Industrial Biography: Iron Workers and Tool Makers. Samuel Smiles
the welds of Sussex, Surry, and Kent', the grand nursery especially of oake and beech, shal find such an alteration, within lesse than 30 yeeres, as may well strike a feare, lest few yeeres more, as pestilent as the former, will leave fewe good trees standing in those welds. Such a heate issueth out of the many forges and furnaces for the making of iron, and out of the glasse kilnes, as hath devoured many famous woods within the welds,"—JOHN NORDEN, Surveyors' Dialogue (1607).
Few records exist of the manufacture of iron in England in early times. After the Romans left the island, the British, or more probably the Teutonic tribes settled along the south coast, continued the smelting and manufacture of the metal after the methods taught them by the colonists. In the midst of the insecurity, however, engendered by civil war and social changes, the pursuits of industry must necessarily have been considerably interfered with, and the art of iron-forging became neglected. No notice of iron being made in Sussex occurs in Domesday Book, from which it would appear that the manufacture had in a great measure ceased in that county at the time of the Conquest, though it was continued in the iron-producing districts bordering on Wales. In many of the Anglo-Saxon graves which have been opened, long iron swords have been found, showing that weapons of that metal were in common use. But it is probable that iron was still scarce, as ploughs and other agricultural implements continued to be made of wood,—one of the Anglo-Saxon laws enacting that no man should undertake to guide a plough who could not make one; and that the cords with which it was bound should be of twisted willows. The metal was held in esteem principally as the material of war. All male adults were required to be provided with weapons, and honour was awarded to such artificers as excelled in the fabrication of swords, arms, and defensive armour.[1]
Camden incidentally states that the manufacture of iron was continued in the western counties during the Saxon era, more particularly in the Forest of Dean, and that in the time of Edward the Confessor the tribute paid by the city of Gloucester consisted almost entirely of iron rods wrought to a size fit for making nails for the king's ships. An old religious writer speaks of the ironworkers of that day as heathenish in their manners, puffed up with pride, and inflated with worldly prosperity. On the occasion of St. Egwin's visit to the smiths of Alcester, as we are told in the legend, he found then given up to every kind of luxury; and when he proceeded to preach unto them, they beat upon their anvils in contempt of his doctrine so as completely to deafen him; upon which he addressed his prayers to heaven, and the town was immediately destroyed.[2]
But the first reception given to John Wesley by the miners of the Forest of Dean, more than a thousand years later, was perhaps scarcely more gratifying than that given to St. Egwin.
That working in iron was regarded as an honourable and useful calling in the Middle Ages, is apparent from the extent to which it was followed by the monks, some of whom were excellent craftsmen. Thus St. Dunstan, who governed England in the time of Edwy the Fair, was a skilled blacksmith and metallurgist. He is said to have had a forge even in his bedroom, and it was there that his reputed encounter with Satan occurred, in which of course the saint came off the victor.
There was another monk of St. Alban's, called Anketil, who flourished in the twelfth century, so famous for his skill as a worker in iron, silver, gold, jewelry, and gilding, that he was invited by the king of Denmark to be his goldsmith and banker. A pair of gold and silver candlesticks of his manufacture, presented by the abbot of St. Alban's to Pope Adrian IV., were so much esteemed for their exquisite workmanship that they were consecrated to St. Peter, and were the means of obtaining high ecclesiastical distinction for the abbey.
We also find that the abbots of monasteries situated in the iron districts, among their other labours, devoted themselves to the manufacture of iron from the ore. The extensive beds of cinders still found in the immediate neighbourhood of Rievaulx and Hackness, in Yorkshire, show that the monks were well acquainted with the art of forging, and early turned to account the riches of the Cleveland ironstone. In the Forest of Dean also, the abbot of Flaxley was possessed of one stationary and one itinerant forge, by grant from Henry II, and he was allowed two oaks weekly for fuel,—a privilege afterwards commuted, in 1258, for Abbot's Wood of 872 acres, which was held by the abbey until its dissolution in the reign of Henry VIII. At the same time the Earl of Warwick had forges at work in his woods at Lydney; and in 1282, as many as 72 forges were leased from the Crown by various iron-smelters in the same Forest of Dean.
There are numerous indications of iron-smelting having been conducted on a considerable scale at some remote period in the neighbourhood of Leeds, in Yorkshire. In digging out the foundations of houses in Briggate, the principal street of that town, many "bell pits" have been brought to light, from which ironstone has been removed. The new cemetery at Burmandtofts, in the same town, was in like manner found pitted over with these ancient holes. The miner seems to have dug a well about 6 feet in diameter, and so soon as he reached the mineral, he worked it away all round, leaving the bell-shaped cavities in question. He did not attempt any gallery excavations, but when the pit was exhausted, a fresh one was sunk. The ore, when dug, was transported, most probably on horses' backs, to the adjacent districts for the convenience of fuel. For it was easier to carry the mineral to the wood—then exclusively used for smelting'—than to bring the wood to the mineral. Hence the numerous heaps of scoriae found in the neighbourhood of Leeds,—at Middleton, Whitkirk, and Horsforth—all within the borough. At Horsforth, they are found in conglomerated masses from 30 to 40 yards long, and of considerable width and depth. The remains of these cinder-beds in various positions, some of them near the summit of the hill, tend to show, that as the trees were consumed, a new wind furnace was erected in another situation, in order to lessen the labour of carrying the fuel. There are also deposits of a similar kind at Kirkby Overblow, a village a few miles to the north-east of Leeds; and Thoresby states that the place was so called because it was the village of the "Ore blowers,"—hence the corruption of "Overblow." A discovery has recently been made among the papers of the Wentworth family, of a contract for supplying wood and ore for iron "blomes" at Kirskill near Otley, in the fourteenth century;[3] though the manufacture near that place has long since ceased.
Although the making of iron was thus carried on in various parts of England in the Middle Ages, the quantity produced was altogether insufficient to meet the ordinary demand, as it appears from our early records to have long continued one of the principal articles imported from foreign countries. English iron was not only dearer, but it was much inferior in quality to that manufactured abroad; and hence all the best arms and tools continued to be made of foreign iron. Indeed the scarcity of this metal occasionally led to great inconvenience, and to prevent its rising in price Parliament enacted, in 1354, that no iron, either wrought or unwrought, should be exported, under heavy penalties. For nearly two hundred years—that is, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—the English market was principally supplied with iron and steel from Spain and Germany; the foreign merchants of the Steelyard doing a large and profitable trade in those commodities. While the woollen and other branches of trade were making considerable progress, the manufacture of iron stood still. Among the lists of articles, the importation of which was prohibited in Edward IV.'s reign, with a view to the protection of domestic manufactures, we find no mention of iron, which was still, as a matter of necessity, allowed to come freely from abroad.
The first indications of revival in the iron manufacture showed themselves in Sussex, a district in which the Romans had established extensive works, and where smelting operations were carried on to a partial extent in the neighbourhood of Lewes, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where the iron was principally made into nails and horse-shoes. The county abounds in ironstone, which is contained in the sandstone beds of the Forest ridge, lying between the chalk and oolite of the district, called by geologists the Hastings sand. The beds run in a north-westerly direction, by Ashburnham and Heathfield, to Crowborough and thereabouts. In early times the region was covered with wood, and was known as the Great Forest of Anderida. The Weald, or wild wood, abounded in oaks of great size, suitable for smelting ore; and the proximity of the mineral to the timber, as well as the situation of the district in the neighbourhood of the capital, sufficiently account for the Sussex iron-works being among the most important which existed in England previous to the discovery of smelting by pit-coal.
The iron manufacturers of the south were especially busy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their works were established