A Lancashire woman said in evidence: 

’I have a belt round my waist and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet....  The pit is very wet where I work and the water comes over our clog tops always, and I have seen it up to my thighs....  I have drawn till I have had the skin off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family way.’[53]

The children’s office was a lonesome one.  Children hate the dark, but being little they fitted into a niche, and so they were used to open and close the trap-doors.  A trapper lad from the county of Monmouth, William Richards, aged seven-and-a-half, said in evidence: 

     ’I been down about three years.  When I first went down, I could
     not keep my eyes open; I don’t fall asleep now; I smokes my pipe,
     smokes half a quartern a week.’[54]

Except in the northern mining districts, where there were good day and Sunday schools and Methodism was powerful, a pagan darkness prevailed.  As a Derbyshire 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.