We have heard how those who could left London to avoid the plague. Many people who could bought country homes, far away from the madding crowd.
One family who fled in 1665 was Mary Cradock and Charles Beale and their son, who went to the safety of Allbrook Farmhouse, Eastleigh, Hampshire, which they bought.
Parish records tell us that 19-year old gentlewoman Mary Cradock (1633-1699) had married Charles Beale (1631-1705) in 1652 at All Saints Church, Barrow, Suffolk, and for a time the couple lived in Covent Garden, part of an artists’ colony in what was a fashionable but rather louche area of London.
The birth of their son, Bartholomew, on the 12 February, 1655, places the Beales in London -- see the Registers of St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, https://www.academia.edu/27500983…
They lived at Allbrook for 6 years, during which time she refined her technique. Among friends who visited the Beales at Allbrook was Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler.
Mary Cradock Beale also wrote a manuscript 'Treatise on Friendship', which was sent from Allbrook on this day, March 9, 1666. https://www.theguardian.com/comme…
How about the ill we see in others we only dimly perceive in ourselves, Michaela?
London was a dangerous place at the best of times -- runaway horses -- desperate, unemployed robbers -- no police force -- excretment being thrown out of windows, etc. -- but these days the inhabitants could also walk around the corner and become unwittingly involved in another riot between army factions, parliament and/or the city militia. At times like this your subconscious is preoccupied with being super-aware; survival and your next meal are the most important things, plus protecting your stuff and the people you love. Pepys is an intelligencer for Montagu -- and Downing? -- so keeping his head down, asking the right questions and listening to the answers are what his life -- and paid employment -- is about; his seat at the office is just his cover.
Your comments about the new wild ways and seemingly available women, theater and orange girls are spoilers! Charles II isn't here yet, and it takes him until 9 July, 1660 (still less than 6 weeks after his Restoration), to issue a royal warrant requiring the issue of a patent under the Great Seal authorizing Thomas Killigrew to establish a company of actors and build a theatre. The warrant also recognizes Sir William Davenant's rights under his patent from King Charles, but all other companies of actors are suppressed. Then they can set up the theaters and hire actors, so it's going to be a while before there is a performance for Pepys to report on for us.
The wild ways and ladies are still in the Netherlands.
I like David Smith's assessment of Pepys' character as shown by his dealings with Barlow.
And I feel sorry for Pepys -- the sooner Sandwich gets a new secretary the better. He can't be Clerk of the Acts by day, and running off to Whitehall every evening. And then walking home with a linkboy; as Arbor mapped out the route, it's a few miles. Thank goodness the rain had stopped, but even so ...
L&M Companion: John and Elizabeth Hunt -- Friends and neighbors in Axe Yard. Their house, taxed on 8 hearths, lay a few doors away from the Pepys'. John, a Cambridgeshire man, seems to have been sympathetic to the political and ecclesiastical extremists. In Feb. 1660 he disapproved of the return of secluded MPs, and in 1665 stood bail for sectary William Hayer. Elizabeth was a relative of Cromwell's. John was employed in the Excise; after doubts about his future at the Restoration, he was serving in the Excise Commission for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire in 1661, and for Cambridgeshire in 1666.
L&M Companion: John and Elizabeth Hunt -- Friends and neighbors in Axe Yard. Their house, taxed on 8 hearths, lay a few doors away from the Pepys'. John, a Cambridgeshire man, seems to have been sympathetic to the political and ecclesiastical extremists. In Feb. 1660 he disapproved of the return of secluded MPs, and in 1665 stood bail for sectary William Hayer. Elizabeth was a relative of Cromwell's. John was employed in the Excise; after doubts about his future at the Restoration, he was serving in the Excise Commission for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire in 1661, and for Cambridgeshire in 1666.
"In a petition to the king of January 2, 1665, the company declared that its trade had already increased to such an extent that over one hundred ships were employed, and that a yearly return of from two to three hundred thousand pounds might reasonably be expected."
The peace-at-any price policy of King James and King Charles I, the decline of Spain and the involvement of the continental powers in the Thirty Years War gave England half a century of respite from anxiety about defence against foreign invasion.
Cromwell’s vigorous foreign policy was based on the superiority of the English navy over its rivals, and it was not until Charles II’s Anglo-Dutch Wars that home defence again became an urgent question. https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…
Pepys' priorities are going to change soon. Is he ready for prime time?
Off the mouth of the River Tyne is located the Dogger Bank, as important in British history as any of the sandbars Pepys mentions as sheltering the Navy off the coast of Kent, Sussex and Essex. But the Second Anglo-Dutch War didn't come this far up the coast.
The name Dogger Bank was first recorded in the mid-17th century. It is probably derived from the word "dogger" used for a 2-masted boat of the type that trawled for fish in the area in medieval times. The area has similar names in Dutch, German, and Danish, which shows its international appeal.
The bank extends over about 17,600 sq. kilometres (6,800 sq. mi.), and is about 260 x 100 kilometres (160 x 60 mi.) in extent. The water depth ranges from 15 - 36 metres (50 - 120 ft.), about 20 metres (65 ft.) shallower than the surrounding sea. More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog…
Kentish ports from Gravesend to New Romney engaged in fishing. Before the Dissolution, the religious houses consumed vast quantities of fish, and there was always a ready market for it.
Around the south coast a large variety of fish were caught. In 1350 Daniel Rough, the Town Clerk of Romney, wrote a list of the taxes which were payable on goods bought or sold in the town, and it includes cod, porpoise, herring, sprats, crabs, salmon, haddock, lampreys, mackerel, conger, shrimps, whiting, tench and eels.
So long as the main fishing grounds were near the coast, or at least not farther off than the Dogger Bank, the Kent fishing industry remained prosperous, ...
Thankfully Charles II decreed that the rebuilding of London should be done in brick and stone.
At many places inKent the clay or brick-earth is suitable for the manufacture of tiles and bricks and has been so used for centuries.
Battle Abbey, which owned the great manor of Wye, had a tile-works at Naccolt with an annual output of more than 100,000 tiles, at least as early as 1340. Similarly, in the 14th century, the monks of Boxley had their own tile-yards, and in the following century we hear of a large brick-ground belonging to the Corporation of Sandwich.
From that time onwards bricks and tiles were increasingly in demand, and although some were imported through Kentish ports from the Netherlands and Flanders, the industry expanded rapidly in Kent, especially as the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666 and its expansion during the 18th century offered a profitable market for the produce of Kent brickfields.
Because cloth-making was carried on in isolated units, the industry was controlled in the interests of the purchaser. The regulation width of Kentish broadcloth was 58 ins., and each piece had to be between 30 and 34 yds. in length and to weigh 66 lbs. Officials, known as ulnagers (from aulne, an ell) checked the regulations were obeyed. No piece of cloth might be sold until it had been passed by them and sealed; offenders, principally those whose cloth was below the regulation weight, were fined.
Woad, madder and saffron were used to dye the cloths, the principal colors being russet, ginger, orange, blue, grey and green. Eventually the Kent clothiers specialised in a grey cloth, which became known as Kentish grey.
So many processes were involved in cloth-making that the manufacture of a single piece required the labor of 30 to 40 skilled workers.
It was estimated, during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, that the output of cloth in Kent amounted to 11,000 - 12,000 pieces a year, so the total value was about £150,000, a large sum of money in those days.
The clothiers constantly believed that the industry was threatened, and sought to have it protected by Parliament against foreign competition.
By the end of the 17th century trade was seriously falling off, and by the end of the 18th century the cloth-making industry had ended. It was not foreign competition, but competition from the more favourably situated cloth areas of Yorkshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Gloucester that caused the collapse of the industry in Kent.
At the height of its prosperity, about 1580, Cranbrook supported a population of some 3,000, at a time when Maidstone’s population was not more than about 2,000.
Stone of a kind which in the Middle Ages was used for church-, castle- and house-building, had been quarried in Kent from Roman times.
The great ragstone quarries at Maidstone ... Folkestone and Hythe for many centuries provided an excellent building material, used for buildings as far apart in time as St. Leonard’s Tower, West Mailing (c.1100) and Preston Hall, Aylesford (c.1850).
The ragstone was not only used for building but also for cannon-balls, at least up to the time of Henry VIII.
A particularly fine limestone known as Bethersden marble was quarried from medieval times, and was used locally for building, and in more distant parts of the county for ornamental features like columns and tombs.
In the south-west corner of Kent the sandstone found around Tunbridge Wells has been extensively used for building, as at Penshurst Place.
At the other end of the county, in Thanet, Dover and Deal, the chalk contains bands of flint which was mined and often used in church- and house-building until the end of the 19th century.
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The cloth-making industry of the Kentish Weald prospered by the introduction of skilled foreign workmen, invited over to England by Edward III, particularly from the Netherlands. Before Edward III’s time cloth-making was widespread, each town and village making the cloth for its own needs. Cloth-making on this scale cannot be called an industry, and fine cloth was either imported from the Continent, or the coarse English cloth sent there to be finished. Edward I, during a dispute with Flanders, forbade the export of English wool or the import of Flemish cloth. Edward III strengthened the English cloth industry and weakened the rival Flanders industry by invitating foreign workmen to resettle in England. At first, the foreigners were not well received.
There was plenty of wool from the Kentish flocks, although it was of inferior quality to the wool of East Anglia and the West Country.
Two other commodities were available locally for finishing the cloth — water-power and fuller’s earth. To cleanse the grease from the cloth, it had to be pounded in water and treated with fuller’s earth. The pounding was done by people walking on the cloth in a trough, but it was done more economically by a fulling mill where hammers were driven by water-power.
The fuller’s earth came from around Maidstone, especially from Boxley parish.
Apart from the weaving and fulling, processes like spinning and carding, were carried out in the workers’ homes.
Until the 18th century, weaving was done in the master cloth-worker’s ‘hall’ and there the raw materials and the finished products were stored. Several of these fine timber-framed cloth-workers’ halls still exist, one of the best known being that at Biddenden.
Some of the iron made in the Kentish Weald found its way to Dartford where, in 1590, Godfrey Box, an immigrant from Liege, set up the first slitting mill in England for cutting iron bars into rods. The engineering industry at Dartford claims a long ancestry.
Dartford was also a pioneer town in paper-making. The mill which John Spielman, a German, set up there early in the reign of Elizabeth was the second paper-mill to be opened in England. (also see https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/… )
The Darent provided the power to drive the mill, and also the supply of clean water that is essential for paper-making. Spielman was given a monopoly of the making of white paper for 10 years and was authorised to ‘gather all manner of linen rags … scraps of parchment, leather shreds, clippings of cards, and old fishing nets, necessary for the making of white writing-paper’. He employed at least 600 men, many of them Germans.
The paper-making industry in Kent received a big impetus from the arrival of refugee Huguernots after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and many French terms are still employed in the industry; the large room where the paper is finished, for example, is still called the salle.
By the end of the 17th century there were several paper mills working in Kent, including a second mill at Dartford, a brown-paper mill at Canterbury, and a very small mill at Aylesford ....
Boat-building was carried on in a larger way at the royal dockyards, at Deptford, Woolwich and Chatham. Deptford was in use as a shipbuilding yard at least 1400. Woolwich and Chatham did not follow until the 16th century.
All 3 yards derived much of their timber, especially oak, for the building and repair of ships from the Kentish Weald. Transport presented great difficulty because the roads were old, and often totally impassable after heavy rain.
Oak and Spanish chestnut were also largely used for the building of houses in the Weald, and on those parts of the North Downs where the clay overlying the chalk carried timber-forest.
There were famous oyster-fisheries at Reculver, Whitstable, Faversham, Milton Regis and in the mouth of the Medway [all in Kent]. So valuable were they that from time to time they were raided by men from Essex and by Dutchmen.
Gunpowder had also been manufactured at Faversham, on a larger scale, from Elizabethan times. ... The stream which runs down through Ospringe into Faversham Creek provided the power to drive the mills.
Faversham Creek is the site of a boat-building yard, and probably the industry has been carried on there in a small way for centuries. ...
There were famous oyster-fisheries at Reculver, Whitstable, Faversham, Milton Regis and in the mouth of the Medway. So valuable were they that from time to time they were raided by men from Essex and by Dutchmen.
Some of the iron made in the Kentish Weald found its way to Dartford where, in 1590, Godfrey Box, an immigrant from Liege, set up the first slitting mill in England for cutting iron bars into rods. The engineering industry at Dartford claims a long ancestry.
Dartford was also a pioneer town in paper-making. The mill which John Spielman, a German, set up there early in the reign of Elizabeth was the second paper-mill to be opened in England. (also see https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/… )
The Darent provided the power to drive the mill, and also the supply of clean water that is essential for paper-making. Spielman was given a monopoly of the making of white paper for 10 years and was authorised to ‘gather all manner of linen rags … scraps of parchment, leather shreds, clippings of cards, and old fishing nets, necessary for the making of white writing-paper’. He employed at least 600 men, many of them Germans.
The paper-making industry in Kent received a big impetus from the arrival of refugee Huguernots after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and many French terms are still employed in the industry; the large room where the paper is finished, for example, is still called the salle.
By the end of the 17th century there were several paper mills working in Kent, including a second mill at Dartford, a brown-paper mill at Canterbury, and a very small mill at Aylesford ....
A partial answer to my question "the evolution into metal in the 1600's":
The clothiers of the Cranbrook district in Kent complained in 1635 that their industry was threatened by the setting up of John Browne’s ironworks, which consumed vast quantities of timber.
The iron-ore of the Kentish Weald had been worked and smelted from Roman times, but more on the Sussex than the Kent side of the forest. The smelting of ore was done at Tudeley at the beginning of the 14th century, and by the end of the 16th century there were ironworks at Cranbrook, Hawkhurst, Goudhurst, Horsmonden, Tonbridge, Cowden, Ashurst, Brenchley, Lamberhurst and Biddenden.
Iron-making involved two processes: first the smelting of the ore in a ‘bloomery’, and then the refining of the metal so produced. A bloomery consisted of a kiln, about 24 ft. in diameter and 30 ft. high, open at the top. The ore and fuel (wood and charcoal) are fed in from the top in alternate layers and the furnace is then set alight. The high temperature requires a draught provided by bellows, worked either by men or by water-power. The metal collects in a molten mass at the bottom of the furnace and was drawn off into a depression in the ground. Then it is reheated and beaten to get rid of impurities. Water-power could be used to work the hammers in the same way it was used at fulling-mills, and contemporary travellers in the Weald speak of the awful noise made by the hammer-furnaces.
Nothing of them now remains besides names like Hammer Stream, Furnace Pond, Cinderhill Wood, and Blower’s Cottage.
The iron was used for making horseshoes, nails, pots, pans, firebacks, hinges plus cannon-balls and cannon.
Casting cannon was highly skilled work. Kentish cannon were not only used in castles and ships, but were also exported -- sometimes smuggled out of the country under loads of wood.
Browne’s ironworks at Brenchley, one of the largest, employed 200 men in the early part of the 17th century. The amount of timber used as fuel was enormous: one works burned 750,000 cubic ft in a year. The Weald was still heavily wooded, but the exhaustion of timber was a constant worry to the people of Kent, and the government.
The scarcity of timber, the importation of iron from Sweden, Flanders and Spain, and the discovery that coal could be used for smelting iron-ore, caused the decline of the Kentish iron industry from the 1660s. In 1740 only 4 furnaces were still open in Kent.
Some of the iron made in the Weald found its way to Dartford where, in 1590, Godfrey Box, an immigrant from Liege, set up the first slitting mill in England for cutting iron bars into rods.
About the same time a mill was established at Crayford for the manufacture of iron plates for armor.
Maidstone owes much of its importance to its situation at the point where the road from London and Sevenoaks to Ashford and the coast crosses the Medway. However, in the 16th and 17th centuries this road carried much less traffic than Watling Street, and it was not until the latter half of the 19th century that Maidstone surpassed Rochester, Chatham and Canterbury in size.
For its development in the 17th century Maidstone had to thank 4 local industries — the making of cloths called ‘mannikins’, the export of fuller’s earth from Boxley, the dressing of linen, and the making of linen-thread.
The latter was another industry introduced by Flemish refugees at the end of the 16th century. During the following century it flourished to such an extent that it was said that Maidstone thread was ‘carried all over the world’, but in 1668 the thread-makers of Maidstone petitioned Parliament to protect their industry from unfair competition, and especially from the import of Dutch thread.
The industry survived into, but not until the end of, the 18th century.
In the 16th century, Walloon refugees settled in Canterbury. Cloth-making had been established there since the Dissolution of the Monasteries when the Franciscan house, the Greyfriars, became a cloth-factory.
These Walloons specialized in the making of silks, and the city soon became, along with London, the two centers of the craft in England.
This was not a case of an industry being set up near the source of its raw material, because the raw silk had to be imported from Italy and Turkey; the important ‘raw material’ here was the skill of the weavers.
As elsewhere in the county, refugees were generally welcomed by the authorities, as they realized their knowledge and industry brought prosperity to the places where they settled.
At Canterbury the Huguenots, as they were called, were granted the use of a chapel in the crypt of the Cathedral so that they could continue their own religious services. They became loyal citizens, giving no trouble to the authorities, but to some extent ‘keeping themselves to themselves’. For example, they looked after their own aged and poor, and therefore demurred at paying the City poor rate, although their objection to doing so was overruled by the Judge of Assize.
The silk-weavers thrived to such an extent that, in 1660, over 2,000 people were employed in the industry, of whom 1,300 were ‘strangers’ and 700 English.
After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 more French Protestants fled to England, some of whom settled at Canterbury.
The last few years of the 17th century saw the industry at its zenith. Celia Fiennes, who was a great traveler and kept a diary of all that she saw, remarked on the prosperity of the silk-weavers when she visited Canterbury in 1697: ‘I saw 20 Loomes in one house with severall fine flower’d silks’, she records.
Sadly, the industry was about to collapse. The opening up of trade with the East by the East India Company and the importation of woven silks was a serious blow to the silk-weavers of London and Canterbury. Attempts were made, by Act of Parliament, to protect the home industry by restricting the importation of silk cloth, but were not successful and by 1710 the number of master-weavers at Canterbury had fallen by more than half.
A few years later the industry was practically dead.
Comments
Third Reading
About Friday 9 March 1665/66
San Diego Sarah • Link
We have heard how those who could left London to avoid the plague. Many people who could bought country homes, far away from the madding crowd.
One family who fled in 1665 was Mary Cradock and Charles Beale and their son, who went to the safety of Allbrook Farmhouse, Eastleigh, Hampshire, which they bought.
Parish records tell us that 19-year old gentlewoman Mary Cradock (1633-1699) had married Charles Beale (1631-1705) in 1652 at All Saints Church, Barrow, Suffolk, and for a time the couple lived in Covent Garden, part of an artists’ colony in what was a fashionable but rather louche area of London.
The birth of their son, Bartholomew, on the 12 February, 1655, places the Beales in London -- see the Registers of St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden,
https://www.academia.edu/27500983…
They lived at Allbrook for 6 years, during which time she refined her technique. Among friends who visited the Beales at Allbrook was Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler.
Mary Cradock Beale also wrote a manuscript 'Treatise on Friendship', which was sent from Allbrook on this day, March 9, 1666. https://www.theguardian.com/comme…
About Saturday 18 February 1659/60
San Diego Sarah • Link
How about the ill we see in others we only dimly perceive in ourselves, Michaela?
London was a dangerous place at the best of times -- runaway horses -- desperate, unemployed robbers -- no police force -- excretment being thrown out of windows, etc. -- but these days the inhabitants could also walk around the corner and become unwittingly involved in another riot between army factions, parliament and/or the city militia.
At times like this your subconscious is preoccupied with being super-aware; survival and your next meal are the most important things, plus protecting your stuff and the people you love.
Pepys is an intelligencer for Montagu -- and Downing? -- so keeping his head down, asking the right questions and listening to the answers are what his life -- and paid employment -- is about; his seat at the office is just his cover.
Your comments about the new wild ways and seemingly available women, theater and orange girls are spoilers! Charles II isn't here yet, and it takes him until 9 July, 1660 (still less than 6 weeks after his Restoration), to issue a royal warrant requiring the issue of a patent under the Great Seal authorizing Thomas Killigrew to establish a company of actors and build a theatre. The warrant also recognizes Sir William Davenant's rights under his patent from King Charles, but all other companies of actors are suppressed.
Then they can set up the theaters and hire actors, so it's going to be a while before there is a performance for Pepys to report on for us.
The wild ways and ladies are still in the Netherlands.
About Tuesday 17 July 1660
San Diego Sarah • Link
I like David Smith's assessment of Pepys' character as shown by his dealings with Barlow.
And I feel sorry for Pepys -- the sooner Sandwich gets a new secretary the better.
He can't be Clerk of the Acts by day, and running off to Whitehall every evening. And then walking home with a linkboy; as Arbor mapped out the route, it's a few miles.
Thank goodness the rain had stopped, but even so ...
About John Hunt
San Diego Sarah • Link
L&M Companion: John and Elizabeth Hunt -- Friends and neighbors in Axe Yard. Their house, taxed on 8 hearths, lay a few doors away from the Pepys'. John, a Cambridgeshire man, seems to have been sympathetic to the political and ecclesiastical extremists. In Feb. 1660 he disapproved of the return of secluded MPs, and in 1665 stood bail for sectary William Hayer. Elizabeth was a relative of Cromwell's. John was employed in the Excise; after doubts about his future at the Restoration, he was serving in the Excise Commission for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire in 1661, and for Cambridgeshire in 1666.
About Elizabeth Hunt
San Diego Sarah • Link
L&M Companion: John and Elizabeth Hunt -- Friends and neighbors in Axe Yard. Their house, taxed on 8 hearths, lay a few doors away from the Pepys'. John, a Cambridgeshire man, seems to have been sympathetic to the political and ecclesiastical extremists. In Feb. 1660 he disapproved of the return of secluded MPs, and in 1665 stood bail for sectary William Hayer. Elizabeth was a relative of Cromwell's. John was employed in the Excise; after doubts about his future at the Restoration, he was serving in the Excise Commission for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire in 1661, and for Cambridgeshire in 1666.
About Great Fire of London
San Diego Sarah • Link
And pictures of that new, brick London can be seen at
https://spitalfieldslife.com/2023…
About Monday 2 January 1664/65
San Diego Sarah • Link
"In a petition to the king of January 2, 1665, the company declared that its trade had already increased to such an extent that over one hundred ships were employed, and that a yearly return of from two to three hundred thousand pounds might reasonably be expected."
The peace-at-any price policy of King James and King Charles I, the decline of Spain and the involvement of the continental powers in the Thirty Years War gave England half a century of respite from anxiety about defence against foreign invasion.
Cromwell’s vigorous foreign policy was based on the superiority of the English navy over its rivals, and it was not until Charles II’s Anglo-Dutch Wars that home defence again became an urgent question.
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…
Pepys' priorities are going to change soon. Is he ready for prime time?
About Newcastle Upon Tyne
San Diego Sarah • Link
Off the mouth of the River Tyne is located the Dogger Bank, as important in British history as any of the sandbars Pepys mentions as sheltering the Navy off the coast of Kent, Sussex and Essex. But the Second Anglo-Dutch War didn't come this far up the coast.
The name Dogger Bank was first recorded in the mid-17th century. It is probably derived from the word "dogger" used for a 2-masted boat of the type that trawled for fish in the area in medieval times. The area has similar names in Dutch, German, and Danish, which shows its international appeal.
The bank extends over about 17,600 sq. kilometres (6,800 sq. mi.), and is about 260 x 100 kilometres (160 x 60 mi.) in extent. The water depth ranges from 15 - 36 metres (50 - 120 ft.), about 20 metres (65 ft.) shallower than the surrounding sea.
More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog…
Kentish ports from Gravesend to New Romney engaged in fishing. Before the Dissolution, the religious houses consumed vast quantities of fish, and there was always a ready market for it.
Around the south coast a large variety of fish were caught. In 1350 Daniel Rough, the Town Clerk of Romney, wrote a list of the taxes which were payable on goods bought or sold in the town, and it includes cod, porpoise, herring, sprats, crabs, salmon, haddock, lampreys, mackerel, conger, shrimps, whiting, tench and eels.
So long as the main fishing grounds were near the coast, or at least not farther off than the Dogger Bank, the Kent fishing industry remained prosperous, ...
EXCERPTED FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…
About Great Fire of London
San Diego Sarah • Link
Thankfully Charles II decreed that the rebuilding of London should be done in brick and stone.
At many places inKent the clay or brick-earth is suitable for the manufacture of tiles and bricks and has been so used for centuries.
Battle Abbey, which owned the great manor of Wye, had a tile-works at Naccolt with an annual output of more than 100,000 tiles, at least as early as 1340.
Similarly, in the 14th century, the monks of Boxley had their own tile-yards, and in the following century we hear of a large brick-ground belonging to the Corporation of Sandwich.
From that time onwards bricks and tiles were increasingly in demand, and although some were imported through Kentish ports from the Netherlands and Flanders, the industry expanded rapidly in Kent, especially as the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666 and its expansion during the 18th century offered a profitable market for the produce of Kent brickfields.
EXCERPTED FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…
About Maidstone, Kent
San Diego Sarah • Link
PART 2
Because cloth-making was carried on in isolated units, the industry was controlled in the interests of the purchaser. The regulation width of Kentish broadcloth was 58 ins., and each piece had to be between 30 and 34 yds. in length and to weigh 66 lbs.
Officials, known as ulnagers (from aulne, an ell) checked the regulations were obeyed. No piece of cloth might be sold until it had been passed by them and sealed; offenders, principally those whose cloth was below the regulation weight, were fined.
Woad, madder and saffron were used to dye the cloths, the principal colors being russet, ginger, orange, blue, grey and green. Eventually the Kent clothiers specialised in a grey cloth, which became known as Kentish grey.
So many processes were involved in cloth-making that the manufacture of a single piece required the labor of 30 to 40 skilled workers.
It was estimated, during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, that the output of cloth in Kent amounted to 11,000 - 12,000 pieces a year, so the total value was about £150,000, a large sum of money in those days.
The clothiers constantly believed that the industry was threatened, and sought to have it protected by Parliament against foreign competition.
By the end of the 17th century trade was seriously falling off, and by the end of the 18th century the cloth-making industry had ended.
It was not foreign competition, but competition from the more favourably situated cloth areas of Yorkshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Gloucester that caused the collapse of the industry in Kent.
At the height of its prosperity, about 1580, Cranbrook supported a population of some 3,000, at a time when Maidstone’s population was not more than about 2,000.
About Maidstone, Kent
San Diego Sarah • Link
Also from "Industries ...":
Stone of a kind which in the Middle Ages was used for church-, castle- and house-building, had been quarried in Kent from Roman times.
The great ragstone quarries at Maidstone ... Folkestone and Hythe for many centuries provided an excellent building material, used for buildings as far apart in time as St. Leonard’s Tower, West Mailing (c.1100) and Preston Hall, Aylesford (c.1850).
The ragstone was not only used for building but also for cannon-balls, at least up to the time of Henry VIII.
A particularly fine limestone known as Bethersden marble was quarried from medieval times, and was used locally for building, and in more distant parts of the county for ornamental features like columns and tombs.
In the south-west corner of Kent the sandstone found around Tunbridge Wells has been extensively used for building, as at Penshurst Place.
At the other end of the county, in Thanet, Dover and Deal, the chalk contains bands of flint which was mined and often used in church- and house-building until the end of the 19th century.
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The cloth-making industry of the Kentish Weald prospered by the introduction of skilled foreign workmen, invited over to England by Edward III, particularly from the Netherlands.
Before Edward III’s time cloth-making was widespread, each town and village making the cloth for its own needs. Cloth-making on this scale cannot be called an industry, and fine cloth was either imported from the Continent, or the coarse English cloth sent there to be finished.
Edward I, during a dispute with Flanders, forbade the export of English wool or the import of Flemish cloth.
Edward III strengthened the English cloth industry and weakened the rival Flanders industry by invitating foreign workmen to resettle in England. At first, the foreigners were not well received.
There was plenty of wool from the Kentish flocks, although it was of inferior quality to the wool of East Anglia and the West Country.
Two other commodities were available locally for finishing the cloth — water-power and fuller’s earth.
To cleanse the grease from the cloth, it had to be pounded in water and treated with fuller’s earth. The pounding was done by people walking on the cloth in a trough, but it was done more economically by a fulling mill where hammers were driven by water-power.
The fuller’s earth came from around Maidstone, especially from Boxley parish.
Apart from the weaving and fulling, processes like spinning and carding, were carried out in the workers’ homes.
Until the 18th century, weaving was done in the master cloth-worker’s ‘hall’ and there the raw materials and the finished products were stored.
Several of these fine timber-framed cloth-workers’ halls still exist, one of the best known being that at Biddenden.
About Dartford
San Diego Sarah • Link
Some of the iron made in the Kentish Weald found its way to Dartford where, in 1590, Godfrey Box, an immigrant from Liege, set up the first slitting mill in England for cutting iron bars into rods. The engineering industry at Dartford claims a long ancestry.
Dartford was also a pioneer town in paper-making. The mill which John Spielman, a German, set up there early in the reign of Elizabeth was the second paper-mill to be opened in England.
(also see https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/… )
The Darent provided the power to drive the mill, and also the supply of clean water that is essential for paper-making.
Spielman was given a monopoly of the making of white paper for 10 years and was authorised to ‘gather all manner of linen rags … scraps of parchment, leather shreds, clippings of cards, and old fishing nets, necessary for the making of white writing-paper’.
He employed at least 600 men, many of them Germans.
The paper-making industry in Kent received a big impetus from the arrival of refugee Huguernots after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and many French terms are still employed in the industry; the large room where the paper is finished, for example, is still called the salle.
By the end of the 17th century there were several paper mills working in Kent, including a second mill at Dartford, a brown-paper mill at Canterbury, and a very small mill at Aylesford ....
EXCERPTED FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…
We also had exchanges about paper in general starting at
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
and
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
About Deptford, Kent
San Diego Sarah • Link
Boat-building was carried on in a larger way at the royal dockyards, at Deptford, Woolwich and Chatham.
Deptford was in use as a shipbuilding yard at least 1400.
Woolwich and Chatham did not follow until the 16th century.
All 3 yards derived much of their timber, especially oak, for the building and repair of ships from the Kentish Weald.
Transport presented great difficulty because the roads were old, and often totally impassable after heavy rain.
Oak and Spanish chestnut were also largely used for the building of houses in the Weald, and on those parts of the North Downs where the clay overlying the chalk carried timber-forest.
EXCERPTED FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…
About Oysters
San Diego Sarah • Link
There were famous oyster-fisheries at Reculver, Whitstable, Faversham, Milton Regis and in the mouth of the Medway [all in Kent].
So valuable were they that from time to time they were raided by men from Essex and by Dutchmen.
EXCERPT FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…
About Faversham, Kent
San Diego Sarah • Link
Gunpowder had also been manufactured at Faversham, on a larger scale, from Elizabethan times. ...
The stream which runs down through Ospringe into Faversham Creek provided the power to drive the mills.
Faversham Creek is the site of a boat-building yard, and probably the industry has been carried on there in a small way for centuries. ...
There were famous oyster-fisheries at Reculver, Whitstable, Faversham, Milton Regis and in the mouth of the Medway. So valuable were they that from time to time they were raided by men from Essex and by Dutchmen.
EXCERPTED FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…
About Sunday 15 July 1660
San Diego Sarah • Link
More about paper and its production at
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
and starting at
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/… which includes more on John Spielman, who sounds like a 16th century James Dyson.
About Deptford, Kent
San Diego Sarah • Link
Some of the iron made in the Kentish Weald found its way to Dartford where, in 1590, Godfrey Box, an immigrant from Liege, set up the first slitting mill in England for cutting iron bars into rods. The engineering industry at Dartford claims a long ancestry.
Dartford was also a pioneer town in paper-making. The mill which John Spielman, a German, set up there early in the reign of Elizabeth was the second paper-mill to be opened in England.
(also see https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/… )
The Darent provided the power to drive the mill, and also the supply of clean water that is essential for paper-making.
Spielman was given a monopoly of the making of white paper for 10 years and was authorised to ‘gather all manner of linen rags … scraps of parchment, leather shreds, clippings of cards, and old fishing nets, necessary for the making of white writing-paper’.
He employed at least 600 men, many of them Germans.
The paper-making industry in Kent received a big impetus from the arrival of refugee Huguernots after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and many French terms are still employed in the industry; the large room where the paper is finished, for example, is still called the salle.
By the end of the 17th century there were several paper mills working in Kent, including a second mill at Dartford, a brown-paper mill at Canterbury, and a very small mill at Aylesford ....
EXCERPTED FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…
We also had exchanges about paper in general starting at
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
and
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
About Board of Ordnance
San Diego Sarah • Link
A partial answer to my question "the evolution into metal in the 1600's":
The clothiers of the Cranbrook district in Kent complained in 1635 that their industry was threatened by the setting up of John Browne’s ironworks, which consumed vast quantities of timber.
The iron-ore of the Kentish Weald had been worked and smelted from Roman times, but more on the Sussex than the Kent side of the forest.
The smelting of ore was done at Tudeley at the beginning of the 14th century, and by the end of the 16th century there were ironworks at Cranbrook, Hawkhurst, Goudhurst, Horsmonden, Tonbridge, Cowden, Ashurst, Brenchley, Lamberhurst and Biddenden.
Iron-making involved two processes:
first the smelting of the ore in a ‘bloomery’, and then the refining of the metal so produced.
A bloomery consisted of a kiln, about 24 ft. in diameter and 30 ft. high, open at the top.
The ore and fuel (wood and charcoal) are fed in from the top in alternate layers and the furnace is then set alight.
The high temperature requires a draught provided by bellows, worked either by men or by water-power.
The metal collects in a molten mass at the bottom of the furnace and was drawn off into a depression in the ground.
Then it is reheated and beaten to get rid of impurities.
Water-power could be used to work the hammers in the same way it was used at fulling-mills, and contemporary travellers in the Weald speak of the awful noise made by the hammer-furnaces.
Nothing of them now remains besides names like Hammer Stream, Furnace Pond, Cinderhill Wood, and Blower’s Cottage.
The iron was used for making horseshoes, nails, pots, pans, firebacks, hinges plus cannon-balls and cannon.
Casting cannon was highly skilled work.
Kentish cannon were not only used in castles and ships, but were also exported -- sometimes smuggled out of the country under loads of wood.
Browne’s ironworks at Brenchley, one of the largest, employed 200 men in the early part of the 17th century.
The amount of timber used as fuel was enormous: one works burned 750,000 cubic ft in a year.
The Weald was still heavily wooded, but the exhaustion of timber was a constant worry to the people of Kent, and the government.
The scarcity of timber, the importation of iron from Sweden, Flanders and Spain, and the discovery that coal could be used for smelting iron-ore, caused the decline of the Kentish iron industry from the 1660s.
In 1740 only 4 furnaces were still open in Kent.
Some of the iron made in the Weald found its way to Dartford where, in 1590, Godfrey Box, an immigrant from Liege, set up the first slitting mill in England for cutting iron bars into rods.
About the same time a mill was established at Crayford for the manufacture of iron plates for armor.
EXCERPTED FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
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About Maidstone, Kent
San Diego Sarah • Link
Maidstone owes much of its importance to its situation at the point where the road from London and Sevenoaks to Ashford and the coast crosses the Medway.
However, in the 16th and 17th centuries this road carried much less traffic than Watling Street, and it was not until the latter half of the 19th century that Maidstone surpassed Rochester, Chatham and Canterbury in size.
For its development in the 17th century Maidstone had to thank 4 local industries — the making of cloths called ‘mannikins’, the export of fuller’s earth from Boxley, the dressing of linen, and the making of linen-thread.
The latter was another industry introduced by Flemish refugees at the end of the 16th century.
During the following century it flourished to such an extent that it was said that Maidstone thread was ‘carried all over the world’, but in 1668 the thread-makers of Maidstone petitioned Parliament to protect their industry from unfair competition, and especially from the import of Dutch thread.
The industry survived into, but not until the end of, the 18th century.
EXCERPTED FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
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About Canterbury
San Diego Sarah • Link
In the 16th century, Walloon refugees settled in Canterbury. Cloth-making had been established there since the Dissolution of the Monasteries when the Franciscan house, the Greyfriars, became a cloth-factory.
These Walloons specialized in the making of silks, and the city soon became, along with London, the two centers of the craft in England.
This was not a case of an industry being set up near the source of its raw material, because the raw silk had to be imported from Italy and Turkey; the important ‘raw material’ here was the skill of the weavers.
As elsewhere in the county, refugees were generally welcomed by the authorities, as they realized their knowledge and industry brought prosperity to the places where they settled.
At Canterbury the Huguenots, as they were called, were granted the use of a chapel in the crypt of the Cathedral so that they could continue their own religious services.
They became loyal citizens, giving no trouble to the authorities, but to some extent ‘keeping themselves to themselves’.
For example, they looked after their own aged and poor, and therefore demurred at paying the City poor rate, although their objection to doing so was overruled by the Judge of Assize.
The silk-weavers thrived to such an extent that, in 1660, over 2,000 people were employed in the industry, of whom 1,300 were ‘strangers’ and 700 English.
After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 more French Protestants fled to England, some of whom settled at Canterbury.
The last few years of the 17th century saw the industry at its zenith. Celia Fiennes, who was a great traveler and kept a diary of all that she saw, remarked on the prosperity of the silk-weavers when she visited Canterbury in 1697: ‘I saw 20 Loomes in one house with severall fine flower’d silks’, she records.
Sadly, the industry was about to collapse. The opening up of trade with the East by the East India Company and the importation of woven silks was a serious blow to the silk-weavers of London and Canterbury. Attempts were made, by Act of Parliament, to protect the home industry by restricting the importation of silk cloth, but were not successful and by 1710 the number of master-weavers at Canterbury had fallen by more than half.
A few years later the industry was practically dead.
EXCERPTED FROM “Industries in the 15th to 18th Centuries“ [in Kent]
https://www.wilcuma.org.uk/the-hi…