The Charcoal Iron Industry in the Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract

THE earliest known comprehensive list of ironworks in England and Wales was compiled in 1717 T a d source material for the study of the charcoal-iron industry prior to this date has been fragmentary, and for many areas almost non-existent. A most valuable set of manuscript ironworks accounts has recently been made available to me and most of them refer to the period 1688-1717,2 although for no works are the accounts complete for all these years. The papers cover ironworks in the central, north and west Midlands, the Forest of Dean, north and south Wales, and Sussex, though in the last three districts a total of only four works is involved. In addition to the manufacturing and commercial activities of the concerns to which the Foley accounts particularly refer, they yield much information on other works for which such detailed papers have not yet come to light and, with the help of supplementary manuscripts and published material, it has been possible to make a fair appraisal of the pattern of the iron trade in about 1700.3 Information on one important iron manufacturing region, south Yorkshire, is lacking in the Foley MSS. but accounts of several works in this district have been brought together in Bradford at Cartwright Hall.4 Although not compiled with the same attention to detail, they fill an otherwise serious gap. The account which follows provides a reasonably comprehensive picture of the iron trade in the Midlands and in the adjacent areas of the Forest of Dean, south Yorkshire, Derby and Nottingham. For the rest of the country, notably for south Wales and the Weald, the evidence is less adequate. The 1717 list of furnaces and forges appears to be substantially accurate in the light of the Foley accounts and provides an invaluable scale against which to gauge the extent to which the works concerned in them may be taken as representative of the whole industry. Figure 1 shows the distribution of works enumerated in the 1717 list. The close correlation of furnaces with the occurrence of iron ores is at once apparent; Coal Measure ironstones were the most widespread basis for the industry, except in the Forest of Dean and north Lancashire, where hsematite ores of the Carboniferous limestone were important, and in south-east England, where ironstones in the Wealden Series were used. This general pattern of blast-furnace distribution was to