Dudley's Heritage: The 17th Century & Lord Dudley

By the seventeenth century, serious depletion of forests had occurred and local industrialists turned their minds to finding alternative fuels.

Around 1625 the son of Lord Dudley, known as Dud Dudley, began to experiment with coal as an alternative fuel for iron making. In 1665 he recorded in his book Metallum Martis, that he succeeded (after forty years of trials and experiments). He records that this upset the local charcoal workers who destroyed his furnaces.

Dud Dudley has received little recognition in the general scheme of things and until very recently one of the most significant of his works went completely unnoticed. This is that in that same book he provides a map showing Dudley Castle around which he correctly identifies the stratigraphic order and geographic layout of beds of coal and ironstone. This is, we believe, the earliest known geological map and reflects a key point in the development of scientific thinking and information recording and interpretation.