NAVAL DOCKYARDS UNDER THE LATER STUARTS

Abstract

T tHE travellers and topographers of later seventeenthand early eighteenth-century England often commented fulsomely upon the naval dockyards of the time, admiring their size and noting their growth since Tudor times. As French wars succeeded Dutch wars, so did Portsmouth and Plymouth rise to importance alongside the existing yards at Chatham, Deptford and Woolwich.2 In his i695 edition of Camden's Brittania, Gibson observed that the Navy had multiplied fiveor six-fold in ships, tonnage and men since Camden wrote; he paid tribute to the corresponding expansion in the Chatham yard which, in due time, Defoe was to describe as 'monstrously great and extensive', resembling 'a wellordered city'.3 What was the reality behind these and like observations? It is the purpose of this article to examine the nature of the naval dockyards as industrial entities,4 to assess their economic significance in certain directions and to consider them in relation to civil shipbuilding. In the light of this it is proposed to discuss some of the conclusions reached by Professor J. U. Nef concerning the characteristics of shipbuilding in seventeenth-century England. An important pillar in the edifice of the 'industrial revolution' which Professor Nef has perceived as taking place in the period I540-i640 is the growth of large-scale shipbuilding.5 Writing of this country and that century, he has claimed that 'shipbuilding ... had long been organized in large-scale units, for while smiths and carpenters, sail and rope makers might prepare the materials in their own households,