Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  Picking its way down the steep, winding trackway that descends the flank of the Lob valley comes the last pack-train of the day, each horse carrying on its crucks a burden of three hundredweight of iron ore or limestone from the mines and quarries of Deepforest and Lobstock. Like most of the charcoal that is being produced in the woods it is bound for the ironworks beside the Lob.

  Here in this narrow valley lies the heart of this new Winterstoke, a heart of glowing metal ceaselessly active, and beating to the rhythm of many hammers, smith’s hammer ringing on anvil, the clang of the oliver, or the metronomic thud of the heavy tilt hammer at the forge. This last is silent now, but the others still sound from the ‘outshuts’ of the cottages which are scattered like bricks down the steep slopes. Here, as can be seen by the glow from their open doorways, the smiths have their hearths, their wives and families sharing the work by blowing the fire or treadling the oliver. This last is a heavy hammer whose helve is pivoted so that it strikes upon the anvil when the treadle is depressed and is raised again by the spring of an ash pole slung under the roof.

  There are still some small bloomeries of medieval pattern in work, one or two ‘foot bloomeries’ where the bellows are worked by a treadle and ash pole like the Olivers, but the remainder ‘water bloomeries’ where a small water-wheel, turned by the Lob or its tributary streams, works the bellows. But this old bloomery method is no longer capable of meeting the smiths’ demand for iron. Already they have become obsolete and within fifty years the last of the Winterstoke bloomeries will go cold. The real centre of this little world of iron is now the charcoal blast furnace with its loom house and its adjacent forge which was set up at the expense of Henry Hanmer, second Earl of Winterstoke, and leased to his yeoman tenant, Alfred Darley. It is the vital link between the miners and charcoal burners on the one hand and the smiths on the other.

  This blast furnace is encased in a square of masonry built into the slope of the valley so that proportioned quantities of charcoal, ore and burnt lime may conveniently be fed from the flat top or ‘bridge’ above into the decanter-shaped upper part of the furnace which holds the charge. In the base of the furnace is the firestone crucible, six feet deep and tapering from six feet in diameter at the top to four at the bottom. At the top of it is the blast hole and at the bottom the tapping hole. The blast is supplied to the furnace from the ponderous double-acting bellows driven by the waters of the Lob, the air being led to the blast hole through an annular space in the brickwork where it is to some extent pre-heated. The lime, the virtue of which as a flux in the furnace has already been recognized, is burnt with coal in nearby kilns built into the hillside in the same manner as the blast furnace. The men who tend this new furnace may no longer observe the ancient daily rhythm of labour and of sleep. For six months or more it has been fired continuously to produce an average of twenty tons of iron a week, the flare from its open throat lighting up the silent woods at night or throwing a false sunset glow on the skirts of low-flying clouds. But the limiting factor is the flow of the River Lob. Already the great bellows creak and sigh with painful slowness and the output of the furnace has fallen in both quantity and quality as a result of the weakening blast. Soon it will be blown out and then relined and repaired in readiness for the autumn rains.

  In front of the furnace is the ‘loom house’ where the molten metal is run into moulds shaped for it in the clay floor. Occasionally simple castings such as hearth backs are cast in this way, but most of the metal is run into ‘pigs’. Unlike the blooms produced by the older method, these pigs are brittle and useless to the smith until they have been treated in the forge. There they are reheated in an air furnace and pounded under the heavy tilt hammer to disperse the excess carbon and make the metal ductile. The bars of wrought iron thus produced are then slit by hand into rods of sizes suitable for the smiths. In this ‘finery’, as it is sometimes called, a small quantity of steel is also produced by cementation for the use of the edge toolmakers. The great head of the tilt hammer is mounted on a stout helve of ash pivoted at a point about two-thirds of its length away from the head. The other end of this helve is shod with an iron pane which engages the cogs of a massive wheel mounted on the axle tree of the water-wheel outside the forge. As each cog of the slowly revolving wheel strikes the pane it depresses it and so lifts the hammer head from the anvil, letting it fall again as cog and pane move out of engagement. Water power is thus used to raise the hammer only; its own weight delivers the blow, while its rate of strike can be varied by altering the number of cogs on the driving wheel. The smith sits before the hammer in a swinging chair suspended from the roof, flexing his knees against the base of the anvil as he works the hot metal to and fro under the hammer. A chain, hanging beside him, is connected to the sluice on the headrace of the water-wheel, so that he is able to start and stop the hammer at will.

  As in the case of the nearby blast furnace, the limiting factor of this forge is the water supply, although here the problem is not so acute because the demand is intermittent. Now, with the forge dark and silent in the summer dusk, the hammer pond above is slowly filling up. This means that even in the droughts of midsummer a certain amount of work can be done before the pool is exhausted. In time of winter rains or melting snows when the blast furnace roars its loudest, the output of raw iron exceeds the capacity of the forge so that a stock of pig-iron can be built up which will serve to keep the forge in work during the period when the furnace must be blown out. Moreover, the fact that ironworking must perforce slack off in summer for lack of water suits well the majority of the workers involved. For these miners, charcoal and lime burners, furnacemen, finers, slitters and smiths of Winterstoke are not yet an exclusively industrial community entirely divorced from the land. Their new activities and their new skills have, as it were, grown up in those cracks in the old rural economy of medieval England which appeared after the dissolution. But although these cracks continue to widen, the older structure has not yet fallen apart. Many still have land of their own and many more work seasonally as farm labourers. Even the far-seeing and ambitious Alfred Darley at whose instigation blast furnace and forge were built is no man of iron but an active and prosperous yeoman farmer. So life is still governed by a seasonal rhythm, the drought-enforced idleness of furnace and forge coinciding with the season of haysel and harvest when most labour is needed in the fields.

  What of the smiths for whom most of the iron produced in the old bloomeries and in the new furnace and forge is destined? What are they forging on the hearths in their cottage outshuts? Some are skilled tradesmen: scythe-smiths, making scythes and other edge tools; locksmiths; loriners and spurriers forging bits, spurs, harness buckles and other horse tackle. But an overwhelming majority are nailers. Because nail-making is the least skilled of all the metal trades it is the one to which the hard-pressed small holder or landless labourer and common-squatting immigrant most readily turns in an effort to better his condition. Therefore, even at this early date, it is already tending to become an overcrowded trade, displaying that instability and those chronic conditions of acute poverty and sweated labour which result from overcrowding and which would disfigure the whole history of the hand-made nail industry.

  When we delve down through centuries of English history in search of the seed from which the Industrial Revolution sprang we find that the roots go much deeper than we had imagined; that they form a complex web in which there is no distinguishing cause from effect, so subtle is the interplay of the forces involved. Yet it is tempting to isolate the figure of the Winterstoke nailer, forced into this precarious trade by worsening agricultural conditions, and labouring long hours with his family at his cottage hearth, as an unwitting architect of industrial England. It was his insatiable demand for iron which created Darley’s blast furnace and forge and, through them, the increasing demand for charcoal, for ore, for limestone and for coal. It was the need to create a market for his nails which brought to power the merchants, the prosperous ironmongers who range
d ever further afield. So, at this turn of the century, we see the Winterstoke nailer already sandwiched between two layers of capitalistic enterprise, soon to join forces over his head and ultimately to crush him out of existence.

  The more skilled of the Winterstoke smiths, the makers of edge tools, the loriners and locksmiths, some of whom inherited a tradition of craftsmanship which had originated under monastic tutelage, are in a much stronger position than the nailers. Yet in this ‘free’ trade even the most skilled craftsman may be threatened by unwelcome competition from aspiring newcomers. For the greater the influx of new recruits at the bottom of the nail trade, the greater the tendency for those at the top to graduate into some other craft more skilled, more lucrative and more secure.

  Those who still imagine that industrial England sprang into instantaneous life towards the end of the eighteenth century when James Watt ‘invented’ the steam engine may find this picture of Winterstoke at the beginning of the previous century scarcely credible. Nostalgic pictures of a simple rural ‘merry England’ as exemplified by the old villages of Winterstoke and Emberley, and of the courtly England of Winterstoke Place have so captured the fancy to the exclusion of all else that it is difficult to believe that blast furnaces and mechanical hammers could ever have had their place in the England of Shakespeare. Surely, they will say, this picture of the Lob valley is an anachronism in the England of the players and the well-turned sonnet, in an age whose signature tune is the music of lute and virginals, not the clangour of hammers. Surely if Alfred Darley’s furnace and forge had really existed in this England it would have been regarded as the marvel of the age and we should have discovered many more references to ironworking in contemporary literature. There are various reasons why these developments, so pregnant with significance for us, occasioned so little contemporary remark that their history is extremely difficult to trace. In the first place, like most of the early centres of ironworking, the Lob Valley was remote and, owing to the appalling state of the roads, seldom or never visited by the literate minority. Secondly, the Elizabethan and the Jacobean looked out upon his world through eyes very different from ours; eyes which, despite the effects of the Reformation and the Renaissance of learning, still retained the shadow of the medieval vision as in a glass darkly. Consequently, while they accepted and might actively exemplify the new mercantile spirit of their age, they did not regard such activity as the be-all and end-all of life. The Hanmers may have violated most of the medieval canons during their rise to power and wealth, but the beauties which soon mellowed Winterstoke Place revealed that they regarded neither as an end in itself. The pursuit of wealth and power for its own sake, the idolatrous worship of man’s handiwork as instruments of power and evidence of man’s mastery of the world, such aberrations of pride were not yet. Thus the Hanmers of Winterstoke regarded the noisy activities in the Lob Valley merely as a profitable offshoot of the primary industry of agriculture. The second Earl had financed the building of the blast furnace and forge for his progressive yeoman tenants and now drew rent from them in the same manner as he might cause new barns and bartons to be constructed. From the time of the Black Death onwards the chief crop from the Winterstoke estate had been wool, but now iron was taking its place. Such a simple statement would sum up the contemporary attitude to the new trade. It had grown up in a framework which was still in many respects medieval; no one could know that the hammers of Darley’s Bank, as it was now called, were forging a new world and a new school of thought which would soon shatter that framework forever.

  Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century progress was slow. The old bloomeries either vanished or became fineries and a second charcoal furnace took their place, but otherwise, apart from one significant development which will be mentioned later, our picture of the Winterstoke iron trade does not alter technically until after the civil war. Limited water power and transport facilities combined with a knowledge of iron-smelting which was still primitive effectually prevented any considerable expansion. Moreover, although the trade was free in the sense that there was no local Guild of Ironworkers, medieval conceptions of trade regulation and control continued to influence legislation and to limit the expansion of the Winterstoke iron industry. Thus when the ironmongers from the Midland shires began to invade the London market, they came into conflict with the powerful Ironmongers’ Company with the result that there was fought a similar battle to that between the free weavers of Winterstoke and the weaving guilds of Coltisham and Church Ambling. The arguments on both sides and the results were precisely the same. The only significant difference was that this battle of iron was fought at much longer range than the older wool fight with the result that the Winterstoke smiths, whose livelihood depended on the outcome, knew little or nothing of the distant struggle which was going on between merchant and merchant. But they suffered from its repercussions when they were forced to accept a sacrificial price for their nails or buckles or locks. This was the first stage in a process of expansion which would one day make Winterstoke dependent upon the fluctuations of an unstable and bitterly competitive world market.

  The State, through the local justices of the peace, continued its efforts to control trade by means of enactments such as that which forbade any man to practise a trade unless he had served a proper apprenticeship. But attempts at control, whether they were made by the Guilds or by the State, could only check and not prevent the growth of free iron-producing centres such as Winterstoke. They failed for the same reasons that had caused the failure of the weaving guilds. They were unable to resist the overwhelming pressure of necessity which was behind production and their regulations were only enforceable in an organized urban community. Winterstoke was not such a community; it was a rural area whose inhabitants were combining ironworking with agriculture, and here no urban writ could run effectually.

  So, in spite of restrictions and difficulties the Winterstoke iron trade continued slowly to expand. The trade map of England was changing. By a great northward movement the trades were assuming the geographical pattern which they were destined to retain until the twentieth century. The textile trade was moving away from the midland counties to the north of England and to fill the void the iron trade was moving into the midlands from the south. Although the story of the Winterstoke iron trade in the sixteenth century was not unique in the shires of the western midlands, until the end of that century Sussex retained its position as the great iron-producing county of England. It was the Wealden men who cast the cannon of the little ships which challenged the galleons of Spain, and in the minds of most Elizabethans the name of Sussex was synonymous with iron. But with the new century a decline set in, slow at first, but quickening to a collapse after the civil war. Furnace after furnace went cold, forge after forge fell silent. In an area which was mostly in Sussex but which included parts of Surrey and Kent there were still thirty-five furnaces and forty-five forges in 1653, but by 1667 there were only eleven furnaces still in blast and eighteen forges at work. This rate of decline was almost exactly counterbalanced by the rate of growth of the Midland iron trade. There were various good reasons for this. In the west midlands there were still great areas of woodland to feed the furnaces with charcoal; in the south the Government became alarmed at the inroads which the insatiable furnaces had made into the Wealden woods and feared that a failure of timber supplies to the naval shipyards would result. Having a lower average annual rainfall than the Midlands, the Wealden furnaces had to be blown out for lack of water power for a proportionately longer period. Thirdly, the south country ironmasters suffered more from the lack of transport facilities than the midlands. Though a good market in London was comparatively close at hand, it could not be reached except over-land through the heavy Wealden clay, and attempts to solve this problem by canalizing the Wey, the Medway and the Sussex Ouse came too late to save the trade. Winterstoke, on the other hand, was not unique in the midlands in being able from the outset to export by water down the Wendle to Westerpor
t. Difficult though the navigation of the Wendle was in these early days, it nevertheless possessed an immense advantage over land carriage by pack-horse. But perhaps the most cogent reason for the rise of the midland iron trade and its conquest of the south is to be found in the vacuum left by the loss of the textile trade combined with acute land hunger. These were the circumstances which created the army of domestic ironworkers for which there was no parallel in the south of England.

  The rate at which domestic ironworking in general and the nail trade in particular continued to grow at Winterstoke may be judged by the fact that the smiths’ demand for material was sufficient to justify the erection of a slitting mill at Darley’s Bank in 1636. This, like the two furnaces and the forge, used the power of the River Lob, a fourth pool and dam being constructed directly below the forge, the rapid fall of the Lob down its narrow valley being peculiarly favourable to such development. This was the one important technical innovation which took place at Winterstoke between 1600 and the outbreak of civil war. Once again the Darley family, represented by Alfred Darley II, were the instigators, the capital being furnished jointly by him and by Charles, third Earl of Winterstoke, who seems to have displayed a keener interest than his father in the activities of his enterprising tenants. Of the mechanical arrangement of such early slitting mills no detailed information has so far been discovered, but we may guess that the erection of the mill was the outcome of a visit paid by Alfred Darley to the Hyde House at Kinver in Staffordshire where the pioneer ironmaster, Richard Foley, had installed the first slitting mill in the Midlands seven years before. It is not without significance that this Richard Foley was himself the son of a sixteenth-century nailer. It is safe to assume that Darley’s mill followed closely the pattern of Foley’s, but whether rotating cutters or reciprocating shear blades were used to slit the bars wrought under the helve hammer in the forge is not known. Whichever the method, it is fairly certain that, after slitting, the rods were reheated and then evened and trimmed by passing them through water-driven rolls. This slitting mill is noteworthy as the first machine in the iron trade to provoke the long and often bitter struggle of machines versus men which was to accompany the whole course of the industrial revolution and in which the machine was always the ultimate victor. Though there is no record of any attempt having been made to destroy the new mill, the iron slitters of Winterstoke complained bitterly against the machine which had robbed them of their arduous and tedious livelihood. Their protests soon died down. Doubtless they were quickly absorbed elsewhere in the industry.