Wealden iron masters and gunfounders

 Iron had been produced in Britain since the Iron Age! wherever ore was readily available. Later, in nearly every village there were blacksmiths skilled in moulding the metal.

The Weald in Sussex and Kent was a particularly rich area. In my tour of manufacturing places I had hoped to find a single identifiable place, Heathfield perhaps, but the truth is that the iron works of the Weald were not tied to any town or indeed county. Iron was made where iron was found. There was plenty of wood for charcoal for smelting.

Things changed at the end of the fifteenth century when French iron masters arrived at Buxted with a new technique of blasting air into the smelting process. The air was pumped into the furnace by bellows driven by water wheels and the forging process to make wrought iron then required more bellows to power a large hammer. All this demanded the location of iron works close to flowing water that could be managed in large ponds to power the water wheels for long periods.

Iron works emerged in numbers estimated between 50 and 100 and many took on the skilled task of casting cannon. Periodic battles had been the story of England from time immemorial, with brief periods of peace. So there were blacksmiths who made swords, chain mail and eventually articulated armour. Fletchers made arrows, and bowmen bows. Gun powder was a sea-change. The first cannon appeared possibly in the thirteenth century, but the increased production of iron with blasting enabled more to be cast and the casting process to be improved.

England was moving towards the industrialisation of war.

The use of charcoal meant that the forests were being lost at an alarming rate and Queen Elizabeth had cried halt! She needed the wood for her navy. I write about this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. The iron masters of the Weald had served their nation well, but the discovery of a process during the seventeenth century whereby coal could be used to smelt iron ore changed all that.

Iron works now moved nearer to coal. Carron in Scotland began to cast cannon at a price much below the Wealden iron masters could match. In the Black Country smelters and foundries came into their own. Telford and Abraham Darby perfection of the process changed everything again and places like Dudley, Wolverhampton and of course Birmingham prospered.

Slowly the Weald's iron masters lost business both from the Board of Ordnance and for pig iron. Nonetheless they had enabled England to win nation defining battles against the Dutch, French and Americans.