The Pattern Under the Plough

by George Ewart Evans

  One of Hector Moore’s skills which gets little exercise today is the crystallization of axles belonging to wagons and tumbrils from the farms. De-crystallization would be a more apt description of the process; for before the use of modern bearings in a wagon wheel it was necessary after a time to treat the axle – to de-crystallize it. Owing to the intense friction and the resultant heat in that part of the axle near the collar, there was a re-alignment of the iron molecules which tended to crystallize. The axle then became so brittle at this point that a sudden jolt – the wheel dropping into a pot-hole or encountering a large stone on the highway – often caused it to snap off completely without warning. Occasionally a farmer brought in a wagon for repair and took the precaution of telling the smith: ‘Do the axles at the same time, will you?’ By this he meant that the smith should treat the axles so that the weak, crystallized sections should regain their former temper. The following recipe for the process was given to Hector Moore by an old craftsman. It is headed: Crystallization of Axles. ‘All forge pieces should be brought to a white heat and then plunged into a receptacle filled with raw Flax Oil. I have applied this process for many years to the Axles and Springs of common Vehicles and it has always proved successful.’ Raw flax oil was unboiled linseed oil: the boiled or refined oil was the kind often used for horse-draughts.

  When the smith made wagons and tumbrils with the wheelwright one of his jobs was to weld the axle. An axle came from the foundry in two sections so that it could be welded together at its centre to give the exact length required by the wagon or cart it was to serve. But it was no use preparing one end of the section without first tying a sack tightly round the collar end and dipping the whole into water. If this were not done, when the section was hammered the vibration would cause a re-alignment of the molecules at the collar end, and it would fly off exactly as it did after being subjected to the friction of a fast moving wheel as described above. Dipping the sacking into water caused it to contract, thus tightening itself round the axle and preventing the vibration from reaching the collar. It is worth noting that the place of salt in the welding process was often not recognized by some of the older smiths. They used to maintain that sand out of the pit was no use for welding: it had to be sand from the seashore. Pit sand, however, was equally effective if a little salt was added to it. Sand, it appears, is used as a flux in welding, and the presence of a little salt in the sand facilitates the process, keeping the temperature down and preventing oxygen from mixing with the carbon in the steel.

  Brazing – the making of a joint in metal with the aid of brass or spilter, brass with a high proportion of tin in it to give it a low melting point – was another process that relied on traditional skill. A clear fire was essential: ‘Whatever you do, don’t put the green coal on it – plenty of cinders, that’s all. Heat the iron till it’s cherry-red then sprinkle borax on it: as the spilter runs it fuses the two faces of the metal to form a joint.’ One old smith who worked with Hector Moore some years ago used to insist that the borax must be rubbed into the metal with a piece of cherry-wood; and he kept a piece of the wood in his pocket just for this purpose. Commenting on this example of sympathetic magic the smith said: ‘If I’d asked him why he had to do this, he’d probably have knocked me down. It would have been like questioning his whole way of life!’

  Another process in the smithy attracted a good deal of speculation up to a few years ago; and it was wrapped round with much mystery and secrecy. This was the tempering of mill-bills or -picks, the steel wedges used for dressing a mill-stone, making the grooves in it more deep and roughing or cracking the grinding surface. This implement is about eleven inches long with a cutting edge at either end. It was fitted into a wooden holder or thrift which was usually turned from a piece of wych-elm. After the millwright had used the bill for some time, the cutting edges became blunt and the bill lost its temper. He then took the bill to the smith to have it re-tempered and sharpened.6 This was a skill that few smiths possessed; and in recent years, at least one East Anglian farmer who used to have a mill in his barn for grinding grist for his cattle, has had to discontinue this: he dismantled his mill and sent it away for scrap chiefly because no smith in the district could temper a bill satisfactorily so that he could keep the mill-stones properly dressed. Most millstones in East Anglia were made from French burr; and to cut this stone the steel at the tip of the bill needed to be hard enough to scratch glass; that is, it had to be almost as hard as diamond. Some of the smiths who knew how to temper mill-bills liked to surround their skill with a little mystery; though undoubtedly many of them believed in the efficacy of their secret tempering mixtures which were said to be essential to their skill. The following letter is a comment on this belief: it is from Reginald Lambeth, Rural Industries Organizer for Cambridgeshire: ‘I thought I saw your ears prick up the other day at Bury St Edmunds when I mentioned Bills and Thrifts. The story is that, when I was working in Cambridge University Metallurgical Laboratories during the war, out of curiosity I took a Vickers Diamond hardness test of a bill, and I was astonished to find that the centre core which is made of silver steel, as a rule, gave a higher reading than any nickel chrome armour-piercing bullet. I mentioned this to Dr Tipper, Mr Douglas Searle and one or two other professional metallurgists, and they asked me to bring some more along for testing.

  ‘On testing we found that they all gave an equally high reading. This has never been explained, neither had the professional metallurgists any theory or explanation to offer and dismissed it as just a freak or a piece of folk lore, as scientists naturally would. I might mention that Dr Tipper was probably at the time one of our most distinguished metallurgists: she also had no explanation.

  ‘I returned these to Mr Ruffell, the blacksmith of Horseheath, with a request for information; and he told me that the secret lay in quenching the steel. As you know, a bill is made up of a piece of sheet silver steel sandwiched between two pieces of mild steel and forged together by a fire-weld. This keeps the inside hard and the outside remains ductile, which means that in use the bill more or less sharpens itself by the mild steel outsides wearing away and exposing the silver steel. When this is all welded together in a sandwich and roughly ground up, it is put in a fire to about 650° C. which is in colour a dull cherry red. It is then quenched in water from his own well that contains certain chemicals which made it specially hard. This, of course, from a scientific point of view is absolute bunk: it has no scientific foundation whatever. Nevertheless, Mr Ruffell gets results with a piece of steel which will cut millstone grit or French burr stones. I have heard of other smiths who quenched in either horse urine or even cabbage water.

  ‘To harden a piece of steel you quench to reduce the temperature drastically and suddenly; and it doesn’t matter quite what you are quenching in as long as the temperature is reduced suddenly. Often if you want a piece of steel not too hard – that is, brittle hard – you quench in paraffin or oil. It may be that in this case it quenches the silver steel not quite as drastically as hard water would. Owing to the chemical properties of either the water from the well, horse urine or cabbage water, there may be some tempering effect: the two latter do, of course, contain considerable chemicals, but what I do not know as I am no chemist.

  ‘Mr Ruffell has a great reputation for making all edged tools; and the people in the neighbourhood swear by his billhooks. Very often a blacksmith will make an edged tool out of an old wagon strake, that is the segment of iron which covered the joins in the felloes of a wooden-axle armed wheel. This is because the iron made before a certain date, say before the Industrial Revolution, was smelted with charcoal. When a blacksmith is using real iron for wrought iron work he has to be careful not to quench it in water, but to let it cool off gently; as this too would harden up if the temperature was reduced suddenly.’

  One Suffolk farmer, however, had no doubts where the secret lay, and put his money on the tempering mixture. A blacksmith was known to have great skill in sharpening mill-bills, and
it was generally agreed that his tempering liquid held the secret. The smith naturally declined to discuss the question. Therefore the farmer called on him one morning, determined to break the secret. The ostensible reason for his visit was to pay a five shillings account he had with the smith; and he purposely offered him a £1 note in payment. While the smith was out of the forge getting the change, the farmer took an empty bottle out of his pocket and quickly filled it with the liquid from the tempering vat. He later sent the specimen to be analysed for which the analyst charged a fee of £5. The result of the analysis was interesting, though perhaps not to the farmer: the water contained no appreciable amount of any substance except iron rust.

  After hearing the question of the critical factor in tempering mill-bills so often debated, Hector Moore determined to settle it to his own satisfaction once and for all. He sought the help of his friend, Jesse Wightman of Saxtead, the last millwright of the old school in Suffolk. He first of all unearthed two old recipes for secret quenching mixtures, both of which claimed to be able to give bills the best possible temper. One was for preparing a mixture of ground borax in a quart of hard water and then adding the mixture to a gallon of ordinary water – and so on. Another was for a mixture made with potassium ferro-cyanide which had the very necessary warning Beware of Fumes. He had used both these formulas before but after long experimenting over the years he had come to the conclusion that he could do as well, even better, without any of the so-called secret mixtures. He determined, however, to try one more experiment, and he asked the millwright to bring him twelve bills for sharpening and re-tempering. Jesse Wightman soon brought the mill-bills and the smith divided the bills into two lots, marking six of the bills with a mark of his own. These he tempered using one of the old traditional and secret remedies – the borax and hard water, as it happened; the second, unmarked, six he tempered using nothing but water from the tap. Then he gave them to the millwright:

  ‘You take these two lots, Jesse,’ he told him. ‘Don’t pity ’em. Give ’em a good testing, and tell me afterwards which lot you think the best.’

  Jesse Wightman was working full-time on dressing mill-stones at that time – about fifteen years ago – as most of the bigger farmers used to grind the grist for their animals and had oil-driven mills of their own on the farm. It was not long before he returned with the used mill-bills. His verdict was:

  ‘These six bills are as good as any I’ve used,’ he said. Then pointing to the six unmarked bills: ‘But this lot is much better: and I shan’t hope to find any more bills to equal them.’

  They were the bills the smith had treated according to his own method and they confirmed his theory that there was no mystery about it and his opinion that the tempering mixture was not critical. As he explained afterwards: his method was simply an appreciation, arrived at through long experience, of the right temperature at which to quench the bill. His way of testing the temperature of the heated steel was lightly to run his thumb and fore-finger over the end of the bill, just touching the metal. From experience he could feel the right temperature and choose the right moment to make his quenching. He also pointed out: ‘Once you’ve dipped the end of your bill into the pail of water, you have to make sure to change the water before quenching the other end; for the first dipping of the bill has raised the temperature in that water by a few, very important degrees.’

  Some smiths tested the time for quenching the heated bills by observing the changing colour of the metal. Cherry-red was also the important colour here; and as it could easily be missed in daylight and the right temperature accordingly exceeded, the process was best performed after dark – a circumstance which would be likely to increase the mystery in the eyes of the uninitiated or the casual observer.

  The technique of horse-shoeing7 has remained virtually unchanged for centuries although the early medieval shoe was fashioned from plate-iron as distinct from the bar-iron of the modern shoe. But each county, and often different districts of a county, had a characteristic shoe of its own, or a shoe with its own peculiar mark. The clip is one of these marks: this is the tab of metal which is turned up from the shoe itself onto the side of the hoof to give the shoe stability. The position of the clip depends on the tread of the individual horse, but even more so on the type of surface he works on. A horse puts his foot down on a hard surface in the same way as on any other. But there is a big difference in the result: if the shoe hits an obstruction the hoof tends to continue its forward motion, thus bending or even breaking the nails that hold it to the hoof. The clip is made on the toe of the shoe to prevent this; and where the dangers of an uneven surface are greater two or more clips are put on each hoof. Conversely, in those counties or regions where the going is fairly soft and even – the Sussex downs or the downs of Dorset – no clips are needed: for the same reason a race-horse requires no clips on his shoes. In very stony country a shoe with a broad web – a much wider shoe – was used to protect the horse’s foot from the stones; and, in general, early shoes were much broader than modern ones for the same reason. The calkin, the wedge of iron at the heel of the shoe, often had a design peculiar to the district; and in the north, even up to modern times, smiths made shoes with calkins on the toes as well as the heels, probably to suit the hard conditions under which they worked. But an expert smith could tell the mark and style of a fellow smith in the same county, merely by a glance at the shoe; and this was particularly true of earlier times when communications between one area and another were not as good and individual and county styles tended to become more differentiated.

  We know this from an account of the escape of Charles – later Charles II – after his defeat in the battle of Worcester. He was in disguise, trying to reach the south coast and a ship to take him to France. He got to Charmouth near Monckton Wylde in Dorset:8 ‘Meanwhile my Lord Wilmot’s horse was being shod, and the prick-eared blacksmith Hamnet viewing the remainin shoessaid: “This horse hath but three shoes on, and they were set in three several counties, and one of them is Worcestershire;” which speech of his fully confirmed the ostler’s suspicion that one of the inn’s guests was the King …’ Another incident in this escape has a link with villages in East Anglia. To complete his disguise Charles had previously rubbed his hands on the back of a chimney and then on to his face. Now: ‘My Lord Wilmot cut his hair, untowardly notching it with a knife.’ Charles, who was supposed to be an ordinary villager, looked less like one than ever: ‘Then Richard came with a pair of shears and rounded the King’s hair.’9 Richard Penderel was a Cornish countryman who was helping the royal party to escape. He knew the proper drill and the proper instrument for cutting hair country fashion – that is, with a sheep shears; a method that lasted in East Anglia10 and in other regions, notably Sussex, until the beginning of this century.

  1 Lyn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change, p. 40.

  2 W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England, The Highland Zone in Domesday Book.

  3 Hector Bradlaugh Moore (The Forge, Brandiston) who has kindly given most of the material for this chapter.

  4 H.I.F., pp. 203–4.

  5 Many such stories were once told in the smithy – the gossip-shop or news exchange-mart under the old community. This, it seems, was the smithy’s ancient reputation; as it is reported (C. Kerenyi, Prometheus, p. 74) that, according to an old Nordic law, a man was not held responsible for what he said at the forge.

  6 H.I.F., p. 201.

  7 Lyn White, Jr., op. cit., pp. 57–8.

  8 Quoted in A. C. A. Brett, Charles II and His Court, London, 1910.

  9 Charles II and His Court, pp. 52–3.

  10 A.F.C.H., p. 50.

  18

  Hag-stones and the Evil Eye

  AT THE beginning of this century some farm horsemen in East Anglia hung a flint stone with a natural hole in it on the door of the stable. They often tied a piece of iron such as a key to the flint: sometimes they suspended the flint by a piece of string or wire just above the horse’s head or ba
ck as he stood in his stall. The two following accounts hint at its purpose. The first is from a Suffolk harness-maker who was born in 1900:1 his business specialized in making and repairing farm-harness: ‘In a farm about two or three miles from this village a gentleman told me that one of his mares was very upset during the night. Every morning when he went in, she was all covered in lather – all of a sweat, as we say. And one of his friends told him to try and get a flintstone – a round flint to hang up in the stable. He found the particular flint that he required and hung it up in the stable nearly over the centre of the mare’s back: I should say, roughly about eighteen inches above head height. And he assured me that cured the mare. In the morning when he went to the stable his mare was quiet and calm; and he assured me, as I say; “Blast, bor, that done the trick.” The flint had a hole in it and was hung up by a piece of wire.

  ‘Since this occurrence at this particular stable I took notice when I went into the other stables, because I used to go round to collect the harness repairs. And in several other stables I noticed this flint hanging up. I took particular notice then, because after this one or two people told me that it was to keep the horses calm at night.’2