Iron has been worked in Britain from the earliest historical times, and flint implements have been found at Stainton-in-Furness and at Battle in Sussex in positions suggesting that ironworks existed in those places at the end of the Stone Age.[65] Julius CÆsar relates that iron was produced along the coast of Britain, but only in small quantities, its rarity causing it to be considered as a precious metal, so that iron bars were current among the natives as money. The coming of the Romans soon changed this. They were not slow to see the value of the island's mineral wealth and to turn it to account. Ironworks sprang up all over the country: at Maresfield in Sussex they were apparently in full swing by the time of Vespasian (died A.D. 79), and in the neighbourhood of Battle fifty years later. Even more important were the workings in the West, on the banks of the Wye and in the Forest of Dean. Near Coleford have been found remains of Roman mines with shallow shafts and adits, while round Whitchurch, Goodrich, and Redbrook are enormous deposits of 'cinders,' or slag, dating from the same period.[66] Ariconium, near Ross, was a city of smiths and forgemen; and Bath (Aquae Sulis) is often said to have had a 'collegium fabricensium,' or gild of smiths, as one of its members, Julius Vitalis, armourer of the 20th Legion, dying after nine years' service, was given a public funeral here by his gild; but it seems more probable that the seat of the gild was at Chester, and that Julius had come to Bath for his health.[67]
It is a most remarkable fact that although abundant circumstantial evidence of the Roman exploitation of British iron exists in the shape of coins and other relics found upon the site of the works, there is practically no trace of any such working during the Saxon period until shortly before the Conquest. The furnaces must have been still in blast when the Saxons landed; they were a warlike race, possessing a full appreciation of iron and something of the Scandinavian admiration for smithcraft, yet there is hardly a trace of their having worked iron in this country. Few, if any, objects definitely assignable to this period have been found upon the site of iron works, and documentary evidence is almost non-existent. There is a charter of Oswy, King of Kent, given in 689, by which he grants to the abbey of St. Peter of Canterbury land at Liminge 'in which there is known to be a mine of iron';[68] and there is the legend that about 700 A.D. Alcester, in Warwickshire, was the centre of busy ironworks, peopled with smiths, who, for their hardness of heart in refusing to listen to St. Egwin, and endeavouring to drown his voice by beating on their anvils, were swallowed up by the earth;[69] but the rest is silence, until we come to the time of Edward the Confessor. The Domesday Survey shows that in the time of the Confessor, Gloucester rendered as part of its farm 36 dicres of iron, probably in the form of horseshoes, and 100 rods suitable for making bolts for the king's ships,[70] while from Pucklechurch in the same country came yearly 90 'blooms' of iron.[71] The same Survey mentions that there were six smiths in Hereford, each of whom had yearly to make for the king 120 horseshoes, and it also refers to iron mines on the borders of Cheshire, in Sussex and elsewhere.
During the twelfth century the industry appears to have expanded. In the North, at Egremont, we read of the grant of an iron mine to the monks of St. Bees,[72] and at Denby a similar grant was made about 1180 by William FitzOsbert to the abbey of Byland.[73] In Derbyshire, towards the end of the century, Sir Walter de Abbetoft gave to the monks of Louth Park wood at Birley in Brampton and two smithies, namely one bloomery and one forge, with the right to take beech and elm for fuel.[74] But it was in the south-west that the greatest development took place. During the whole of this century the Forest of Dean was the centre of the iron industry, and played the part that Birmingham has played in more recent times. All through the reign of Henry II. the accounts of the sheriffs of Gloucester[75] tell of a constant output of iron, both rough and manufactured, iron bars, nails, pickaxes, and hammers sent to Woodstock, Winchester, and Brill, where the king was carrying out extensive building operations, horseshoes supplied to the army, arrows and other warlike materials despatched to France, spades, pickaxes, and other miners' tools provided for the Irish expedition of 1172, iron bought for the Crusade which Henry projected, but did not live to perform, and 50,000 horseshoes made for the actual Crusade of Richard I. Throughout the thirteenth century the Forest of Dean retained its practical monopoly of the English iron trade, so far at least as the southern counties were concerned, and during the whole of that time members of the family of Malemort were employed at a forge near the castle of St. Briavels turning out enormous stores of bolts for cross-bows and other war material.[76] But a rival was now growing up in the Weald of Sussex and Kent. As early as 1254 the sheriff of Sussex had been called upon to provide 30,000 horseshoes and 60,000 nails, presumably of local manufacture,[77] and in 1275 Master Henry of Lewes, who had been the king's chief smith for the past twenty years,[78] purchased 406 iron rods (kiville) 'in the Weald' for £16, 17s. 11d.,[79] while a year or two later he obtained another 75 rods from the same source and paid £4, 3s. 4d. 'to a certain smith in the Weald for 100 iron rods.'[80]
The Wealden works had the advantage, a great advantage in the case of so heavy a material as iron, of nearness to London, and soon obtained a footing in the London markets with the imported Spanish iron at the expense of Gloucestershire, which at the beginning of the reign of Henry III. had been sending its iron to Westminster and into Sussex.[81] It must not be imagined that the northern counties were neglecting their mineral wealth all this time; they were on the contrary very active, and were exploiting their iron with vigour and success. On the lands of Peter de Brus in Cleveland in 1271 there were five small forges each valued at 10s., and two larger worth £4 each:[82] these sums may not sound very imposing, but it must be borne in mind that the best land in that district was then worth only 1s. an acre. Twenty years later the forges belonging to Furness Abbey yielded a profit of £6, 13s. 4d., as compared with a profit on flocks and herds of only £3, 11s. 3d., and it is probable that the Abbey had at least forty forges then working on their lands.[83] The great quantity of iron obtained at Furness, also, formed the most valuable part of the booty carried off by the Scots in their raid in 1316.[84] But the large production of iron in the northern counties was absorbed by their own local requirements, and this was still more the case with the smaller quantities smelted in Northamptonshire and Rutland. Derbyshire must have been another important centre, for as early as 1257 four or five forges in the Belper ward of Duffield Frith were yielding about £10 each yearly, and in 1314 two forges in Belper accounted for £63, 6s. 8d. in thirty-four weeks, and there was a third, yielding nearly £7, 10s. for only eleven weeks' work,[85] but there is nothing to show that Derbyshire iron was ever sent south, and from the middle of the fourteenth century such English iron as was used in London was almost entirely drawn from the Weald.
In order to understand how Sussex and Kent, where no iron has been worked for the last hundred years, came to be the centres of a great iron industry in medieval times, it must be borne in mind that charcoal was the only fuel used for iron working[86] until Dud Dudley discovered a method of using pit coal, about 1620, a date which may be considered to mark the end of the medieval period in iron mining. The earliest and most primitive method of smelting iron was by setting a hearth of wood and charcoal on a wind-swept hill or in some other draughty position, heaping upon it alternate layers of ore and charcoal, and covering the whole with clay, to retain the heat, leaving vents at the base for the wind to enter and the iron to come out.[87] A slight advance on this substituted a short cylindrical furnace of stone for the containing layer of clay, and an ingenious device for increasing the draught was used by the Romans at Lanchester, in Durham, where two narrow tunnels were made on the side of a hill, with wide mouths facing to the west, the quarter from which the wind blows most frequently in this valley, tapering to a narrow bore at the hearth.[88] Even under the most favourable conditions such a furnace would reduce a very small percentage of the ore to metal,[89] and the use of an auxiliary blast, produced by bellows, must have been resorted to at a quite early date. Prior to the fifteenth century such bellows were almost invariably worked by hand, or rather by foot, for the blowers stood upon the bellows, holding on to a bar, but during the fifteenth century water power was introduced in many parts of the country, and the bellows were driven by water-wheels. Such was apparently the case in Weardale in 1408,[90] probably in the Forest of Dean about the same date, and clearly in Derbyshire by the end of the century.[91]
In several early charters granting mineral rights to Furness Abbey, mention is made of the privilege of using water from the grantor's streams; but where particulars are given, as in the case of the charter of Hugh de Moresby made in 1270, the water is always stated to be for the washing of the ore, and not for power.[92] The ore, or 'mine,' to use the more common medieval term, was sometimes dug on the 'open-cast' system, but more usually by a series of bell or beehive pits.[93] It was then roughly cleansed by washing on a coarse sieve, and was next subjected to a preliminary burning, or 'elyng,'[94] as it was termed at the Tudeley forge in the fourteenth century.[95] The burnt ore was then broken and carried to the furnace. In the sixteenth century this was a building in the shape of a truncated cone, about twenty-four feet in diameter, and not more than thirty feet high, in the base of which was a cupped, or bowl-shaped, hearth of sandstone, and such we may assume the earlier furnaces also to have been. Alternate charges of mine and charcoal were fed into the furnace from the top, the iron settling down into the bowl of the hearth, from which it was taken as a lump or 'bloom.' From the sixteenth century, when by the use of a more powerful blast a higher temperature was obtainable and cast iron was produced, the molten iron was drawn off from time to time through a vent at the bottom of the hearth into a bed of sand. In Sussex and Gloucestershire it seems to have been usual to form in the sand one large oblong depression in the direct course of the flow of the iron with a number of smaller depressions at right angles to the first, the large mass of iron thus moulded being known as a 'sow,' and the smaller blocks as 'pigs.'
There were in the earlier periods of the industry a very large number of smelting hearths, consisting practically of an ordinary blacksmith's forge with a cup-shaped hearth, or crucible, in the bottom of which the imperfectly molten iron accumulated. Such were the itinerant forges (fabricÆ errantes) in the Forest of Dean, of which there were as many as sixty in blast at the end of the thirteenth century.[96] The buildings attached to such a forge would naturally be merely temporary sheds, such as were referred to by the Earl of Richmond in 1281, when he gave leave to the monks of Jervaux to cut wood in his forest to smelt iron and to make two small sheds (logias) 'without nail, bolt, or wall,' so that if the smelters moved to another place (as these itinerant forges did when the ore or the fuel became exhausted) they should pull down the sheds and erect others.[97] In this instance the grant of two sheds may imply two smelting-houses, but it seems more probable that one was the 'bloomery,' or smelting forge, and the other the smithy, which invariably accompanied the bloomery.[98] With this simple type of forge the product was a lump of malleable iron, which was purified by hammering and worked up at the smithy, but the pig iron produced by the larger high blast furnace required more elaborate treatment. The sow was carried from the furnace to the forge, 'finery' or 'strynghearth,' where it was heated on an open hearth and reduced by the sledge, or by the water-hammer[99] when available, to a large ingot or 'bloom.'[100] The latter was, as a rule, reheated, divided and worked into bars, the completion of which was usually carried out in the seventeenth century at a third hearth, the 'chafery,' but this appears to have been an elaboration of post-medieval date. The sows naturally varied in size according to the capacity of the furnace, and this, it may be observed, was much greater at the end of a 'blowing' than at the beginning, owing to the fire eating away the hearth, especially if too large a proportion of intractable 'hot' ore were used;[101] but the blooms were made of standard weight. At the same time the weight of the bloom, though constant in any given district, varied in different parts of the country. In Weardale it seems to have been about two hundredweight, being composed of fifteen stones, each of thirteen pounds;[102] and in Furness it was about the same weight, but contained fourteen stones of fourteen pounds.[103] On the other hand, we find blooms selling at the Kentish ironworks of Tudeley for 3s. 4d. in the reign of Edward III.,[104] when iron bought for repairs to Leeds Castle cost about 7s. the hundredweight,[105] which, allowing for cost of carriage, agrees fairly well with the three quarters of a hundredweight attributed to the Sussex bloom in the seventeenth century.[106] As regards the price of iron, it was always high during the medieval period, but naturally varied with conditions of demand and supply, cost of carriage, and the quality of the iron. To take a late instance: in Staffordshire in 1583, 'coldshear,' or brittle iron, fetched only £9 the ton when tough iron fetched £12.[107] In Sussex[108] in 1539 iron sold on the spot for from £5 to £7 the ton, allowing a profit of 20s. the ton, and ten years later £8 at the forge and about £9, 5s. in London, the cost of carriage to London being 9s. the ton.[109]
The number of workmen employed at the different works naturally varied, but the surveyor of the iron mills in Ashdown Forest in 1539 laid down the rule:[110] 'That to melt the sowes in ij forges or fynories there must be iiij persones, and at the forge to melt the blomes there must be ij persones. So are there at every forge ij persones wherof the oone holdeth the work at the hamor and the second kepeth the work hot. Md that oone man cannot kepe the hamor bicause the work must be kept in such hete that they may not shifte handes.'
At the Bedburn forge in 1408,[111] there were a 'blomer' or 'smythman,' a smith and a foreman, as well as a 'colier' or charcoal burner. The blomer was paid 6d. for every bloom smelted, of which the average production was six in a week, the largest output recorded in any week being ten blooms. For working up the bloom at the forge, the smith received 6d. and an extra penny for cutting it up into bars, while the foreman, who in spite of his name does not seem to have had any staff of workmen under him, received 2d. a bloom when he assisted at the smelting, and 3d. at the reworking. Such additional labour as was required was supplied by the wives of the smith and foreman, who did odd jobs, breaking up the ore, attending to the bellows, or helping their husbands, earning wages paid at first on a vague but rather high scale, but falling afterwards to the settled rate of a halfpenny a bloom. An allowance of one penny a week was made for ale for the workmen; and a similar munificent allowance was made 'for drink for the four blowers' at Tudeley in 1353.[112] At this Tudeley forge in 1333, the workmen were paid in kind, receiving every seventh bloom,[113] a payment roughly equivalent to 6d. a bloom, but by 1353 this system had been dropped, and they were paid from 7½d. to 9½d. a bloom. In addition to the 'seventh bloom,' we find mention in 1333 of a customary payment to the 'Forblouweris'[114] of 2¼d. a bloom, and in the 1353 account we find 'rewards' paid to the master blower and three other blowers; no other workmen are mentioned by name, and as the whole process of making the blooms is here referred to as 'blowyng' we may probably assume that the staff of these Kentish works consisted of four men. The Sussex iron mills at Sheffield in Fletching in 1549 employed one hammerman and his assistant,[115] two fyners and their two servants, a founder, and a filler,[116] the business of the latter being to keep the furnace charged. Here the founder was paid 8s., and the filler 6s. for each 'foundye,' or working week of six days, and the hammerman and fyners received between them 13s. 4d. a ton, about three tons being produced each 'foundye.'
In addition to the actual ironworkers every forge afforded employment to a number of charcoal-burners and miners. For the most part these latter, as was the case with the coal miners, ranked as ordinary labourers, but in the Forest of Dean they formed a close corporation of 'free miners,' possessing an organisation and privileges of considerable importance and antiquity.[117] So far as can be judged the customs of the free miners were traditional, based on prescription, recognised as early as the time of Henry III., and officially confirmed by Edward I. By these customs the right of mining was restricted to the free miners resident within the bounds of the Forest, and they had also control of the export of the iron ore, all persons carrying the same down the Severn being bound to pay dues to the miners under penalty of forfeiture of their boat. The free miners had also the right of digging anywhere within the Forest, except in gardens, orchards, and curtilages; the lord of the soil, who might be the king or a private landowner, being entitled to a share as a member of the fellowship, almost always consisting of four 'verns' or partners. Besides the right thus to open a mine the miners had a claim to access thereto from the highway, and to timber for their works. In return, the king received from every miner who raised three loads of ore in a week one penny, which was collected by the 'gaveller' every Tuesday 'between Mattens and Masse,' and he had also the right to certain quantities of 'law-ore' from the different mines every week, for which the miners were paid at the rate of a penny a load, and if he was working an itinerant forge they were bound to supply ore therefor at the same rate, and finally there was a royal export duty of a halfpenny on every load of ore taken out of the Forest.[118]
The right of mining within the forest was restricted, as we have already said, to the resident free miners, and they might only employ the labour of their own family or apprentices. These rights to their mines, or shares therein, were definite, and could be bequeathed by will; and in order to prevent trespass the rule was laid down that no man should start a fresh working near that of another miner 'within so much space that the miner may stand and cast ridding[119] and stones so far from him with a bale, as the manner is.' When disputes arose between the miners, they were settled at their own court, held every three weeks at St. Briavels, under the presidency of the Constable, appeals being made, if necessary, from the normal jury of twelve miners to juries of twenty-four or forty-eight. These Mine Law Courts continued to be held until the latter half of the eighteenth century; but we are not here concerned with their later proceedings and constant endeavours to maintain restrictions which had long passed out of date; endeavours which seem to have resulted chiefly in promoting 'the abominable sin of perjury,' so that it was found necessary to ordain that any miner convicted thereof should be expelled and 'all the working tooles and habitt burned before his face.' What those tools and costume were in the fifteenth century, and until modern times, may be seen on a brass in Newland Church, whereon is depicted a free miner wearing a cap and leather breeches tied below the knee, with a wooden mine-hod slung over his shoulder, carrying a small mattock in his right hand, and holding a candlestick between his teeth.[120]
Although not so intimately connected with iron working as the smiths, smelters and miners, the charcoal-burners were auxiliaries without whom the industry could not have existed, and who in turn derived their living largely from that industry. The amount of wood consumed by the iron works was enormous. As an example we may take the case of the two Sussex mills of Sheffield and Worth for 1547-9.[121] At Sheffield 6300 cords of wood were 'coled' for the furnace, and 6750 cords for the forge; at Worth the amounts were respectively nearly 5900 and 2750 cords; the cords being 125 cubic feet, this represents an expenditure of about 2,175,000 cubic feet of timber for these two works alone in less than two years. Later, in 1580, it was stated that a beech tree of one foot square 'at the stubbe' would make one and a half loads of charcoal, and the ironworks at Monkswood, near Tintern, would require 600 such trees every year,[122] while some thirty years later Norden referred to the fact that there were in Sussex alone about 140 forges using two, three, or four loads of charcoal apiece daily. Acts were passed in 1558, 1581, and 1585 regulating the cutting of wood for furnaces and prohibiting the use of timber trees for charcoal, but they were evaded, and the destruction of trees continued until in the eighteenth century charcoal was supplanted by mineral coal, the first successful use of which for iron smelting, by Dud Dudley in 1620, marks, as we have said, the termination of the medieval period.
