Highley Forum articles on the local iron industry

A collection of articles dealing with bloomeries, furnaces and forges in Billingsley, Stottesdon, Kinlet, Neen Savage and Cleobury Mortimer

The medieval iron industry

Shropshire is of course famous for its role in the history of iron making. Most people will be familiar with the story of Abraham Darby I, who pioneered the use of coal rather than charcoal to make molten iron in a blast furnace and so laid one of the foundations of the industrial revolution. Darby’s work took place in Coalbrookdale, in 1709. What is less well known is the very considerable prehistory of iron manufacture, much of which was centred around Chorley and Cleobury. Here I want to concentrate on the first part of the story, on how iron was made in the middle ages.

The raw material for iron is ironstone. This is typically found as orange nodules, mixed up with coal. Around Chorley, Billingsley and Baveney Wood, the ironstone is found close to the surface close to where coal outcrops. Of course, there are also good outcrops on the Clee Hills. The outcrops are particularly easy to spot in streams, where the water has washed away the soil to expose a brown streak in the ground. Early prospectors would have noted these.

The second raw material for iron manufacture is carbon. The purest and most readily available source of carbon is charcoal made from wood. There are plenty of woods close to where the ironstone outcrops and it would have been a simple matter to convert the trees into charcoal. Thus the two main requirements for iron manufacture are close at hand.

In the very earliest ironworks, charcoal and iron ore are heated together. To get a sufficiently high temperature, bellows must be used to force a current of air through the fire. Eventually the ironstone reacts with the white-hot charcoal to leve metallic iron. The impurities form a slag. The temperatures that were reached in these early ironworks were not enough to melt the iron. Instead it would form a spongy mass called a bloom. This would be removed from the fire. It would then be beaten into a bar by a hammer; this also forced more slag out, giving a purer form of iron. The works where these operations were carried was called a bloomery. In the early bloomeries, all operations were carried out by hand. However, later both the bellows and the hammers were powered by water wheels.

There are no good documentary records of any bloomeries at work in the locality. However, at two sites in Chorley there are large quantities of very distinctive slag that could only have come from a bloomery. One of these sites is in an area once known as Ned’s Garden, between Billingsley and Chorley and the other is between Rays Farm and Chorley. Both sites are on streams and in both cases there are traces of dams and water courses; It is tempting to associate these with the bloomeries but it is necessary to be cautious; the earthworks may be connected with later mills that are known to have existed in the area. The Ned’s Garden site is surrounded by numerous ironstone pits that must have supplied it with ore; the same mines also probably fed the other bloomery. Both are located on what were once roads.

Until recently, the date of both of these sites was unknown. However, pottery has now been found at the two sites. The bloomery by Rays Farm has given material from the 14th Century; that at Ned’s Garden is 13th-14th Century in date. Little is known about the archaeology of bloomeries from this date and so the sites are likely to be of some importance.

The coming of the blast furnaces

The iron works (bloomeries) around Billingsley and Chorley were large enterprises that would stand comparison with anywhere else in the region. None-the-less, they were limited in the amount of iron they could produce. Iron was used sparingly in medieval times.

As far as iron working is concerned, a technical revolution occurred in Europe around the 15th Century. In the old, bloomery process for making iron, the iron itself was never produced as a liquid. However, it was discovered that if a strong current of air was applied to the furnace, the iron would melt. This could be cast directly into moulds. The resulting cast iron was very brittle and had only a few uses; however if it was reheated in a forge, it was turned into wrought iron that was equal to anything that could be made in a bloomery. The real advantage was the amount of iron that could be made. In the course of a year a bloomery’s output would be a few tens of tons; by contrast even a small blast furnace would produce ten times this. Suddenly the way was open to cheap, mass-produced iron.
T
he first blast furnace appeared in Britain in the Weald, on the south coast, in 1496. For the next century or so, this was the centre of iron making, close to London and with plenty of good quality iron ore. However, as the 16th Century progressed, the new technology started to spread. About 1561, a blast furnace was built on Cannock Chase. By 1570 there were about another half dozen, including one (possibly two) in Shropshire. By 1576, these pioneers had been joined by two in the Wyre Forest, on the boundaries of Kinlet and Cleobury Mortimer.

Cleobury and much of the forest had been acquired by Robert Dudley in 1563, advisor to and lover of Queen Elizabeth I. Next year, Elizabeth made him Earl of Leicester. Dudley had family connections with the ironmasters of the Weald and so knew of the potential of the iron trade. The new tecnology needed a strong stream to power bellows for the furnaces, a good source of iron ore and plenty of wood to make charcoal. The Wyre Forest provided charcoal, iron ore was found on the Clee hills and Neen Savage as well as Billingsley and Chorley and the Dowles brook provided water power. By 1576 Dudley had built two furnaces. One was at the present Furnace Mill, on the Kinlet Cleobury boundary and the other was about ½ a mile further upstream, on the Kinlet bank of the brook. Both were leased to a tenant called John Weston, who lived in Neen Savage. The cast iron produced by these furnaces would only have had limited uses and so one or more forges also needed to be built to turn it into wrought iron. These were put up on the Rea, close to Cleobury Mortimer; almost certainly the later Upper and Lower Forges. It seems that Dudley invested wisely; in the 1580s he apparently made around £1600pa from his ironworks.

Whilst the furnaces were profitable in the 16th Century, there is no documentary evidence that they were still at work after 1600. However the forges were still busy so iron making must have been carried out somewhere in the locality. Certainly by 1630 a furnace was operating at Catherton, on the edge of the common and later in the century another was at work just below Ditton Mill, on the lower slopes of the Clee. By 1641 Furnace Mill was just that; a corn mill and its neighbour further upstream appears to have been completely abandoned. None-the-less, even today Dowles brook is full of glassy-green slag, the products of these two pioneers of the real revolution in iron production.

John Weston of Neen Savage

The introduction of blast furnaces to the area owened much to the energetic 16th Century entrepreneur , John Weston.

We know little about where John Weston came from. He may have been the son of a John Weston of Rugeley; if this is the case, his brother Richard was involved from 1577 in running bloomeries in that part of Staffordshire. Whatever the truth of this, John suddenly burst into the local records in 1576 when he took the lease on a pair of blast furnaces in the Wyre Forest. These were on the Dowles Brook. One was at Furnace Mill on the narrow road that leads from Kinlet to Far Forest and the other was about a mile upstream, at a site that is now completely abandoned. Although blast furnaces as a way of making iron had been at work in south-east England for over ¾ of a century in 1576, very few had been built outside this area and so Weston was very much of a pioneer. He appears to have settled down at Cleobury Lodge Farm (actually in Neen Savage) where he lived with Alice his wife, Margery Strong his mother-in-law, and his children of whom we know there were at least two. To be able to afford to lease the furnaces means that he must have been fairly well off; however, he was clearly not amongst the elite of the gentry.

Weston’s career as a pioneer ironmaster is interesting enough, but by itself it would not have marked him out as anything particularly special. What makes him of more than passing interest is his involvement in copper mining and smelting in Cornwall and South Wales at the same time as he was operating his furnaces in the Wyre Forest. Until the reign of Queen Elizabeth, little or no copper was produced or smelted in this country. However, a group of German miners were enticed to this country and given a monopoly to produce copper, under the title of the Company of the Mines Royal. They concentrated their efforts in the Lake District, ultimately to little avail. In 1582, Weston and a partner leased all the copper mines in Cornwall from them. We have no good information as to how Weston came to be involved in copper mining. One clue might be that he leased his blast furnace from Robert Dudley, Earl of Essex and Dudley was also a partner in the Mines Royal. Perhaps it was through Dudley that he became involved in copper mining.

Weston’s exact role in the Cornish copper mines has been the subject of much argument. He is perhaps best viewed as a middle man; he had other, probably wealthier partners, but he appears to have been the driving force and the man concerned with day-to-day management of the concern. He did have a professional mine manager to advise him; a notably melancholic German called Ullrich Fosse. Fosse had little time for Weston, dismissing him as a “young scholar” and blaming him for all the misfortunes at the mine. Weston appeared to have had equally little time for Fosse, eventually shunting him off to Neath in South Wales, where the Cornish copper was being smelted with Welsh coal and charcoal. However, Weston was also a frequent visitor here and claimed to have invented a new method for producing copper.

Weston left a trail of correspondance as he shuttled between Neen Savage, Cornwall, Neath and London in the early 1580s, much of it from his frustrated business partners or the ever more grumpy Fosse. Suddenly it all comes to an end. The explanation is in the Neen Savage parish registers; Weston died suddenly in July 1584.

We simply cannot judge whether Weston was a genuine industrial pioneer or merely a middle-man on the make; his sudden death brought a swift end to his works in Cornwall, although Alice operated the blast furnaces until the end of their lease. It would have been fascinating to watch his career develop.

Local Forges

From the late 16th Century onwards, local iron was produced in blast furnaces. The product of this was cast iron. As it was produced as a liquid from the furnace, it could be poured into moulds and so could be directly formed into many different objects. However, it has a very serious problem; it is very brittle. For some castings this does not matter, but for anything that is subject to being knocked or bumped in the course of use, this is a fatal weakness. Fortunately the iron can be made much more malleable by a process of reheating. This produces wrought iron and until the introduction of large-scale steel manufacture in the 19th Century, it was by far the most important material derived from iron. The process of making wrought iron was carried out in forges and many existed on streams in this area.

The earliest and longest lived forges were at Cleobury. These must have been built at the same time as the first blast furnaces, around 1570. Their sites are still known as upper and lower forges, on the River Rea. Essentially the “pig iron”, the cast iron from the furnace, was remelted and subject to a process of hammering. Thus water wheels were needed to operate both bellows and the large forge hammer. The forges at Cleobury had a complicated history. They long outlived the original furnaces in the Wyre Forest, instead buying their iron from other furnaces in the general locality. In the later part of the 18th Century they specialised in tinplate manufacture, under the direction of an Irish-born, Birmingham-established entrepreneur called John Florey. The forges finally closed around 1815.

On the Rea in Stottesdon there were three forges; Prescott Forge, Hardwick Forge and Rotherham Forge. Prescott Forge was on the site of the present Prescott Mill. In 1708, Peter Hussey, a frying pan maker from Wolverley, was granted a lease to take over an existing corn mill and turn it into a forge. In the 1730s he established a second forge at Hardwick, about half a mile upstream of Prescott. It may be that he continued his trade of pan making, using a water-powered hammer to draw out the thin plates needed for these utensils. By the middle of the century, Prescott seems to have closed and Hardwick was now leased by Cornelius Hallen. Hallen came from a long line of iron-workers based originally in East Shropshire; like Hussey, he seems to have continued making frying pans and similar objects; shovels, boiler plates and so forth. Cornelius’s son, Samuel, made his home at Hardwick and what is presumably his house still survives. His tombstone, recording his death and the subsequent deaths of many of his family, is next the chancel in Stottesdon grave yard.

In 1759, Sam Hallen went into partnership with Robert Palmer of Coalbrookdale, a timber merchant to build a brand new forge about half a mile downstream of the old Prescott Forge. This new forge was also, confusingly, called Prescott Forge for a period, but soon was known as Rotherham Forge. I have no idea why!. I suspect that unlike Hardwick, Rotherham did not specialise in iron plate production but perhaps made other types of iron such as bar iron. It seems to have done well at first, but must have suffered as the iron industry became more concentrated in East Shropshire and the Black Country. The forge was sold in 1791 to John Glover, who already owned most of Farlow and Cleeton. Samuel and his brother John went bankrupt in 1794 and Glover turned the forge, improbably, into a cotton mill