludge all the week, they want to be in bed all day to rest on
Sunday.'[55]

In the hope of startling a religiously-minded England, the Commissioners
reproduced examples of working-class ignorance. James Taylor, aged
eleven,

'Has heard of hell in the pit, when the men swore; has never
heard of Jesus Christ; has never heard of God; he has heard the
men in the pit say, "God damn thee ".'

A Yorkshire girl, aged eighteen, said:

'I do not know who Jesus Christ was; I never saw him, but I have
seen Foster, who prays about him.'[56]

4. Just as in the East Midlands the frame-work knitters worked for
middlemen or master middlemen, and just as the Dudley nailers worked for
petty-foggers and market-foggers, so too the Staffordshire miners worked
for 'butties'. Here again the workers were exposed to the petty
tyrannies of semi-capitalism; and here again the middlemen, in this case
the butties, incurred the odium of a system for which their superiors,
the coal-owners and coal-masters, were responsible.

Why the butty system prevailed in the Midlands--and in a modified form
it prevails to-day--is not clear. In some places it seems to be
connected with the smallness of the mining concerns or of the metal
trades which they supplied. In South Staffordshire a contributing factor
was the ancient and allied industry of nail-making.

The conditions in South Staffordshire in 1843 are fully described in the
Midland Mining Commission of that year.

The butty was a contractor who engaged with the proprietor or lessee of
the mine to deliver the coal or iron-stone at so much per ton, himself
hiring the labourers, using his own horses, and supplying the tools
requisite for the working of the mine. The contract price was known as
the 'charter price' or 'charter'. Thus by a freak of language the
Staffordshire miner knew by the same word the 'butty's charter' which
was the symbol of his oppression, and the 'people's charter' which was
the goal of his desire.

'The butties', said the miners and their wives, 'are the devil: they are
negro drivers: they play the vengeance With the men.'[57] The men
kicked when, after working a couple of hours, they were fetched up,
without pay, on the excuse that there were no waggons to take away the
coal. But the butty comforted them with a bottle of pit drink, and all
w