L. F. Salzman

“ MINING—COAL
Coal is so intimately connected with all that is essentially modern—machinery, steam, and the black pall that overhangs our great towns and manufacturing districts—that it comes almost as a surprise to find it in use in Britain at the beginning of the Christian era. Yet excavation has proved beyond all doubt that coal was used by the Romans, ashes and stores of the unburnt mineral being found all along the Wall, at Lanchester and Ebchester in Durham, [1] at Wroxeter [2] in Shropshire and elsewhere. ”

“ The discovery of one era is lost in the next, only to reappear at a later day, welcomed as a triumph of modern ingenuity or science. In maps of three centuries ago the Nile is shown rising from great lakes, but in the atlases that our fathers used the lakes have vanished and a range of imaginary mountains lies like a little woolly caterpillar in the heart of Africa as the source of the Nile, only to be replaced once more in our own days by the great lakes. ”

“ Pewterers, founders, and such specialised trades as bladesmiths and spurriers played an important part in the realm of industry, and if the materials upon which they worked were less valuable in themselves, the finished products were not to be despised even from a purely artistic point of view. The figures of Queen Eleanor of Castile and Henry III., both cast by William Torel, and those of Edward III. and Queen Philippa, by Hawkin of Liége—to name but a few obvious examples—are magnificent examples of the founder's work. ”

“ The economists of that period had not grasped the fact that the cleverness shown in buying an article cheap and selling the same thing, without any further expenditure of labour, dear, if done on a sufficiently large scale, justifies the bestowal of the honour of knighthood or a peerage. In the case of manufactured food stuffs, such as bread and ale, the price was automatically fixed by the price of the raw material, and in general prices of manufactures were regulated by the cost of the materials. ”

“ At the present time [1] the coronation is the Rome towards which all roads lead; and if a walk down Oxford Street lands us among ‘coronation’ cuffs and collars and soaps and souvenirs it is only to be expected that a Mediæval Byway should bring us into the subject of coronations. For of all the survivals with which we are surrounded in this conservative country the coronation ceremonies, though shorn of much of their grandeur and significance during the last hundred years, are still the most unchanged in spirit and in detail. ”

“ A case in which the motive of rebellion was more clearly resentment to oppression occurred at Preston in Sussex, in 1280, when the villeins of Simon de Pierpoint set fire to his manor-house, and with drawn knives and flourished axes compelled him to swear upon the Gospels that he would demand no services from them without their consent, and would take no action against them for their violence. At the same time they destroyed their lord’s tabard, so beat his charger that it could never be used again and slew his ‘gentle falcon,’ thus wreaking their wrath on the outward signs of his nobility. ”

“ The crucial point in gunfounding was the invention of solid boring in the time of Henry VIII.; in the cloth industry it was the introduction of the 'new draperies' by Protestant refugees in the reign of Elizabeth; for iron mining it was the adoption of pit coal for smelting in the seventeenth century; for coal mining, the application of steam power to solve the problems of drainage at great depths early in the eighteenth century. Yet, taking one thing with another, the sixteenth century may be considered to be the period of transition. ”

“ I have seen the first piece of lead smelted there, of great size and weight, which when it is struck rings almost like silver, wherefore I agree with the others that if it is faithfully worked the business should prove of immense value to yourself and to the neighbourhood, and if a reliable workman is obtained I think that it would be expedient to smelt the ore where it is dug, on account of the labour of carrying so heavy material such a distance. ”

“ If, then, gold and silver can be split into the same constituents it might well be possible to recombine those constituents in such manner that the silver should become gold and the gold silver. To the scientific mind the two transmutations would be of equal value, but to the philosopher aiming ever at perfection, and to the sordid speculator, aiming ever at profit, the production of gold from the baser metal has always been the goal. ”

“ Though this was legislation in favour of the employer, it was not exactly a case of favouring the wealthy, for by imposing a penalty on the giver of excessive wages as well as upon the receiver, an attempt was made to prevent the small employer being deprived of his workmen by richer rivals. The Act was, so far as we can judge, inspired partly by fear that the capitalist might control the sources of labour, and partly by fear that those sources might get beyond control. ”

“ Call a man ‘a boor’ nowadays and you may get a black eye, but the results were more disastrous in the thirteenth century, as John Marsh found when he applied that opprobrious term to Richard Fraunkfee as they were walking back from church at Doncaster, for Richard promptly knifed him. Every man in those days carried a knife, dagger, anelace, or baselard, and produced it without hesitation if angered. ”

“ In early heraldry the lean and fearsome beast that does duty for a lion when seen in profile is called a leopard when its full face is shown; it is true that a later generation of heraldic writers converted the three golden leopards of England into ‘lions passant guardant,’ but leopards they were, and, for those of us who prefer the heraldry of the classic period to its debased and jargonised descendant, leopards they remain. ”

“ It is certainly strange, if an ancient and well-established trade in tin really existed in Britain when the Romans came over, that that race, with its keen eye for metallic wealth, should have made no use of the tin mines of Cornwall. ”

“ Whatever the meaning of ‘Wekare,’ there can be no doubt of the insult conveyed by Robert Sutton to Roger of Portland, clerk of the Sheriff of London, when he exclaimed in full court, ‘Tprhurt, tprhurt!’ This monosyllable is a very trumpet blast of contempt and its significance surely did not require to be emphasised by Robert’s ‘raising his thumb’—whether to his nose or not it is not stated, which is a pity, as it would have been interesting to find the ‘long nose’ flourishing in 1290. ”

“ Broadly speaking, the Control of Industry may be said to be either External, by parliamentary or municipal legislation, or Internal, by means of craft gilds. These two sections again admit of subdivision according as their objects are the protection of the consumer, the employer or the workman. Nor can we entirely ignore legislation for purposes of revenue—subsidies, customs, and octroi dues. ”

“ During this halt Wilkoc the clerk was sent into Genoa to fetch a doctor for Sir Hugh, and at the same time, money having run short, fresh supplies were obtained from some Pistoian merchants resident in the town. Fortunately Genoa was well furnished with both cash and curatives, for not only was it one of the richest ports in Europe, but it shared with its rival, Venice, the fame of producing a ‘treacle’ which possessed as many healing virtues as any of the quack compounds that now make England hideous to the railway traveller. ”

“ The growth of the towns and the rise of a wealthy merchant class during the reign of Henry III. brought about the birth of Parliament, and naturally led to a certain amount of trade legislation. But with trade—the distribution of finished products by persons other than the producers—we are not concerned. Edward III., thanks perhaps to his queen Philippa, from the cloth land of Hainault, realised the possibilities of the English cloth manufacture, and endeavoured to foster it by a series of statutes to which reference has been made above. ”

“ Of course, it is given to few to unpack a ship, and there may be persons of little imagination to whom a bill of lading seems dull and uninspiring, but to me every such list is a potential hamper. When the bill of lading is of the fifteenth century there is added something of the feeling which we have when turning out a drawer in an old forgotten bureau of our great-grandmother’s. ”

“ The success of the London saddlers in forcing wages up is a remarkable tribute to the power of union; and we find that during the fourteenth century the strike was well known, and when a master would not agree with his workmen the other workmen of the craft would come out and cease work until the dispute was settled. ”

“ To read a medical dictionary is to marvel that any man should enjoy even brief intervals of health, there are so many delicate organs in the body and so many diseases lying in wait for them. Read the pronouncements of specialists on diet and the dangers which attend the eating of any food or the drinking of any liquid, and the marvel grows. ”

“ POTTERY—TILES, BRICKS
The manufacture of earthen vessels was one of the earliest, as it was one of the most widespread industries. From the end of the Stone Age onwards wherever suitable clay was to be found, the potter plied his trade. The Romans, who had brought the art of potting to a high pitch of excellence, introduced improved methods into Britain, where numerous remains of kilns and innumerable fragments of pottery testify to the industry and the individuality of the Romano-British potters. ”

“ The average City man is within inches and seconds of death every day, and it is only when the inches and seconds become fractional that he realises for the moment his insecurity of tenure. Which is just as well. Every age has its own dangers: we have the motor car, unwitting apostle of socialism in its brutal, individualistic disregard for the rights of others ”

“ QUARRYING—STONE, MARBLE, ALABASTER, CHALK
Stone-quarrying is an industry to which the references in medieval records are more numerous than enlightening. It would be easy to fill pages with a list of casual references to the working of quarries in all parts of England, and after struggling through the list the reader would know that stone was dug in quite a lot of places at different times, which he might have assumed without the documentary evidence. ”

“ The unlading of a ship is an enlarged and, it must be admitted, less personal version of the unpacking of a Christmas hamper, a joy apportioned to childhood, not, in nine cases out of ten, because in our maturer years we lose the appreciation of disinterring the unexpected from swathings of paper, string, and straw, but because the opportunities are denied us. ”

“ We have seen that by the end of the thirteenth century worsted weaving was well [165] established in Norfolk, and particularly in Norwich, and that worsted serges and says were articles of export, while a century later the forms in which these cloths were made up were very varied. Norwich continued to hold the monopoly of searching and sealing worsteds, wherever made, until 1523, when the industry had grown to such an extent in Yarmouth that the weavers of that town were licensed to elect a warden of their own to seal their cloth ”

“ The demand for bells could hardly have been large enough to enable a craftsman to specialise entirely in that branch, and a bell-maker would always have been primarily a founder, and according as the main portion of his trade lay in casting buckles and other fittings for belts, or pots or bells, he would be known as a girdler, a potter, or a bell-founder. ”

“ It is rather remarkable that the year 1324, in which the great Irish trial of the Lady Alice Kyteler took place, was the date of the fullest and in many ways the most interesting of the early English trials for sorcery. In that year Robert Marshall of Leicester, under arrest for a variety of offences, endeavoured to save his own neck by turning King’s evidence and accusing his former master, John Notingham, and a number of Coventry citizens of conspiring to kill the King, the two Despensers, and the Prior and two other officials of Coventry by magical arts. ”

“ Occasionally the pension took the form of landed estate, as when Edward III. gave land in Kildare to his surgeon, John Leche, a grant which proved rather a white elephant, for early in the next reign Parliament, seeing the evils of absenteeism, ordered that all owners of estates in Ireland should reside on them in person or else pay for an able-bodied man to assist in policing the country, two alternatives equally trying to the old surgeon’s feelings. ”

“ As to defining what is meant by the medieval period, it is not easy to lay down any hard and fast rule, for the change from old methods or conditions to new, which practically constitutes the division between the medieval and the modern periods, occurred at a different date in each industry. ”

“ At the same time the thoroughly unpractical searcher, who allows his attention to be distracted and does not confine himself to the strict object of his search, is constantly rewarded by the discovery of entries, quaint, amusing, or grimly significant, throwing a light upon the lives of men and women whose very names perished out of memory centuries ago. ”

“ Tin mining claims an antiquity unsurpassed by any other industry in this country, but with what degree of justice may well be doubted. The claim of the western promontory of Britain, later known as Cornwall and Devon, to be the Cassiterides or Tin Islands whence the Phœnicians obtained their stores of that metal at least five hundred years before the Christian era rests upon rather shadowy grounds. ”

“ There were a great many varieties of dragons, but I think the most curious that I have met was one of silver gilt belonging to Henry IV. which was described as ‘au guyse d’un boterflie’; anything less like a dragon than a butterfly it would be difficult to imagine. At the same time some of these terrible beasts seem to have been quite insignificant. The amphisbæna, though it developed in the Bestiaries into a fearsome dragon with a head at each end, started as quite a small worm, so small indeed that a whole one could be carried on the person without inconvenience. ”

“ The principle that the craftsman should be content with a reasonable profit, and not turn [210] the casual needs of his neighbours to his own benefit is constantly brought out in local regulations, as, for instance, in London in 1362, when in consequence of the damage wrought by a great storm tiles were in great demand, and the tilers were ordered to go on making tiles and selling them at the usual prices. [731]
The question of prices, which were thus so largely composed of a varying sum for material, and a fixed sum for workmanship, is very intimately connected with the question of wages. ”

“ For one thing the unprejudiced historian is practically bound to be uninteresting; the works of the most judicially impartial historian of the present time—so far as English history goes—are unreadable. ”

“ The growing attraction of town and craft life as compared with agriculture swelled the ranks of the craftsmen, and the gilds, whose management was in the hands of the masters, endeavoured to limit competition by raising their entrance fees and more especially by raising their 'upsets,' that is to say the fees which had to be paid by a craftsman upon setting up as a master. ”

“ The usual projectiles employed in the larger guns were round stone balls, such as had been in use for mangonels and catapults since the days of the Romans, and these were supplied from the quarries of Maidstone and elsewhere down to the time of Henry VIII. Iron 'gunstones' do not seem to have been made much before the end of the fifteenth century, and the 'wooden balls for cannon,' of which there were 350 at Dover in 1387, [351] can hardly have proved successful, but lead was commonly employed for the smaller guns from an early date. ”

“ The lead-mining industry in England is important and interesting from its antiquity, the value of its produce, large quantities of silver being obtained from this source during the medieval period, and the organisation of its workers. ”