10 INLAND WATERING-PLACES-BATH. [1689-1714. The city at the beginning of the eighteenth century was a small cluster of narrow streets, where the houses, although built of stone, were mean and illfurnished. Yet it had long been the resort of the rich health-seekers and the rich pleasure-seekers. It was proverbial also for its beggars. Fuller, noticing the proverb, says that many repair to Bath from all parts of the land, "the poor for alms, the pained for ease." The beggars came, like fowl to the barn-door, where there was "the general confluence of gentry." Wood, the architect, changed Bath from a crowded nest of dirty lodgings into a city of palaces. But after these improvements were begun, Defoe compared "the close city of Bath" to a foul prison; and laments that physicians, by not giving equal praise to the hot springs of Matlock and Buxton, had not encouraged the building there of "noble and convenient bathing places, and, instead of a house or two, a city raised for the entertainment of company." The passion for drinking mineral waters, and for bathing in medicinal springs, sent the fashionable world, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, to a similar round of idleness and dissipation, of card-playing and dancing, at the crowded cottages of Tunbridge Wells, and the fishing hovels of Scarborough. The virtues of "the Spa-waters" of the great sea-bathing place of the North were known in the days of Elizabeth. Those who walked from the town over the sands, to the mineral spring which issued from the cliff, never thought of a swim in the sea. There was then no gathering on the coast, east or west, north or south, to inhale the breeze or to float in the brine. The sea was as much dreaded by inland dwellers, as the mountains were hateful to the inhabitants of the plains. When the Prince of Orange landed at Brixham, the probability was that the governor of Plymouth would have opposed the descent of a Dutch army upon the Western coast. The island of St. Nicholas had been fortified in the time of Elizabeth. The citadel had been built by Charles II. But at the end of the seventeenth century Plymouth was not a great naval station. No fleets of men-of-war anchored in the Hamoaze; no docks and victualling yards gave employment to two thousand five hundred workmen. William III. imparted the first impulse to the creation of the great arsenal which was to rival Portsmouth, by building two docks, which were begun in 1691. But Plymouth, the noble estuary of the Tamar and the Plym, had long been the most considerable port for merchandise of South Devon, as Bideford on the Torridge, and Barnstaple on the Taw, had chiefly absorbed the commerce of North Devon. The Plymouth of the end of the seventeenth century, and the Plymouth of the middle of the nineteenth century, are as essentially different as the war ships of each period. The perils of the Eddystone rock, "whereon many a good ship hath been split," were not averted by the warning light which has securely burnt there since the days of Smeaton. A light-house was commenced to be built on the Eddystone in 1696. In three years it was finished, and the dangers of the approach to the Sound were greatly lessened. The mighty storm of 1703, almost unequalled in its destructive violence, swept the first lighthouse away. There had been signals for help from the doomed fabric when the tempest began on the 24th of November. On the morning of the 26th, the people of Plymouth looked out upon the stormy * "Tour," vol. iii. p. 43. Teonge's "Diary,” p. 25. 1689-1714.] PLYMOUTH. 11 sea with their perspective glasses, and behold, the lighthouse was gone. engineer, Winstanley, perished with it. Another lighthouse, formed like the first, of wood upon a stone foundation, was commenced in 1706. It was destroyed by fire in 1755. The force of the South Western gales always made the anchorage of Plymouth harbour somewhat unsafe, till Telford's breakwater, one of the triumphs of modern engineering, rendered the port as eminent for its safety as it is unequalled for picturesque beauty. The ship-building of Plymouth Dock, of Portsmouth, and of the other naval stations, leads us to look at one of the most extraordinary contrasts between the end of the seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth. . What mighty efforts of invention and energy between England depending upon foreign countries for iron, and England supplying the whole world with iron: England without iron to hold together its "wooden walls," and England building iron ships; using iron as the great material of the grandest as well as of the humblest purposes of constructive art; covering the whole island with iron roads for vehicles drawn by iron engines; connecting opposite hills by iron viaducts, and carrying iron bridges over the narrowest river and the broadest estuary-the England of every tool and every machine 12 IRON TRADE. FOREST OF DEAN. [1689-1714. produced from iron, and the England with scarcely iron enough to make its ploughshares. In such considerations of the grandeur of Art there is the poetical element, as deep if not so vivid, as in the contemplation of the grandeur of Nature. To connect poetry with manufacture, according to Dr. Johnson, "is to couple the serpent with the fowl." Whateley, in a celebrated passage, described the smoky cloud of an iron forge on the Wye as adding to the grandeur of the scene at the New Weir. This was simply the picturesque of poetry. But what images of the past, the present, and the future are connected with an incident of the iron manufacture on the same river. The first mass was performed in "the Cistertian house of the blessed Mary of Tintern," in 1287. Now, five hundred and seventy years afterwards, the majestic ruins of the conventual church are the admiration of every visitor. To our minds the impressiveness of this noble monument of the piety of the days of Edward I. is enhanced by the solemn thought of the vast social changes of six centuries-changes never more strikingly manifested than in the fact that, within a few hundred yards of the Abbey, the best wire was manufactured for the Atlantic Telegraph. In the seventeenth century the forest of Dean was the principal seat of the iron manufacture. It had been an iron-making district from the time of the Romans. The cinders from the old Roman furnaces still lie like pebbles on the sea-shore on the left bank of the Wye, and deep cavities from which the iron-stone has been dug attest the labours of the industrious race whose coins are found in the same pits.* The work of smelting iron, which the Romans only half performed with imperfect mechanical aids, was carried through, though still imperfectly, by the miners of fourteen hundred years later. The woods of the forest of Dean were burnt for charcoal, in a country of pit-coal, and the best "sow-iron was made from the half-smelted Roman cinders. This sow-iron was sent by the Severn into Worcestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and Cheshire, and there made into bariron. The forges of Stourbridge, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Walsall, and Birmingham were chiefly kept at work by the fine iron from this Western country. "The forest of Dean," says Yaranton, "is, as to the iron, to be compared to the sheep's back, as to the woollen; nothing being of more advantage to England than these two are."+ Nevertheless, there were a few iron works in Staffordshire and Warwickshire, in Worcestershire and Shropshire, where iron of an inferior quality, "a short soft iron, commonly called cold-shore iron," was produced: it was chiefly used in the nail manufacture. An Act of 1668 recites, that the wood and timber of the Crown in the forest of Dean had become totally destroyed.§ The manufacture of iron was unpopular. Many said, "it were well if there were no iron works in England, and it was better when no iron was made in England: the iron works destroy all the woods, and foreign iron from Spain will do better and last longer." || Drayton makes the trees of the Weald of Sussex utter their lament for "these iron times." Iron works had been nearly driven from Kent and Surrey by statutes of Elizabeth and James I. The iron railings round St. Paul's Churchyard were almost the last produce of southern 1689-1714.] TIN MINES OF CORNWALL. 13 iron-works. Plant woods to burn for charcoal, was the advice of those who believed that home-made iron was a necessity. A man wiser than others in his generation, Edward lord Dudley, obtained in 1619 a patent for smelting iron-ore by pit coal. He would probably have bestowed immense riches upon his country had not his iron-works been destroyed in an outbreak of that popular ignorance which has too often interrupted the course of scientific improvement. The notion of smelting the iron ore by coal was not fairly tried till after 1740, at which time the annual produce of iron in the whole country was only about seventeen thousand tons. What a contrast is the conveyance of iron from the mouth of the Wye in those days, and from the mouth of the Taff in our day. The furnaces of South Wales produce as much pigiron in one week, as all the furnaces of England produced in the whole year of 1740. The seventeen thousand tons, smelted by charcoal in that year, are only the hundred and fortieth part of all the iron produced in the United Kingdom in 1851, and only the two-hundreth part of the produce of 1857. The iron of 1851, compared with the population, was estimated at a hundred and sixty-eight pounds (14 cwt.) per head. The iron of 1740 gave less than seven pounds per head. The iron-workers of Merthyr-Tydvil are greater now in number than the whole population of Glamorganshire at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The western extremity of England was the most ancient seat of her mining riches. The Romans worked the tin-mines of Cornwall, as they worked the lead-mines of Derbyshire. The sea-coast is full of the traces of the earliest mining industry. At a comparatively modern period, the reign of John, the Jews were the chief workers of the tin-mines. In the middle of the eighteenth century the produce of these mines was about sixteen hundred tons; and no great increase was observable for another half century. That quantity is about a seventh of the present annual produce. The tin that was used to make the pewter dishes of the rich in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is now chiefly employed to produce the tinned iron plates that form the cooking utensils of the mansion and the cottage, and the tea-pots of Britannia-metal and queen'smetal that are the luxuries of the mechanic's household. The first tinplate manufactory was established in Monmouthshire in 1730. We now export tin-plates to the value, annually, of a million and a half sterling. The mines of Cornwall created the Stannary towns, of which Truro was the chief, for the stamping of tin, and the assessment of its "coinage," as the revenue of the dukes of Cornwall. But the county, in the time of William III., was full of decayed boroughs, which successive governments have reckoned amongst the best foundations of public security. Of the five hundred and thirteen representatives of England and Wales, Cornwall, with a population of a hundred and twenty-six thousand, sent forty-four members to parliament. It contained about a fiftieth part of the whole population, and it had a voice in the legislature as potent as if it contained a twelfth of all the inhabitants of the kingdom. This inequality did not contribute to the prosperity of the district. It was poor, and it was venal. The adventurers from Bristol who, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, thought that copper ore might be found in Cornwall; and Newcomen, the engineer, who, in 1713, employed the first steam-engine to drain a tin-mine near Helstone; conferred more sub 14 COPPER-WELSH COAL FIELDS. [1689-1711. stantial benefits upon Cornwall than all the privileges that kings and ministers had ever bestowed upon the Duchy. The Bristol traders set up mills in their city for the production of brass-ware, and to this use was the first copper ore applied. Sixty years afterwards, the copper produced from the ore of Cornwall was only about three thousand tons. In another century it had quadrupled in amount and value. The copper mines have brought about a commercial marriage between Cornwall and South Wales. The ore of the country which has no coal is conveyed across the Bristol Channel to the country which has coal in abundance. The works for smelting copper upon the Neath and the Tawe are as remarkable as the iron-works of the Taff. They are the more remarkable from the fact that the copper-ore of the Cornish mines now forms only a portion of the quantity smelted. The ship that has borne the copper of Australia ten thousand miles, now enters the port of Swansea in company with the small vessel that has only dared the roll of the Atlantic, as she sailed beneath the bold cliffs from the Land's End to Hartland Point. One great element of the mineral wealth of South Wales, whose existence is assumed in this brief notice of her iron-works and her copper-works, is to be found in her coal-fields. The other coal districts of the West, those of Bristol and the Mendip hills, are small in comparison with the vast range that extends from the mouth of the Severn through the whole coast of Wales bordering on the Bristol Channel. The South Welsh coal-field covers a workable area of six hundred thousand acres. At the beginning of the eighteenth century this vast mineral wealth was scarcely worked. There was an export trade of coal from Swansea to Somersetshire, Devonshire, Cornwall, and Ireland; and there was the same trade from Neath.* But no adequate machinery was employed in the mines, and the works were carried on very little below the surface, in pits which could be easily drained by handlabour. The demands of London for the "sea-coal fire" very early made the Newcastle trade of importance. But Wales had no share of this large supply; and the peculiar value of its coal was not felt till the age of steam-engines had arrived. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the industry of the West of England probably exhibited a greater variety of employments than any other district. The people were miners, fishers, cultivators, orchardists, shepherds, weavers, sailors. The Cornish tinners had been engaged in the same unvarying occupation, from times that make other branches of the manufacturing industry of England look as the mere growth of modern necessities. Their peculiar language has died out; but there is the remnant of an old system of co-operative industry in the "tributer" system of their mining labour, which assigns each man a reward different from the ordinary system of wages.t Such arrangements especially belong to an early age of society, before capital had organised industry by its all-controlling power. The Cornish fisheries are conducted upon the same principle, which has probably prevailed from very remote times, when the shoals of pilchards came into the Western bays, and have never ceased to come, although Fuller thought they were "varying more westward, to Ireland." The same system of co-operation prevailed Defoe's "Tour," vol. ii. p. 283. + See Babbage's "Economy of Machinery" &c., p. 177. |