The county of Kent, and the towns of York and Reading, made one kind of cloth of a heavy texture, the piece being thirty or thirty-four yards long by six and one-half broad, and weighing 66 lbs. to the piece. Worcester, Hereford, and Coventry made a lighter kind of fabric, while throughout the eastern counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex were made cloths of various kindsplunkets, azures, blues, long cloth, bay, say, and serges; Suffolk, in particular, made a "fine, short, white cloth." Wiltshire and Somerset made plunkets and handy warps; Yorkshire, short cloths. Broad-listed whites and reds, and fine cloths, also came from Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire; and Somerset was famous in the eastern part for narrow-listed whites and reds, and in the west for "dunsters." Devonshire made kerseys and grays, as also did Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Midlands furnished "Penistone" cloths and "Forest whites"; while Westmoreland was the seat of the manufacture of the famous "Kendal green" cloths, as also of "Carpmael" and "Cogware" fabrics.1 It will be seen that the manufacture was exceedingly extensive, and that special fabrics derived their names from the chief centre where they were made. It may be mentioned here, too, that the value of wool shorn in England at the end of the seventeenth century was £2,000,000, from about 12,000,000 sheep (according to Davenant 2); and the cloth manufactured from it was valued at about £8,000,000. Nearly half a century later (1741) the number of sheep was reckoned at 17,000,000, the value of wool shorn at £3,000,000, and of wool manufactured at £8,000,000, showing that progress in invention had not done much to enhance the value of the manufactured article. But in 1774, when the Industrial Revolution may be said to have fairly begun, the value of manufactured wool was £13,000,000, the value of raw wool (£4,500,000) being smaller in proportion.1 1 Cf. Rogers, Hist. Agric., v. 95, and the Act 4 and 5 James I., c. 2. 4 Ib. 187. Coal Mines. Turning now from textile manufactures to mining and working in metals, we find that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries England was just upon the eve of the most important changes in these industries-changes which, in many places, have entirely transformed the face of the country, and have equally transformed the conditions. of industry, and with them the social life of the working classes. It is no exaggeration to say that in its effects, both for good and evil, hardly any other historical event has been of so much importance as the modern improvements in coalmining. But it cannot be too clearly understood that none of our mining and mineral industries attained any proportions worth speaking of till what is known as the Industrial Revolution. Englishmen seem to have had hardly any idea of the vast wealth of coal and iron that has placed them in the forefront of Europe as a manufacturing nation. Nevertheless we may just glance at the imperfect methods which our forefathers used up till the eighteenth century. Coalmining had been carried on fairly extensively by the Romans, as, for instance, the discovery of coal cinders at Aston1 and other places testifies. Then, like all our industries, it was almost entirely given up, and it was due to the Norman Conquest that coal-mining was revived. That it was practised to some extent in the North is seen from an entry in the Boldean Book (a kind of Domesday of the county of Durham, composed in 1183), in which a smith is allowed twelve acres of land for making the ironwork of the carts, and has to provide his own coal.2 But collieries were not opened at Newcastle till the thirteenth century, in the year 1238. In the next year we find notice of the first public recognition of coal as an article of commerce, and from a charter of Henry III. to the freemen of Newcastle, we may date the foundation of the coal trade. In 1273 this had become sufficiently extensive for the use of coal to be forbidden in London, as there was 1 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 174. 2 Yeats, Technical History of Commerce, p. 171. 4 Ib. a prejudice against it and in favour of wood as fuel.1 In the fourteenth century, again, the monks of Tynemouth Priory engaged in mining speculation, and (1380) leased a colliery 2 for £5. In the fifteenth century trade was sufficiently important to form a source of revenue, for a tax of twopence per chaldron was placed upon sea-borne coal, and in 1421 an Act had to be passed to enforce this tax.3 In fact, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries coal-mining, although in a rather primitive fashion, became general in Great Britain. § 188. Development of Coal Trade: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. By the seventeenth century it had also become important-important enough for the needy Stuart monarch Charles I. to see in it a chance of revenue. This king gave to Sir Thomas Tempest and his partners the monopoly of the sale of Newcastle coal for twenty-one years, beginning in 1637, and next year he allowed a syndicate to be incorporated which was to buy up all the coal from Newcastle, Sunderland, and Berwick, and sell it in London for "not more than 17s. a ton in summer, and 19s. in winter" -an extravagant price for those times. The king got a shilling a ton out of this ingenious scheme, until the Long Parliament finally put a stop to this outrageous monopoly. Yet the coal trade still formed a favourite source of revenue, and the charge of re-erecting public buildings was defrayed by an additional custom on coals." It was said that early in the seventeenth century the Newcastle trade alone employed four hundred vessels.7 But although the coal trade was fairly extensive for that period, it was utterly insignificant compared with its present dimensions, and that for a very good reason. There was no 1 Yeats, Technical History of Commerce, p. 172. Sea-coal is found to have been brought as far south as Dover as early as 1279; cf. Rogers, Hist. Agric., i. 422, and ii. 394-397. 2 Yeats, Technical History, p. 172. • Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 154. • Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 175. 7 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 32, 3 Cf. Act 9 Henry V., c. 10. 5 Ib. means of pumping water out of the mines, except by the old-fashioned air-pump, which was, of course, utterly inadequate. Nor was a suitable invention discovered till the very end of the seventeenth century, when Thomas Savery, in 1698, invented a kind of pump, worked by the condensation of steam.1 This rather clumsy invention, however, was soon superseded in 1705 by Newcomen's steam pump.2 But it was not till after the commencement of the Industrial Revolution that steam power was scientifically applied to coal-mines by the inventions of Watt and Boulton (1765 and 1774), which we shall notice in their proper place. Up to that time, also, it was difficult to transport coal into inland districts by road, Newcastle coal being carried to London in ships, and then carried up inland rivers in barges. But these barges could not go high up many rivers at that time, and canals were not yet made. It was difficult, for instance, to get coal to Oxford, for it had first to come to London, then part of the way up the Thames, which was not then navigable so far as Oxford, and then by road. But at Cambridge it was easily procurable, for barges could come right up to the town from eastern ports. Hence it was much cheaper at Cambridge than at Oxford.4 § 189. The Iron Trade. As it had been with coal, so with iron. Only very small quantities of it were mined in the Middle Ages; it was smelted only by wood,5 as a rule, and was manufactured in a very rude way. We saw that at the great fairs foreign iron, chiefly from the Biscay coast, was much in demand, as our own supply was utterly insufficient. It was naturally not until we learnt to mine and use our coal properly that we learnt also how to mine and manufacture our iron. Before learning this, English workmen used wood as fuel, 1 Smiles, Lives of the Engineers (Boulton and Watt), ch. iii. A diagram of Savery's engine is on p. 49. 2 Ib., chs. iii. and iv., and diagrams, pp. 61 and 73. 3 Below, p. 352. 4 Rogers, Hist. Agric., v. 757, 774, 776; vi. 560. 5 Cf. the 35 Henry VIII., c. 17; and Smiles, Industrial Biography, ch. ii. 6 Above, p. 143, and it is to this cause that we owe the destruction of most of the forests which, at the time of Domesday, occupied so large an area. The extinction of the great forest of the Sussex Wealden is an example of this.1 "The waste and destruction of the woods in the counties of Warwick, Stafford, Hereford, Monmouth, Gloucester, and Salop by these iron-works is not to be imagined," a speaker said in Parliament as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century; and as wood was used as house-fuel also, it will readily be understood what a vast destruction of timber took place. As early as 1581 the erection of iron-works within certain distances from London and the Thames had been prohibited "for the preservation of the woods."3 2 But early in the seventeenth century Dud Dudley, son of Lord Dudley, began to make use of sea and pit coal for smelting iron, and obtained (1619) a monopoly "of the mystery and art of smelting iron ore, and of making the same into cast works or bars, in furnaces, with bellows."4 Dudley sold this cast iron at £12 a ton, and made a good profit out of it, but at last his works were destroyed by an ignorant mob. He actually produced seven tons a week, which was considered a large supply, and shows the comparative insignificance of the industry then. However, it was only comparatively insignificant, for before the close of the century it was calculated that 180,000 tons of ore were produced in England yearly; and in the eighteenth century (1719) iron came third in the list of English manufactures, and the trade gave employment to 200,000 people. There was, however, still great waste of wood, since a great many iron-masters did not use coal, and therefore the export and even the manufacture of iron was discouraged by legislation to such an extent, that, by 1740, the output had been reduced to 17,350 tons per annum, barely a tenth of the 1 Cf. Rogers, Econ. Interpretation, p. 287; and below, p. 2 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 177. 314. 3 M'Culloch, Commercial Dictionary (ed. 1844); s.v. Iron, p. 753. Cf. his book Metallum Martis, or Iron made with pit coale, sea coale, &c. (1665); and M'Culloch, Commercial Dict. (1844), s.v. Iron; also Smiles, Industrial Biography, ch. iii. |