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194 the present one to their cramped space. On this occasion the Commons held their sessions in a barn, and probably had bundles of straw for their "ministerial benches."

The speaker's chair may have been a perch on the bay-beam. The peers temporal and spiritual probably met in the knights' hall, well garnished with boars' heads and deers' horns. Here, in speeches of Norman French, they discussed the public affairs of the kingdom. There is Broseley, well known in the tap-rooms of this and half-a-dozen other kingdoms for its tobacco-pipes. Sir Walter Raleigh was the making of that village and its business when he introduced the Indian weed from America. The Broseley clay was the best fitted for this tubular pottery, and its potters worked out a marvellous variety of patterns for burning the narcotic incense to an evil habit. One of the local archæologists has collected one hundred and thirty specimens, all of different design and make. Between these two points of historical and industrial interest is Wenlock and its old abbey ruin with its ranks of pillars and arches marked with all the genius of the religious sculptors of the Middle Ages. It is a structure ruined picturesquely by the old abbey-mauler of Henry VIII. Oliver's predecessor and teacher in the tactics of demolition. Then in the mosaic of all these heterogenous associations, you have