We interrupt your usual programming to bring a short reflection on some wonderful news.
Among today’s winners of the Nobel prize in Economics1 is Joel Mokyr, the professor at Northwestern whose name is indelibly associated with the primacy of innovation to modern economic growth – the gradual, sustained, and unprecedented improvement in living standards that first Britain, and then country after country, have enjoyed over the past few hundred years. It was reading Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy that first opened my eyes to the importance of studying the history of invention to explaining the causes of the Industrial Revolution, which I have since made my career.
What makes this Nobel win so remarkable, and so pleasantly surprising, is that Mokyr’s work is not the kind that is often published by economics journals, or even many economic history journals anymore. Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what. Although Mokyr is a master of such methods – he was one of the early pioneers of economic history’s quantitative turn – the work for which he has won the prize is firmly and necessarily qualitative.
Mokyr’s is the economic history that gets written up in books – his classics are The Lever of Riches, The Gifts of Athena, The Enlightened Economy, and A Culture of Growth – and in readable papers shorn of unnecessary formulae. His is history accessible to the layman, though rigorously applying the insights of economics. The prize is a clear signal from the economics profession that it doesn’t just value the application of fancy statistical methods; its highest prize can go to works of history.
Whereas most of the public, and even many historians, think of the causes of modern economic growth – the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution – as being rooted in material factors, like conquest, colonialism, or coal, Mokyr tirelessly argued that it was rooted in ideas, in the intellectual entrepreneurship of figures like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, and in the uniquely precocious accumulation in eighteenth-century Britain of useful, often mechanically actionable knowledge. Britain, he argued, through its scientific and literary societies, and its penchant for publications and sharing ideas, was the site of a world-changing Industrial Enlightenment – the place where progress was thoughtpossible, and then became real.
One of Mokyr’s big early insights, first appearing in Lever of Riches, was that many inventions could not be predicted by economic factors. Society could enjoy remarkable productivity improvements from simply increasing the size of the market, leading to division of labour and specialization – what he labelled ‘micro-inventions’ – in the vein popularised by Adam Smith. But this could not explain an invention that appeared out of the blue, like Montgolfier’s hot air balloon in the 1780s – what he called a ‘macro-invention’, not for the magnitude of its impact, but for its novelty. Macro-inventions often required further development to make them important, but the original breakthrough could not be predicted by looking at changes in prices or the availability of resources. It ultimately came down to advances in our understanding of the world. Mokyr put the Scientific Revolution – and the factors that contributed to it – on the economist’s map.
Mokyr also looked at the relationship between different kinds of knowledge. A scientist might know, through observation, that the air has a weight. A craftsman might know, through long training and experience with glass, how to make a long glass tube. Each could not get far alone. But combining them, by creating means to ensure that scientists and craftsmen talked with one another and collaborated – through connecting their propositional and prescriptive knowledge, their heads and hands – very quickly led to the invention of thermometers, barometers, and much more besides, in an ever expanding field of knowledge. What Mokyr taught economists is that it’s not knowledge per se that makes the difference, but the way it is organized. Much of his later work has shown just how deep a pool Britain’s scientists could draw on, of skilled artisans.
In a way, Mokyr himself has practised what he preached. As editor of Princeton University Press’s book series on the Economic History of the Western World, Mokyr has for decades provided an all-important space for economists and historians to write the kinds of research that would never have been publishable in economics journals – including of explanations of the Industrial Revolution that are the polar opposite to his own. He helped keep the connection between history and economics alive.
Mokyr’s case for the primacy of knowledge and ideas was not an easy one to make to economists. They are naturally drawn to data that can be counted, and not to narrative, often no matter how well evidenced. But it appears that Mokyr’s persistence, elevated by his infectious, irrepressible sprightliness, has paid off. His prize is a long overdue recognition of the historyin economic history, and a remarkable testament to the power of ideas to persuade.
[A version of this post was posted earlier today over at
There’s an old proverb about England, current in the sixteenth century, that it was a hell for horses, a paradise for women, and a purgatory or prison for servants. I still don’t quite know what to make of the first and second parts, but a few months ago I finally began to understand how England was a prison for servants. Compared to the world of work today, with all its occasional frustrations and boredoms, having to work for a wage in the four or so centuries c.1350-1750 was a dystopian nightmare, with England pursuing policies sometimes so absurdly and ambitiously oppressive that as I discovered more about them my jaw just kept on dropping.
I believe their impact has been highly underrated, based on the belief that they weren’t regularly enforced. But the evidence, to me, suggests that they were on the whole adhered to, and so they would have hugely distorted the functioning of the English economy. I haven’t seen the full scale of the policies set out before in all their detail, and I think some important details have hitherto been missed or misinterpreted. So what follows is the long, appalling history of how England created its prison for servants, and of how this led to a century of economic depression.
The prison’s walls were first erected in the midst of the Black Death, when an estimated half of the English population was wiped out. As the plague still raged, in 1349 Edward III issued an emergency ordinance to try and contain the economic fallout. Even though half the population died, their gold and silver coins survived, so that there was suddenly twice as much coinage in circulation per head. And so one of the immediate effects was for the price of everything, including both goods and services, to rapidly rise. This rapid inflation, brought on as it was by so many people dying, inevitably led to higher wages being demanded for all kinds of work. “Seeing the necessity of masters and great scarcity of servants”, the ordinance explained, workers now found themselves able to pick and choose who they worked for, and to hold out for much higher wages than before.
But not if the government could help it. The response of Edward’s 1349 ordinance to the inflation was to simply ban it, making it illegal for anyone, whether a merchant or a worker, to charge more than before. But this in turn required the creation of an extraordinary, novel system of oppression for workers.
Waged workers before 1349 did not enjoy great conditions, but much like today they were typically free to work for whomever they pleased, and to bargain for as high a wage as employers were willing to pay.1 There were still many serfs or villeins who could technically be forced to work for their lords, cultivating the lands that the lords managed directly. But only about 10% of peasant labour was claimed in this way, and otherwise even serfs could move around and work for whomever and at whatever rates they pleased.2 It’s often more accurate to think of villeins of the fourteenth century not as a kind of worker, but as a species of rent-paying farmer, locked into a hereditary tenure whose terms were governed by custom, and with only about a third of them owing just a small portion of rent in the form of labour.3 Villeins could even be employers themselves, especially when they managed to acquire larger land-holdings to farm — something that only accelerated as the plague killed off their relatives and neighbours.
On the whole then, workers before 1349 had had great freedom to contract for work, taking it or leaving it on their own terms. It was just that with the sheer number of people in England at the time, few could afford to be picky, resulting in low wages and often poor terms of employment. Yet the Black Death shifted the balance of supply and demand in workers’ favour, so their freedom would have to be brought to an end if the government was to stamp inflation out.
The Statutes of Labourers
In order to prevent workers holding out for the best-possible wages, Edward III’s 1349 ordinance decreed that “every man and woman of our realm of England, of what condition he be, free or bond, able in body” should be forced to work for the first employer who attempted to hire them, and at the old wages too. There were exceptions of course, for workers who were already under contract, for people who were too old or infirm to work, and for those who were otherwise likely to be employers — merchants, craftsmen, farmers, and landlords. But anyone else who tried to withhold their labour, hoping to wait for higher wages by being “idle”, was to be imprisoned (as was anyone who gave alms to beggars, on the grounds that it would allow the able-bodied to stay out of work).
Although the ordinance forbade workers to withhold their labour entirely, however, there were still plenty of jobs to choose from, with each employer still willing to outbid the last. Workers, while taking care to stay out of idleness, could still easily pursue higher wages by travelling longer distances to wherever the pay was best, or by flitting from employer to employer, only ever contracting to work for a day or week at a time, and so able to leave as soon as a better offer came along.
So just a year and a half later, Parliament cracked down. The 1351 Statute of Labourers forbade workers from leaving their home towns or villages in search of better-paid work during harvest-time. It forbade most agricultural workers from serving by the day, pushing them into longer and ideally annual contracts. And it ramped up enforcement. All hiring was to be done openly, in a market town, rather than in private, while all workers were to appear before the local constables every six months to swear, on oath, that they would abide by the statute’s provisions — a serious requirement for a much more religious age. Those who refused to swear, or who failed to keep to their oath, were to be imprisoned for three days in the stocks, with wooden boards fastened around their ankles while they sat with their legs outstretched. Every town, the statute ordered, was to ensure it had stocks, which were a much cheaper and more uncomfortable alternative to gaol. (The stocks are not to be confused with the pillory, which instead trapped the prisoner’s head and hands while they stood.)
This still, however, left the problem of employers outbidding one another. The 1349 ordinance had forbidden anyone from paying or promising to pay higher wages than before, allowing employers who saw their workers being poached by a better-paying neighbour to sue for damages in the manorial courts. But the lords and nobles who presided over those courts were often among the worst offenders themselves, having the means to outbid humbler farmers for employees. As the representatives of the lesser gentry in Parliament, the Commons, complained in 1351, workers were all too able to “withdraw themselves to serve great men”, who were shamelessly abusing their power and influence to pay them wages at twice or even three times the legal rate.
So the statute also centralised enforcement. It set out national maximum wages for the various kinds of work done by the day or the task, to prevent different regions outcompeting one another by pretending that their pre-plague wages had been higher than they actually were. And it enabled the king to appoint officials, the Justices of Labourers (whose powers were in the 1360s to be subsumed into the office of Justices of the Peace), to decide on each particular area’s wages below the national cap. The Justices were to hold court in the region to which they had been assigned four times a year — what came to be known as the Quarter Sessions — where they would judge the cases brought against those taking or giving too much pay.
Typically, there were two ways that people were formally accused of a crime and put on trial: they were either sued directly by the wronged party, or were else indicted by a presenting jury (what would nowadays be called a grand jury), drawn from among their neighbours. Whereas employers might theoretically sue their workers for taking excess wages, however, there was little incentive to do so, not least because they were themselves often just as complicit in the crime for having enticed workers away from other employers with the promise of higher pay. Those who did would probably also find themselves unable to find workers ever again. And as for the presenting juries, it was unlikely that villagers would risk causing strife among so many of their neighbours, especially when they were already struggling to keep their workers from leaving.
So the 1351 statute put in a juicy incentive for presenting juries to indict. By allowing the accumulated fines from the recovery of excess wages to offset the taxes assigned to every village and town to pay for Edward III’s ongoing war against France, anyone who was not a waged labourer themselves — lords, merchants, master craftsmen, farmers, and even villeins — could use the new law to effectively pass their tax bills onto the workers who had taken too much. It seems to have done the trick. In 1352, over 7,500 workers in Essex alone — approximately 15% of its entire adult population — were indicted by their neighbours and forced to hand over their excess wages, offsetting the whole county’s tax bill by over half.4
The current consensus among historians is that enforcement of the new labour laws collapsed in the 1360s, especially as the tax incentive was removed and the Black Death returned, raising the pressures of inflation yet again. But I’m not so sure. Hints of drop in the number of people being sued each year doesn’t really tell us much: it might be a sign of dropping enforcement, or just as easily be a sign of growing acquiescence to the law. And as for the complaints of contemporaries about workers’ demands, which are often cited as the clearest evidence that the laws were failing to bite, I think they actually show the exact opposite.
Take the complaints of contemporary employers that the typical worker “wickedly loafs everywhere”, singing and drinking instead of doing their tasks, being generally “sluggish”, and each day working just a third as hard as before.5 This was not something that would have occurred had wages been able, either legally or illegally, to rise to meet demand. It instead suggests that workers were being generally and often drastically underpaid, and so — perfectly rationally — didn’t bother to work as hard.
Or take the many complaints of workers’ outrageous taste for luxury, which appears to have been the result of employers competing with one another for workers by exploiting various loopholes in the law. Although the statute stipulated the amount of cash that workers could be paid, both with and without providing them with food and drink,6 it didn’t say anything about the quality or even the quantity of that food or drink. So instead of giving them bread made of rye, barley or beans, perhaps with a slice of old salted bacon to sweeten the deal, employers now had to provide their workers with only the best-quality wheaten bread, and with freshly-cooked meat still warm from the pot. Instead of providing them with mere water to quench their thirst, employers now had to give them the freshest of ales. As one contemporary complained, the servants were now demanding “to be better fed than those who hired them”.7
Take also the fact that the law said nothing about paying workers in other goods, or about their broader terms of service. Workers who agreed to serve for some time, receiving room and board in their employer’s house, were no longer content with simple straw pallets, but had to be given such luxuries as proper beds and pillows.8 And workers were frequently paid in the form of increasingly luxurious cloth or clothes. Whereas the clothing of servants had once been “of grey material”, now they apparently “seized upon ermine and grey furs for trimming”.9 Servants were becoming so well-dressed, one chronicler worried, that “one person cannot be discerned from another in splendour of dress or belongings.” It was becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart a serf from a freeman, or even from a gentleman, by sight. And with their better dress, servants were becoming increasingly haughty. Employers “dare not challenge or offend their servants”, the Commons complained in 1376, but “give them whatever they wish to ask”.10
This was all certainly a sign of growing competition for workers, but it’s hard to imagine it being the subject of so much specific complaint, or of such persistent resentment, if cash wages had simply risen to meet the demand. None of these myriad little appeasements or raises in-kind would have been necessary if employers had generally simply broken the law and competed by paying wages well above the caps — much like how airlines before the 1979 in the United States weren’t allowed to compete for customers by lowering their prices, and so had had to offer increasingly luxurious flying experiences with cocktail bars and piano lounges instead. What we see here are indications that the law was being taken seriously.
Testing the Limits
Even if the law was widely followed, this could never be universal. There’s always someone willing to test the limits.
Within cities, carpenters and stonemasons began to effectively unionise, assembling and swearing oaths to one another that they would all refuse to work unless for higher wages. They appear to have got around the caps by contracting to work by the week, so that they could be paid for days, including holy days, that they did not actually work — a strategy that confused the usual punishment of fining them for excess wages, as it was not always clear by how much they’d actually exceeded the cap. So Parliament responded in 1361 by making all their “congregations, chapters, ordinances and oaths betwixt them … void and wholly annulled”. It forbade contracting by the week, insisting on carpenters and masons being paid by the day. And more broadly it forbade all payment of wages to any kind of worker for festival days. To take some of the sting out of the change, it did very slightly increase the permissible wages for both carpenters and masons too.11
But Parliament also enforced the labour laws more harshly. It replaced the usual fines for taking excess wages with 15 days’ imprisonment — presumably in the stocks, given this was often the only form of prison that most villages could afford — to then be continued indefinitely in a nearby gaol until the guilty worker “justify themselves”.12 Local officials were also themselves threatened with substantial fines if they let any such prisoner out on bail, with a generous bounty paid to whoever informed on them.
And there was a crackdown on workers breaking their contracts in search of higher wages, fleeing not just into neighbouring villages, but beyond the grasp of their local Justices into other counties and cities. Parliament made it much easier for their employers to have them arrested and returned, after which the runaway worker was to “be burnt in the forehead with an iron made and formed to the letter ‘F’, in token of falsity”. Any city leaders who failed to expedite the worker’s return, once demanded, was to be punished by a steep fine, with a third of the money going to the aggrieved employer.13 With it now becoming potentially profitable simply to ask, employers gained both the means and the incentive to track their runaway workers down.
In 1362, as the plague returned to take its toll, the labour laws were even extended to priests. Just like other waged workers, they were not to be paid above certain amounts. Those who took more than the legal maximum were to be suspended from office unless they returned the excess to their church within the month. Churches that paid their priests above the caps were to be fined double the excess, the sums seized by the local bishop and spent on alms. Noblemen who overpaid their chaplains, their offers of better pay having enticed many priests away from public-facing jobs, leaving whole parishes un-shepherded, were to be fined most steeply of all. Parliament even restricted the movement of priests in search of better jobs — they were not to leave a bishop’s jurisdiction to work in another without his explicit approval — and sought to ensure minimum levels of service. Given the risk that priests might respond to the wage caps by neglecting their duties — if paid less, they might simply work less too — they were threatened with suspension if they failed to follow orders within three weeks.14
Most ambitiously of all, however, in 1363 Parliament moved to cap the various in-kind payments that had been used to supplement cash wages. Decrying “the outrageous and excessive apparel of diverse people against their estate and degree”, it restricted the kinds of meals that servants and other workers could be served, and capped the values of the cloth that they could possess, let alone wear. Mere farm labourers and servants, for example, along with their families, were to “not take nor wear no manner of cloth but blanket and russet wool” worth under a shilling, and not to wear girdles of any better material than linen. Craftsmen and yeomen were allowed cloth worth under 40 shillings, and forbidden from wearing silks, buttons, rings, garters, ribbons, chains, or anything embroidered; and so on and so forth through all the social classes.15
But this was a step too far. With legal wages being held so far below demand, and with fancy foods and clothes being some of the few legal means to make up the gap, there was only so much extra pressure that the labour market could take. The next time Parliament sat, in 1364, the ban on in-kind payments was repealed.16
The Flight from the Farms
In the decade 1375 to 1385, the post-plague inflation came to an end, and many prices — particularly of grain —suddenly stagnated or slumped.17On the face of it, you would think that the end of inflation would have also spelled an end to the need to enforce the labour laws, as the overall gap between the wages that employers needed to pay, and what they could legally pay, should have shrunk. But the slump mainly only affected farming, while other sectors like tin-mining, fishing, leather-making, and especially cloth-making all surged.
With farmers struggling to sell their produce into a glutted market, they also struggled to afford their workers. The fall in revenues was bad enough, but the knock-on effects made it all the worse. For a start, the slump in prices also meant a slump in rents, making it easier than ever for their labourers and farm servants to get farms of their own, enabling them to quit and go work for themselves. Still worse was that 80% of the wages that farmers paid to their servants had typically been in the form of food and drink — a necessity when they needed to get around the caps on how much they could pay in cash. With the fall in agricultural prices, that payment in kind fell in value too, especially when compared to products of industry like leather or cloth. Farmers tried to adjust. By the 1390s the proportion of annual farm servants’ wages paid in cash had risen from just a fifth to over a third.18 Yet the lure of industry was far too great, their workers fleeing the fields for the cities and towns.
Villein farmers were among the hardest hit by the sudden shortage of agricultural workers, because they still owed some of their rent in the form of labour on the lands that their lords directly managed — dues that the lords increasingly insisted on, as the cost of that labour compared to their own agricultural revenues also grew. It’s unclear to me whether villeins always did this labour themselves, or whether they often hired others to perform it for them. I suspect the latter, especially as the scale of villein holdings had increased. But in any case the effect was the same: the cost of these labour dues, when compared to their falling income from selling produce, drastically increased. And so there was growing discontent. Over the course of the late 1370s there were more and more complaints and disturbances over the terms of villein tenure, culminating in the huge outburst of violence now known as the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.19
Although villeins might be violently angry with their landlords, however, both sides — and indeed, all farmers who ever needed to employ someone — had common cause in wanting their workers’ flight from farming to be suppressed. In 1376 the Commons petitioned for workers to be forced to “return to the trades at which they worked before”, and to be sent back to their villages, as well as to prevent any craftsmen from taking on apprentices who could otherwise be put to work on a farm. But the government seems to have taken the line that the laws already on the books were enough.20 The only minor update, in 1378, was to clear up any doubts about the legality of the 1349 ordinance by having it “affirmed and holden for a statute”.
The 1381 Revolt, however, seems to have prompted the government into action. Seeing that discontent still continued to simmer, in 1383 Parliament cracked down on the ability of workers to travel in search of better wages by making it effectively illegal to be a stranger. In order “to refrain the malice of diverse people … wandering from place to place”, all sorts of local officials and magistrates were given the power to arrest all “feitors and vagabonds” — that is, all idlers and wanderers — and to compel them to find guarantors of their good conduct. Any such person who failed to find anyone to stand surety for them — their guarantors needed to have sufficient goods or property between that was to be liable to seizure if the stranger failed to pay any penalties for breaking the law — would immediately be committed to gaol, there to rot until the Justices eventually figured out what to do with them.21
Who exactly counted as an idler or wanderer, however, was fraught with difficulties, and the system inevitably caught out people who had simply been going about the business of their lords or masters, or who were legally going straight from one person’s employment into another’s. So Parliament refined the restrictions, effectively creating a fully-fledged internal passport regime — much like the hukou system in place since the 1950s in China, which had exactly the same intention of preventing the movement of workers out of agriculture.
From 1388, nobody was to be allowed to leave the area they were living and working in — their borough town or city, or if in the countryside their hundred, known in the north as a wapentake — without bearing an official document under the King’s seal that detailed the area they were leaving and contained “the cause of his going, and the time of his return, if he ought to return”. This internal passport, known as a letter testimonial, was to be delivered to the authorities of the hundred or town they went to upon arrival. Any stranger wandering without one, regardless of whether they were there on their master’s business, had actually found work, or were simply passing through while on religious pilgrimage, was to be arrested and placed in the stocks until someone stood surety for their return.22 Travelling friars and hermits needed to carry passports signed by the officers of their religious orders, students needed passports signed by their university’s chancellor, and those unable to work and reduced to begging were not allowed to travel outside their hundred at all.23 Naturally, the passports were also needed for anyone ostensibly travelling to or from abroad, including prisoners of war returning home.24
It was also made illegal to host any strangers who lacked the letters testimonial, and even to host anyone passing through with such a passport for more than one night, unless they tarried for some reasonable cause like sickness. Otherwise, they would be fined. The royally-appointed Justices of the Peace were also given the power to fine various local leaders for failing to enforce the new system, while anyone found to have a forged passport was to be imprisoned for at least 40 days, and potentially much more, until they somehow found someone to stand surety for them.
But the oppressive new internal passport system would not, on its own, have been enough to stem the flow of workers into industry and so keep agricultural wages low. So a raft of other measures were brought in alongside it. Whereas farm-workers had in 1351 merely been banned from leaving their village during the harvest, now the harvest was to draw upon the workers of the towns. Essentially all town and city craftsmen, be they apprentice, journeyman, or even master, were to “be compelled to serve in harvest, to cut, gather, and bring in the corn”. (The exceptions were for those crafts in “great need in harvest time”, and for masters of especially “great reputation”, but it was presumably up to the Justices to work out what these vague terms meant.)25
Added to this, all those who had practised farming below the age of 12 — or in other words, all those who were the children of farmers — were banned from changing their profession, with any attempt to bind themselves as an apprentice to a craftsman rendered null and void. Farming was effectively made hereditary and inescapable.26
The 1388 statute also set out national maximum wages for the various kinds of agricultural worker who served by the year — the first time that the wages of farm servants, and not just the daily rates paid to labourers, were specifically defined. It’s probably no coincidence that at around this time agricultural employers increasingly recorded the names of farm servants in their accounts, and not just the number of them.27 It would have been essential information, when questioned by the authorities, about how the labour laws were being enforced.
What’s most interesting about the new national maxima for annual wages, however — and I don’t think this clause has ever been properly noticed before — is that the law also commanded that “no servant or artificer nor victualler within city, borough, nor other town, shall take more”. In other words, the 1388 law appears to have pegged all urban wages to the levels of those paid in agriculture, so that the incentive to move to the towns and cities would be extinguished. Those who contracted to pay or be paid more than the caps were to be fined — on the first offence the value of the excess, on the second double, and on the third triple — with the worker to be imprisoned for forty days if they could not pay.28
With these harsh new measures, the final major pillar of England’s prison for servants was in place.29 In the centuries that followed, it was only a matter of ensuring those pillars were propped up — though this often brought radical changes to the way that law, in general, was enforced.
The Birth of Summary Justice
We unfortunately lack detailed evidence of how well the system held up over the course of the next century, and historians long assumed that they simply fell out of use. A lot of the time you’ll see later changes to the law described as Parliament merely re-enacting or re-confirming the older laws from time to time — something that’s often offered as evidence that the laws were not being effectively enforced. And certainly, during the periods when prices were stagnant or even fell, and the pressure to raise wages eased, the need to enforce the system would also have weakened. But whenever inflation returned, or whenever the gap between rural and urban demand widened, the system of suppressing wages came under renewed pressure. The laws that Parliament passed were not mere confirmations, but major updates to the legislation to ensure that the pressure was contained.
Occasionally, a little flexibility was required. In 1390, for example, the plague returned with a vengeance, bringing with it a general inflation again. Given the uncertainty about just how rapidly costs were rising, and where, Parliament delegated the job of controlling prices to the Justices of the Peace, also empowering them to set and proclaim the wages to be taken by the day and the task. Justices were therefore permitted to react to changing local conditions by setting the maximum wages for short-term work, even exceeding the national caps, although the national caps imposed two years earlier on all annual wages remained in place.
Yet there were limits to this newfound flexibility, and more generally Parliament preferred to double down, reinforcing the system and stoppering up all ambiguities and loopholes as and when they emerged. In 1402, the ban on carpenters and stonemasons using weekly contracts had to be extended to include various other building tradesmen as well — labourers, tilers, plasterers, daubers, and roofers — while the ban on them charging for holy days also had to be extended to the days before the holy days, when they often only worked until noon.30
Likewise, in 1406, the measures that had made farm-work hereditary were tightened up by banning anyone with an income below £1 a year from land— a substantial sum — from being able to apprentice their children to a trade other than agriculture, with the Justices to make out certificates of their landed wealth. Craftsmen who took on an apprentice who failed to meet the criteria, rather than their agreement simply being void as before, were now to be punished by a steep fine, half of which was paid out as a bounty to whoever sued them.31 The leaders of London described themselves as so “grievously vexed and inquieted” by the policy that they lobbied hard for an exception to made for the city, eventually managing to secure it over two decades later in 1429.32 Even as late as 1495 — almost ninety years on from the act — an exception also had to be made for the clothmakers of Norfolk, who complained that because of the lack of sufficiently wealthy apprentices their entire industry was dying out.33
Meanwhile, however, general enforcement was also improved. The oaths that all workers had to regularly make to abide by the 1349-51 laws, on pain of being thrown in the stocks, were in 1406 extended to all the later labour laws as well. Fines were also put in place for any villages that failed to maintain their stocks,34 and in 1414 a series of loopholes allowing priests to be paid much higher wages than the maxima set over half a century earlier — by being paid generously in kind, or by simply by getting a special dispensation from their bishop — were eliminated, though the caps were slightly raised.35
Parliament also tried to make enforcement of the labour laws more uniform between counties. Complaining that workers were able to flee to more lenient counties, it threatened each county’s sheriff with the truly astronomical fine of £20 if they failed to see them returned (forty times the legal yearly wage of a master shepherd or carter, or over three times the new legal annual wage of a priest, even with a special dispensation).36 Although this 1414 law seems on the face of it mundane — a typical administrative update, and hardly ever mentioned today — it also contained clauses that were to transform the practice of law in England. Passed the year before Henry V invaded France and won his stunning, much-celebrated victory at Agincourt, the 1414 statute was a far more impactful event, giving Justices of the Peace an unprecedented new power. It authorised them to examine both workers and their employers under oath, and to automatically convict them if they confessed to having broken the law — something they could do without the involvement of a jury.37
This was just the thin end of the wedge. Two years later Parliament was still dissatisfied with the results, noting that employers, having been sworn to tell the truth, were often simply refusing to answer so as to avoid incriminating themselves. It tried suspending the punishment of employers, on a three-year trial basis, to see if this would help.38 But the experiment seems to have been disappointing. So in 1423-4 the Justices’ extraordinary new powers were increased yet again: without a jury, and without now even needing a clear confession, the Justices were enabled to immediately convict based simply on their own opinion of the case, issuing fines for overpaying employers and imprisoning both overpaid workers and overcharging retailers for a whole month without bail. In trying to reinforcing the edifice of wage suppression, Parliament invented the summary trial, which was soon applied to swiftly punishing other crimes as well.39
The new powers did not go unchallenged, or so it at least seems — the sources are scarce, so we often have to read between the lines of the subsequent laws.
A couple of years on, stonemasons reacted to the crackdown by effectively unionising again, organising into “congregations and confederacies” at which “the good course and effect of the Statutes of Labourers be openly violated and broken, in subversion of the law.” The last time this had happened, in 1361, Parliament’s response had been to simply declare the mutual oaths among the masons dissolved. But in 1425 its reaction was brutal. If the masons were to meet again, it declared, those attending would be imprisoned indefinitely, to “make fine and ransom at the King’s will”, while the ringleaders would be punished with death.40
The more serious challenge, however, appears to have been that the Justices’ new powers were undermined by a legal decision, probably when one of their summary decisions was appealed in a higher court. The ability of the Justices to suppress annual wages to the national maximum set in 1388 was beyond question, and may even now have become too strong, as farmers now complained of being totally unable to hire servants while also following the law. But as for wages by the day or the task, which had since the 1390 statute been set by the Justices locally, the law was so loosely worded that the courts interpreted it as not actually specifying a punishment for exceeding the caps.
So in 1427-8 Parliament eliminated the ambiguity by more carefully and precisely set out all the Justices’ powers in full. It also added some flexibility when it came to annual wages, empowering the Justices to set all wages according to local conditions, whether by the day, the task, or the year.41 But, as ever, in making the system more flexible, and in giving greater discretion to each locality, it also made the system less effective at suppressing wages. In the mid-1440s, when a slump in agricultural prices created pressure for workers to flee agriculture for industry again, there was once again too much competition between areas, with agricultural workers in particular flocking to the places where the Justices had set the highest legal wages, and especially to where they were most generally lenient with their punishments.
Thus, in 1445, Parliament was forced to re-impose national wage caps, to re-impose the pegs between rural and urban wages, and to force the Justices to mete out steep minimum fines. It closed a loophole whereby people had been evading the labour laws by pretending to be contracted as farm-servants while actually being contracted to do something else: Justices were now empowered to remove them from their employer and to force them to work for a legitimate farmer instead. It tightened a loophole whereby farm servants were removing themselves from the workforce by acquiring land at rock-bottom rents: Parliament raised the minimum amount of land that they needed in order to no longer be forced to serve.42 It even added a whole new restriction. Many farm servants had, it seems, been obeying the law, keeping to their compulsory annual contracts and only leaving for new employers when the year out. So Parliament insisted that they now give at least six months’ notice before leaving for a new employer, or else be forced to remain for a whole other year.43
And finally — perhaps most momentously for what we know about how the law was enforced — in 1445 Parliament empowered each Justice of the Peace to act like a roving one-man court, with the power to question and imprison those who would not serve according to the labour laws “at every time”, and not just at the formal Quarter Sessions.
The Hundred Years Depression
The result of this extraordinary new power, unfortunately, is that cases that made it to the sessions — the records of which are themselves patchy — don’t actually give us a full picture of how the laws were enforced. The sessions would have dealt with cases where people had been arrested or reported by other local officials to await the Justices’ judgement, or who were being sued by the wronged party. But we have no idea how many cases the Justices dealt with by themselves. Still fewer labour law cases would have gone to higher courts to be appealed,44 or been dealt with by other local officials like sheriffs — their duties only covered some aspects of the laws, such as arresting idlers and wanderers or seeing that runaway workers were arrested and returned.45
So although we only have a smattering of labour law cases in the few surviving records — something that many historians have suggested as a sign that enforcement might have weakened, or become more restricted in scope — the fact that they show up in those records at all should really be treated as just the tiny tip of the iceberg. They’re a hint, in my view, that there was a great deal more enforcement going on under the surface, but which we may never get to see46 — which I think is corroborated by some other signs.
In 1449, for example, just as England was struggling to defend its last remaining lands in France, the priesthood gave to the war effort and were rewarded by being pardoned for all prior offences of exceeding the wage caps, as well as pardoning all priests accused or convicted of rape. That they valued a pardon for excessive wage-taking so highly, and seemingly on par with such serious felonies — of which they complained they had been “grievously and wrongly vexed” — suggests that the caps were still suppressing their wages three decades on from when they’d last been updated.47 In 1450, too, when a major rebellion broke out in Kent, the labour laws were listed among the rebels’ many grievances. And after the upheaval of civil war in 1470-1, when the deposed Henry VI was briefly restored to the throne before being deposed for a second time by Edward IV, one of Parliament’s priorities in restoring basic law and order was to make sure the labour laws were observed.48
This is not to say that enforcement was perfect. Various employers’ account books sometimes show workers being paid above the wage caps set in 1445.49 But what’s also striking is that for at least half a century, right up until the 1490s, if not later, there was hardly any increase in measured wages at all.
This stagnation in wages might have been the result of wider economic conditions. England’s population for much of the fifteenth century was also remarkably stagnant, and prices slumped particularly badly c.1440-1470. By 1500 they were barely back to the level they’d been at a hundred years before. In the context of this long-term stagnation, punctured by bouts of severe deflation — a kind of century-long depression — weak demand for everything, including labour, would have resulted in under-employment and thus lower wages, leaving little reason for the laws to artificially suppress them too.
But on the other hand, it’s something of a mystery as to why England was quite so remarkably stagnant in the first place. The populations of most other regions, like France, the Low Countries, or Italy, recovered fairly quickly to their pre-Black Death levels. Even neighbouring Scotland’s appears to have bounced back. But England’s, even as late as 1500, still languished at less than half.
One recent explanation for this relative stagnation in population is that England chronically lacked coin, so that there was often too little money in circulation with which to grease the wheels of commerce — the result of keeping the precious metal content of its coinage so unusually high, even while every other country in Europe frequently debased theirs. Because England held to a monetary policy that resulted in persistent under-employment, the argument goes, its population often lacked work and struggled to make ends meet, thereby marrying less and having fewer children. It’s a compelling argument because other factors that might have restrained the population — like plague, famine, and war — were seemingly much worse in France.50
Yet even if we buy the monetary explanation for England’s stagnation, why was it so unusually committed to a policy so different to everywhere else?
Well, I’m starting to wonder if we’ve been looking at things the wrong way around. If the labour laws actually did continue to bite throughout the fifteenth century — and I believe they did, though probably with some interruptions when order occasionally broke down when the country was at civil war at various points in the 1450s-90s — then they would have been a major and highly unusual factor in suppressing wages, and thus on restraining population growth. And wage suppression was justified by keeping prices low as well, then the labour laws themselves may have been a major reason for the government to keep the currency so remarkably strong.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much to go off in terms of how England’s unusual monetary policy was rationalised. The sources rarely discuss such matters at all, not least because controlling the currency was very much a royal prerogative, and questioning it akin to questioning the king. But there is a particular, rather rare episode that I think helps to confirm my hypothesis.
In 1445, much of Europe suffered a major deflationary crisis, with prices falling across the board. England actually got off rather lightly, but people did complain of a severe lack of coin, and Parliament went so far as to petition the king to weaken the currency. Yet the government ignored this, instead focusing — as we’ve seen — on reinforcing and extending the labour laws.51
What I think this response to the 1445 crisis shows is that the government was unwilling to do anything that might causes prices or wages in any sector to rise, and so undermine the labour laws. Even in the midst of widespread deflation, affecting agriculture worst of all and so prompting a flight from the farms, it believed that weakening the currency would do little to solve the problem. With still-buoyant industry paying increasingly attractive wages to craftsmen, and with servants and labourers all the scarcer in agriculture as a result, boosting the money supply would only have caused the prices and wages in the towns and cities to rise even higher still. And even if weakening the currency helped to prop up agricultural prices as well, it would have done little to close the gap. If it buoyed industry more than agriculture, it might even have made the problem worse. So the more targeted solution was to lean back on the tried-and-tested, century-old policy of suppressing the movement and wages of workers instead.
In other words, England had a kind of grand political bargain in place. The labour laws were popular among both urban and rural employers — those who were represented in Parliament — because they stood to lose if wages were not suppressed. And so long as prices could be controlled as well, then the much larger population of servants and labourers could be kept relatively content. But to make this bargain work, it was practically impossible to ever weaken the currency, except when in the direst of deflationary straits, because any extraordinary pressures to increase prices would put the caps on both prices and wages under severe strain.
And so, in turn, every part of England’s political and economic consensus prevented its population growing: the price caps prevented the growth of economic activity, restricting opportunities for employment; the wage caps and other restrictions prevented people from amassing the resources to marry and start families; and even when the wage and price caps weren’t under any especial pressure, the unwillingness to weaken the currency often left the country desperately short of circulating cash, exacerbating bouts of deflation and under-employment.
This was not what happened in most other countries, which frequently allowed either prices or wages to rise, and frequently used debasement either for economic reasons — to prevent deflation — or simply to raise cash to fight wars. Although England was not the only country to impose harsh labour laws after the Black Death — almost identical measures were imposed throughout all the rest of Europe too — few other government took them anywhere near as far. England was one of the only places to extend the labour laws to cover essentially all professions, both urban and rural, and across the whole country, as well as then sticking with them for more than just a few years or decades.52
The only other exception, as far as I can tell, was Norway, which experienced many of the same effects. Despite having once had a fairly monetised economy and debased its currency fairly often, Norway after the Black Death resisted any further inflationary devaluations of its currency, in the century after 1387 even going so far as to not mint any new coin at all, so that its people were forced to use foreign coins (when available), and mostly had to resort to barter.53 Unsurprisingly, its population was also remarkably slow to recover after the Black Death, taking even longer than England’s.54
So there was a trade-off at work. Whereas most other countries preferred to be able to debase their currencies at the cost of allowing prices and wages to rise, England upheld the labour laws at the cost of being able to weaken its currency. Indeed, in the sixteenth century, when it denied the trade-off and attempted to have its cake and eat it, it was to suffer devastating results. But more on that another time.
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For the relative freedom of contracting by workers before 1349, see: Bailey, Mark, ‘The Regulation of the Rural Market in Waged Labour in Fourteenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change, 38.2 (2023), pp. 137–62. Bailey, Mark, After the Black Death: Economy, Society, and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp.37-8
Technically, the 1351 statute only says what the specified daily rate was when wages were paid “without meat and drink, or other courtesy to be demanded, given, or taken”. But this only refers to daily and task rates during the peak agricultural seasons and doesn’t say how much they were to be paid in cash if they were also paid in kind, probably because it was expected that cash wages would simply be lower in such cases, as was typical. It wasn’t until the 1390 statute that JPs were instructed to enumerate cash wages for daily and task work both with and without food and drink, and at all times of the year.
Hatcher p.24; Bailey, Mark, ‘The Peasants and the Great Revolt’, in Historians on John Gower, ed. by Stephen H. Rigby and Sian Echard (D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 167–90
Given-Wilson, Chris, ‘Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350-1500’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Boydell & Brewer, 2000), p.28 suggests that the fines were reinstated the following year. I disagree. 36 Edward III st.1, c.14 the following year mentions fines for infractions of the labour laws in a general sense. When it amends another statute, with the words “notwithstanding the words in another statute, which be contrary to this declaration and ordinance”, it refers to whether fines will be used to offset taxes. It says nothing about repeal and doesn’t specify which statute it is amending. Given the context I think it’s much more likely to be referring to 31 Edward III st.1, c.6, which a few years earlier in 1357 had directed the fines from the labour laws to be given to the lords of franchises that have issues, fines and amerciaments — i.e. to local authorities — rather than to offsetting taxes.
Claridge, Jordan, Vincent Delabastita, and Spike Gibbs, ‘(In-Kind) Wages and Labour Relations in the Middle Ages: It’s Not (All) about the Money’, Explorations in Economic History, 94 (2024), article no. 101626. The authors dismiss the impact of the labour laws on the basis of the qualitative evidence that I think has been misinterpreted. As they note, however, there was a substantial lag after the Black Death before annual wages were allowed to rise. The patterns they find in nominal wages, both in cash and in kind, appear to correspond almost exactly to what you’d expect if the laws continued to be enforced.
This is my slightly modified version of Bailey’s compelling arguments as to the underlying factors behind the social disturbances. What I’ve added is to explain the stubbornly high wages in agriculture as being caused by the high rewards on offer in other industries, which Bailey largely discusses separately. See Bailey 2021, pp.255-262.
Given-Wilson, Chris, ‘Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350-1500’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Boydell & Brewer, 2000), p.28
12 Richard II, c.7. Specifically, beggars unable to work were either to remain where they were, if they could find sufficient alms there, or else had forty days from the date of the proclamation to find somewhere else in the same hundred willing to support them, or to return to the place they were born. After that they were never to leave again.
Curiously, the current consensus among historians is that these measures represented a revising and narrowing of the scope of the labour laws. But they did nothing to repeal the older laws, which continued to be enforced - as I think the many later amendments to the overall system show. The 1388 changes represented an additional pillar, not a new one. For a recent statement of the consensus, see e.g. Bailey, Mark, ‘The Implementation of National Labour Legislation in England after the Black Death, 1349–1400’, The Economic History Review, 78.2 (2025), p.548
It’s sometimes said that the 1402 law lifted punishments for employers, but it did nothing of the sort. Instead, the parliamentary petition for this specific loophole being closed for building tradesmen asked that the punishment apply to both employers and employees, but the final act only punished employees. The act did nothing to repeal or amend the 1349, 1351, and 1388 statutes, and effectively just extended the small amendment made in 1361. The misunderstanding seems to stem from an error in Chris Given-Wilson, ‘The Problem of Labour in the Context of English Government, c. 1350–1450’, in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. by James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. Mark Ormrod (Boydell & Brewer, 2000), p.87.
2 Henry V, st.2, c.2. Although this law substantially raised the amounts that priests could receive in cash, it appears less generous than it appears at first glance by insisting that the value was to include all “board, apparel, and other necessaries” when calculating their annual wage - words not present in the 1362 statute. The crucial sentence, however, was the one that limited the amount they could be overpaid by special dispensation: “unless it be by licence of the ordinary, so that the whole sum pass not 9 marks”. This, I think, must have over-ridden the words in the 1362 statute that the old caps could not be exceeded “without the bishop’s dispensation”.
The 1349 Ordinance had simply said that in order to be exempt from compuslory service, the person needed to have “of his own whereof he may live”, or “proper land about whose tillage he may occupy himself”. Although the meaning of “proper” is unclear, it seems to imply that the bar was self-sufficiency from the land - i.e. enough land to simply feed themselves, which may not have been much. What the 1445 law did was to raise the requirement to enough “lands than the husbandry of the same shall suffice to the continual occupation of one man” - or, in other words, enough land to employ a man all year round. I think the key word here is continual, because rural workers who graduated from annual service to more casual labouring would typically have worked on their own farms for part of the year, and then taken on a bit of waged labour by the day or the task in order to supplement their incomes.
Hettinger, Madonna J., ‘Defining the Servant: Legal and Extra-Legal Terms of Employment in Fifteenth-Century England’, in The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England, ed. by Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat (Cruithne Press, 1994), pp. 206–28
Cavill, P. R., ‘The Problem of Labour and the Parliament of 1495’, in The Fifteenth Century: Of Mice and Men: Image, Belief and Regulation in Late Medieval England, ed. by Linda Clark (The Boydell Press, 2005), v, pp. 145-7 for example notes that in York’s sheriff’s court 1471-1500, a mere 47 of its 2,000 or so cases were to do with the labour laws, using them to suggest that enforcement had become restricted to only a few kinds of cases such as dealing with absconding workers. But it’s unclear if he’s counted imprisonment of vagabonds and idlers in this figure, and in any case sheriffs’ only other legal duties and powers under the labour laws were to apprehend and return fugitive workers.
See for example the labour law cases found in Ipswich’s records by Amor, Nicholas R., Late Medieval Ipswich: Trade and Industry (Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2011), pp.218, 250, 253, 264.
Rotuli Parliamentorum, Volum 6, p.8. The Commons petitioned the king in 1472 “to do call before your Highness the Statutes of Westminster, Winchester, Northampton, the Statutes of Labourers and Artificers, the Statute of Apprentices, and all other profitable statutes and ordinances” so as to put the disorder down.
Mayhew, Nick, and Katherine Ball, ‘Debasement and Demography in England and France in the Later Middle Ages’, Continuity and Change, 37.2 (2022), pp. 233–56
For overviews of the 1440s crisis see Nightingale, P., ‘England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century’, Journal of European Economic History (Rome, Italy), 26.3 (1997), pp. 631–56 and Hatcher, John, ‘The Great Slump of the Mid-Fifteenth Century’, in Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, ed. by Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.237-271, and Ball, Katherine, ‘The Role of Demographic and Monetary Factors in the Late Medieval Economies of England, Scotland and the Southern Low Countries (1351–1530)’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2018).
For how other European countries reacted to the Black Death see Lis, Catharina, and Hugo Soly, ‘Labour Laws in Western Europe, 13th-16th Centuries: Patterns of Political and Socio-Economic Rationality’’, in Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen, ed. by Marcel van der Linden (Brill, 2012), pp. 299–321
Svein, H. Gullbekk, ‘Medieval Law and Money in Norway’, Numismatic Chronicle, 1998, pp. 173–84. For newer evidence of the lack of Norwegian coins see Risvaag, Jon Anders, ‘Keep out the Coins! Colonialist Approaches to Northern Norway by the German Hansa?’, in Money, Coinage and Colonialism: Entangled Exchanges, ed. by Nanouschka Myrberg Burström and Fleur Kemmers (Routledge, 2025).
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Previously, we looked at the many English attempts from the 1570s through to the 1630s to invent a smokeless kiln for drying malt — the main ingredient of ale and beer. This post was supposed to be the next part of that story, when we’d look at the technology that ended up being used instead: the smokeless coal, or specifically coal baked into coke. It was not only to usher in a revolutionary change in the drying of malt, which was a huge deal even on its own terms, but also in the smelting of metals, especially iron. I was supposed to first briefly introduce another method of how to remove the smoke from coal, spend a few paragraphs on why that didn’t work out, and then switch to a much longer discussion of the origins of coke. But it turned out that the first, failed method was so interesting, and its failure so repeatedly mystifying to contemporaries, that it ended up deserving a post of its own.
To explain, we need to see things from the vantage point of the 1580s, when we find the first recorded attempts in England to develop the smokeless coal. There were at least two main ways to go about it. One was to try to remove its soot-inducing, sulphurous impurities, which we’ll come back to another time when I set out the story of coke. But the other, much older, and more tried-and-tested method was to add a material to counteract them. At Europe’s greatest coal-mining region in the sixteenth century, near Liège in present-day Belgium, the locals there had long crushed the coal into a dust and mixed it with some wettened loamy soil or mud, working it into balls or briquettes before leaving them to dry, creating a fuel that burned more regularly and completely, releasing far less soot.
What follows is, effectively, the untold story of the coal briquette — and a solution to the centuries-old mystery of why it failed to catch on.
The Secrets of Signior Romero
The person who tried to bring these coal balls or briquettes to London was one Nicolas Romero — a name that has been almost entirely and undeservedly forgotten. Indeed, the one other historian to have ever noticed a handful of his achievements was unable to find his first name. And so I get the pleasure of being able to give a few glimpses of his remarkable story for the first time in over four hundred years.
Nicolas Romero seems to have originally hailed from the Spanish Habsburg possessions in Italy, most probably Naples. He was personally acquainted with Cardinal Granvelle, who was the regent in Naples from 1570 to 1575, and may have been involved in the Spanish attack on Tunis in 1573-4, where he picked up some siege techniques used by the Ottoman Turks. Romero then moved to Spanish-ruled Milan, where he was apparently the close confidant of one “Dr Sirnige” or “Dr Siring” (as it sounded to an English ear), who received a hefty reward for discovering a “defensative” or preventative treatment against a plague that killed some 15% of the city’s population in 1576-8. Then Romero appears to have gone to the Low Countries, much of which was in outright revolt against Spain, where he picked up the details of how coal balls were made at Liège.
There, astonishingly, he suddenly switched sides. Perhaps having fallen afoul of the Inquisition, or perhaps having converted to Protestantism, from some point in the 1580s he was only ever involved with the manifold enemies of Spain. He moved to England, even partaking — and I suspect investing — in its unsuccessful invasion of Spanish-ruled Portugal in 1589, where he was captured and held in “a very cruel prison” for ten months until managing to escape.
Somehow making his way back to London, Romero there befriended the barrister, alchemy enthusiast, and wannabe inventor Hugh Plat. It was via Plat, who plied all of his acquaintances for their technological know-how, and recorded his sources in his manuscripts, that Romero introduced various innovations to England.
Romero told him of how mere bags of linen or canvas, when filled with whatever dirt or sand was to hand, could be used to instantly create a “musket-proof” trench — in essence, the modern sandbag — which had been used by the Turkish army in their successful siege of La Goleta near Tunis. Plat saw a wider potential too, hoping to use these sandbags in reclaiming land from both marsh and sea.
In 1593, when a deadly plague gripped London, Romero gave Plat the recipe of Dr Sirnige’s defensative pills, as used in Milan, and together with the apothecary John Clarke they produced and distributed hundreds of them, including to Queen Elizabeth I and her entire Privy Council, apparently with great success. Clarke published their case notes under the boastful title The Trumpet of Apollo Sounding out the Sweet Blast of Recovery in 1602, though it was a little premature. Just a year later plague returned to London with a vengeance.
Most enduringly of all, Romero told Plat the details of making pasta, which Plat then made and marketed as a cheap and long-lasting food for the English armed forces. What Plat called his “macaroni” even won plaudits from Sir Francis Drake, and in 1594 he published the first known depiction of a pasta extruder. To Nicolas Romero, then — a name never mentioned by even specialist historians — belongs the considerable distinction of introducing the English to pasta. He is the patron saint of “Spag Bol” (if you are Italian, and do not wish to suffer a heart-attack, under no circumstances should you look up this term).
Romero was full of other ideas too. Romero gave Plat his methods for preserving wine, chestnuts, butter, turnips, and quince. He revealed to him the principle behind the diving bell; how to make a metal rotisserie oven; how to catch crayfish; how to engrave glass; how to make vellum paper translucent; how to keep snow from melting over the course of a year by storing it underground; and how a few drops of sulphuric acid might be added to a ship’s water supply to keep it fresh for longer. Along with various recipes for Italian salads, and how to make smoke grenades, he even told him how to raise water using atmospheric pressure — perhaps the earliest record in England of what would eventually be developed into the steam engine. In papers seized by the government from the soldier Sir Thomas Arundel, who was arrested for being a Catholic in 1597, are mentions not just of Romero’s sandbag “trench”, but “also his bridge, his boat to go without wind or sail, and his device against horsemen” — which according to Plat’s manuscripts was a kind of rest for muskets that could also serve as a pike.
Throughout the 1590s, Plat tried to commercialise some of Romero’s inventions, including a method to replace the expensive copper vessels for boiling water for home-brewing with a supposedly more efficient tub made of treated wood; some kind of light, portable water pump; and the Liège-style coal balls or briquettes. But with little success. By 1594 Romero was running low on money and had given up on trying to make it in England, having apparently passed up various opportunities to serve some German princes. So he left Plat in London to keep trying to sell his inventions, while he himself went to Holland to become an engineer in the service of Count Maurice of Nassau, who was fighting to free the Netherlands from Spanish rule.
While in the Netherlands Romero patented his water pump and the wooden boiling tub — an invention apparently “very much needed in the present time of cities under siege”, for whom fuel supplies were scarce. And having gained Count Maurice’s trust and backing, he wrote to one of Elizabeth I’s favourites, the Earl of Essex, in a fresh bid to get the two inventions, along with the coal balls, patented in England. Naturally, Hugh Plat served as his go-between.
Despite such allies, however, they once again failed. Romero would patent more inventions in the Netherlands in 1598 — a means of reducing the friction on the axles of carts and carriages, and a winch for more easily lifting heavy items like anchors and cannon — but he wasn’t to get a patent in England until ten years later in 1608. Just months before Plat’s death, Romero with one James Jackson, presumably an investor, was finally granted an English patent for some kind of universally-applicable method of saving fuel. Unfortunately, the wording of the patent gives no indication whatsoever of what it involved.
I’ve traced no further record of Romero — if anyone is familiar with German, Dutch, Italian or Spanish sources and has ever come across the name, please do get in touch — but along with introducing the English to pasta and sandbags and inoculating Londoners against the plague, his smokeless coal balls were remarkably resistant to being adopted, and not for want of trying. After a demonstration organised by Plat at some point in 1591-3 before the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, the coal ball was the talk of the town — “hot in every man’s mouth for a while”, as Plat put it — prompting the great and the good to visit his house “in whole troops” just to see it for themselves. Yet this failed to attract the reward he hoped for, to be able to reveal the secret to the world. After all, given that making the coal balls simply involved crushing up cheap coal and mixing it with mere wettened dirt, if Plat and Romero weren’t paid up-front, or if they didn’t receive a monopoly patent from the Queen, then the technique was so easily copied that neither of them would receive a penny should the word get out.
Undeterred, Plat lauded the coal balls among his most valuable secrets in the pamphlets and books he published in 1593, 1594, and 1595, continuing to call for a patron to purchase the method from him, and so release it to the benefit all. To the rich and powerful, he argued, its eradication of coal’s smoke should have been worth the investment alone, ensuring that their fine houses and palaces would no longer be besmirched with soot. But he also appealed to their charity and public-spiritedness. The poor, he argued, would save at least a third of the money they usually spent on coals, at a time when deadly plague, a run of especially poor grain harvests, and war with Spain had all combined to make fuel more expensive than ever before. The coal balls would, he argued, even give the poor the jobs they needed to be able to afford fuel in the first place — especially veterans of the war, who despite having lost their legs, might work the crushed coal and wet loam with their hands “according to the manner and making of snowballs”. All Plat asked, given the huge effect the invention would have on the country, was but a fraction of the gain.
Plat was ambitious about the size of that fraction. In his 1595 pamphlet he suggested that between the fuel-saving wooden boiling tub, the fuel-saving coal balls, and a fuel-saving method for making saltpetre — the crucial ingredient in gunpowder — the best way to reward him for revealing all these secrets would be to levy a general tax on the whole population, conceiving of it as a proportion of the fuel everyone would save. Underlying this ambition, however, was an anxiety. The boiling tub was designed for people’s private home-brewing, rather than for the breweries selling beer and ale to the public, and the coal balls could be easily made by poor people using common materials within the privacy of their own homes. So even if Plat were to receive a patent for them, it would be almost impossible to enforce.
As for simply being paid up-front, it was clear that money was too tight. He had already been promoting the secret for years, and noble or charitable patron had been forthcoming, while thanks to the war against Spain the finances of the government were already under severe strain. A new tax thus seemed the only way to capture at least some of the gain to the inventors, as well as setting a precedent, he argued, to incentivise both himself and others to reveal still more useful secrets, and so “enrich and beautify this little island with their admirable and most profitable inventions.”
Plat’s ambitious proposal failed to convince. The following year he was lampooned in a tract by Sir John Harrington, who in addition to promoting his own invention of a flushing toilet, unwisely took the opportunity to analogise, with excrement, many of the perceived corruptions of Elizabeth I’s court. Harrington sarcastically offered Plat assistance in his petitions for a tax to pay for the coal balls. Speculating that the secret ingredients must be urine and cow-dung, Harrington promised that if Plat played the game right and sold a half share of the patent to some powerful royal favourite, then “though it should poison all the town with the ill savour”, his oppressive monopoly on coal balls would nonetheless “be suffered”.
In 1596, Plat hit back in a pamphlet of his own, writing smugly that those in power were ignoring “the malice both of viperous tongues as also of slanderous pens”, and begging his audience to wait a little longer for the secret, because his petitions did “as yet attend some courtly favours”. But he was once again to be disappointed, and in 1603 — over a decade after having first demonstrated them, and having lost all hope of reward — he finally released the secret, publishing all the details of how to make the coal balls, along with helpful tips on how to judge the quality of coals offered for sale, how to most efficiently arrange the balls or briquettes when making a fire, and even describing a range of premium coal balls of his own devising, involving even more additives like charcoal and sawdust.
Plat’s coal ball fire, as illustrated in 1603
It’s unclear how many copies Plat printed, but it cannot have been many, as the fact he revealed the secret was soon entirely forgotten. A quarter of a century later, in 1628, one Richard Gosling was to advertise near-identical coal balls, citing Plat as the original inventor, but as one who had “kept this jewel secret, and so preserved it”. Gosling did make a few small changes to its form, sometimes lengthening the balls “into rolls like to a weaver’s shuttle”, and sometimes casting the mixture of coal and wet loam into the elongated triangular shape of a Toblerone box using moulds. Plat’s round coal balls, he claimed, had been best suited to boiling, whereas his longer briquettes were equally suited to roasting as well. But Plat must have turned in his grave at the lie that it was Gosling, and not he, who had first condescended “to show it to the whole world; who of his mere love, without coveting of a patent, has for the good of the poor and rich showed it at full in ample manner to give all content and comfort.”
Nonetheless, even Gosling’s pretensions seem to have fallen on deaf ears. In 1644, by which time Gosling was dead, one of his executors again advertised the details of how to make coal balls to the public. Suggesting that “had he lived, he might have put it to the press”, the executor was apparently entirely unaware that Gosling had already done so sixteen years before, and he made no mention of Plat at all. And even this was soon forgotten. Another twenty-two years later, in 1666, a physician named Theodore de Vaux read a short paper to the recently-established Royal Society on how coal balls were made, which was in fact an abridged version of Plat’s 1603 tract, copying from it almost word-for-word (it’s unclear whether he divulged his source, and so whether Plat was yet again turning in his grave).
Despite being presented to the country’s scientific establishment, however, the method of making coal balls appears to have failed to stick yet again. Eight years on, in 1674, the coal balls were being advertised in a pamphlet as “a new experiment lately found out”, and under the headline “good news for the poor”. The anonymous author noted how they had even been adopted by “several eminent victuallers and coffee-houses” in the city centre, but this cannot have lasted long: by 1716, the coal balls were again being promoted as a novelty, this time by the playwright and failed entrepreneur Aaron Hill, who had travelled widely and probably seen them for himself at Liège.
When Coals Fail to Catch
But the coal balls still wouldn’t stick — not just for the whole of the seventeenth century, but for the eighteenth, nineteenth, and well into the twentieth as well. Twenty-five years on from Hill, in 1741, the journal of the Royal Society published a fresh account of how coal balls were made. The author, a landed gentleman named William Hanbury, of Kelmarsh near Northampton, had apparently first seen them himself at Liège. He provided some coal balls for the Royal Society’s own hearths at Crane Court, and even demonstrated them at the house of the Speaker of the House of Commons. But the balls were to be advertised to the public as a novelty yet again in 1754; again in 1764, when Hanbury’s article was reprinted in full; and again in 1796.
We might, at this point, begin to wonder if the coal balls actually worked as advertised. Aaron Hill claimed in 1716 that “for pleasure, for heat, for long burning, and cleanliness, one bushel of this is worth two of sea-coal”. He was certainly exaggerating its efficiency, but over the centuries pretty much every author said something similar, noting how the addition of mud not only reduced coal’s soot, but made coal last much longer in terms of the heat it gave out.
Not everyone could believe it. The French scientist Gabriel François Venel claimed in the 1770s to have put the Liège-style coal balls to the test. Despite his “researches and experiments”, the only advantages he could see were in providing a way to use up coal dust that would otherwise have been wasted, and in not needing to stir the fire so often, adding dismissively that perhaps coal balls didn’t blacken one’s fingers as much as handling raw coal. Venel wondered whether the idea of their smoke-reducing quality and superior efficiency had been put about as a mere marketing ploy, so as to inure a sceptical populace to the very idea of burning coal.
Yet Venel was motivated to find fault. He wrote to persuade the people of southern France to adopt raw coal in their hearths, and took every opportunity to dismiss any notion that coal had any downsides at all. Many of his own claims were grossly exaggerated, and it undermined his case to admit that coal could be improved. Despite claiming to have conducted experiments, he didn’t report how he conducted them, or any measurement of results, most likely allowing theory to mislead him. Knowing that mud didn’t combust, he simply couldn’t see any way, in theory, that adding it would do anything to augment the combustion of coal.
Yet against Venel, who spent most of his life in southern France and cannot have had much everyday experience with coal, stand dozens of experiments by those who used coal all the time. Plat’s demonstrations in the 1590s had impressed coal-burning Londoners, and Hanbury in the 1740s had managed to convince the coal-burning fellows of the Royal Society, England’s premier scientific society. Indeed, the person to advertise coal balls in 1796 — and to resolve the seeming paradox of how they could give out more heat than raw coal — was none other than Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, one of the most important scientists to investigate heat in the eighteenth century, and a founding figure of thermodynamics.
To Rumford, the superior efficiency of coal balls was firmly empirically proven, having “been found by long experience”, and would only “appear extraordinary to those who have not considered the subject with some attention”. (Had Venel still been alive, he’d have felt that burn.) Rumford’s key insight was that ordinary coal was actually extremely inefficient, because much of it literally went up in smoke: “the enormous waste of fuel in London may be estimated by the vast dark cloud which continually hangs over that great metropolis, and frequently overshadows the whole country, far and wide; for this dense cloud is certainly composed almost entirely of unconsumed coal.” So what the coal balls did was to trap the fuel where it was actually useful, in the hearth. The added mud bound the particles of coal dust, preventing them from escaping up the chimney half-burnt, and so forcing them to burn completely and give off all their heat where it could actually be enjoyed. Coal balls were more efficient precisely because they produced less soot and smoke.
So we have considerable evidence that coal balls worked. Rumford even wondered if they might be improved by adding sawdust, much like Plat, almost two hundred years earlier, had actually tried. Indeed, when Rumford helped found the Royal Institution a few years later with the aim to apply science in the service of the poor, one of its fourteen founding research strands was to perfect the coal ball by “ascertaining the effects of mixing clay, etc. with coal dust and cinders in forming fire-balls and combustible cakes”.
With such high praise, the failure of Londoners to adopt coal balls was soon becoming something of a mystery. “It is surprising”, wrote one author in 1767, “that some work of this kind is not undertaken in the neighbourhood of London”. It was still “surprising” to another in 1789, and to yet another in 1828. The lack of adoption was not because of ignorance, as the knowledge of how to make coal balls became both widespread and in a sense latent — a technique lying embedded among the population at large, re-emerging whenever the situation seemed to call for it. In a letter to the London Evening Standard in 1867, a correspondent had no doubt that they would already “be inundated with letters when the hard frost sets in pointing out how [coal balls] can be made with coal dust and clay”.
In the early nineteenth century there was even a spate of patents taken out in Britain, continental Europe, and the United States to cover coal balls “made, with very trifling modifications, of the same simple materials.” Plat, having repeatedly failed to patent the method, must by the 1840s have not had a chance to stop spinning in his grave. As one writer sardonically put it: “notwithstanding the extreme antiquity and publicity of the custom among people at all times and all countries, there have not been wanting persons … to assert the originality of their re-invention”.
This was not entirely fair. There were some significant changes in the additives used as binding agents, and the process of forming the balls became considerably more mechanised. Using increasingly sophisticated compressing machines, the manufacture of coal balls became a major industry in the 1860s in Belgium and France — perhaps one of the reasons that we now almost exclusively use the French word briquette, rather than calling them balls. After they were displayed at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris — one of the early World’s Fairs — an English observer called the mechanically-made briquette “one of the most important of modern inventions”. He was especially impressed by the progress made in Austria, where the binding agency of mud — which had traditionally taken up at least a third to a half of the balls, and left a lot of ash — had been replaced by taking up just 1% of the mixture with the residue from manufacturing starch, a substance “practically almost valueless for other purposes”.
Yet despite these processes being introduced in Britain too — major briquette factories were erected in the 1840s in both Sunderland and southern Wales — they still failed to find a market in London, and even in much of England. By the 1870s, of the 230,000 tons that they were producing each year, over 90% was instead being exported, and even into the twentieth century had failed to catch on, with the technique of making coal balls still occasionally resurfacing in the newspapers as a novel top tip for household thrift. As a Daily Express headline put it in 1920, “Coal Balls Save Coal Bills”. In 1942, with the country embroiled in the Second World War, the papers even called on the population to make their coals go further as part of their patriotic duty.
A Coal Ball Conundrum
So why did the coal ball keep failing to catch on in London? Ironically it was Plat who gives us a hint, by having recommended the manufacture of coal balls as a means to provide gainful employment for thousands of wounded veterans. Although he extolled this as a benefit, it also shows that coal balls required a great deal of extra labour to make. And as such, they would have been at their most attractive to Londoners at times of both severe fuel scarcity and high unemployment. It was when the poor were faced with rising fuel bills and struggling to find work that it made most sense for them to spend their hours of enforced idleness making coal balls, stretching their fuel reserves as far as they could. And with widespread unemployment causing the cost of any added labour to fall, it was also when coal balls were at their cheapest for the rich to buy.
The conditions of high unemployment and fuel scarcity were most usually met when England fought a war, leaving wounded veterans in its wake and mobilising swarms of enemy privateers to disrupt the supply of coal shipped down the coast from London to Newcastle. Indeed, the technique for making coal balls tended to pop up at precisely those times: in 1593-1603 when England fought Spain; in 1628 during the next conflict, this time against both Spain and France; in 1644 during the Civil War, after Parliament had banned the buying of coals from Royalist-held Newcastle, which was then besieged by the Scots; in 1666 during war with the Dutch; and in 1674 at the end of the next war with the Dutch.
Thereafter, with the British Navy increasingly dominant, the risk that privateers would disrupt London’s coal supplies seems to have receded. But the crucial conditions could still be brought about by extreme weather. When Aaron Hill promoted coal balls in 1716, there had been such a cold winter that the river Thames froze over. The demand for coal for heating must have been exceptionally high. When Hanbury demonstrated coal balls to the Royal Society in 1741 it was after the Thames had frozen over again in one of the coldest winters in centuries. Hanbury’s account was reprinted in full in 1764 on the grounds that “our daily papers are continually full of complaints of the high price of coals”, which a parliamentary inquiry discovered was the result of some “tempestuous and rainy seasons” having prevented the arrival of the coal ships.
Even in the late nineteenth and and early twentieth centuries, when coal in Britain had become super-abundant, there could be supply-disrupting events of such magnitude as to prompt the coal ball to be recommended again. In early 1873 it was owing to the coal miners of Britain going on strike for higher pay, resulting in what the newspapers dubbed the “coal famine”. Its consequences were so severe for ordinary people, both in terms of heating their homes and bringing all their workplaces to a standstill, that the failure of the mine owners and unions to reach a compromise was labelled a “treason against the supreme law of human society”. The periodic advertisement of coal ball recipes in the newspapers throughout the 1920s and 30s seems to have also corresponded to whenever the miners threatened to strike, or actually did, while in the early 1940s it was because coal supplies had become disrupted by the Second World War.
How to make coal balls, as illustrated in 1926 by the Sunday Mirror
Apart from being promoted and perhaps adopted during these specific crises, however, the coal ball just wouldn’t catch on. When coal was relatively cheap, it wasn’t wasn’t worth all the extra effort of making it go further, especially compared to the other items the poor had to stretch like food or drink or clothes. The only major appeal of coal balls became their lack of smoke, which could appeal to only the more discerning and wealthier consumers who could afford the extra cost. Yet even in this, coal balls were inferior to other smokeless fuels like charcoal, not least because they often still reeked of sulphur. And as for when unemployment was low, labour was in such high demand, and could command such high wages, that it made the coal balls all the more expensive to make, pricing them out of the market completely.
When a Penny Saved is Not a Penny Got
This would, you would hope, largely explain the mystery. But you might have spotted a rather important snag, as coal balls had also of course been used for centuries right next to the coal mines of Liège, one of the most coal-abundant places in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Indeed, coal balls were the preferred fuel in many other coal-mining regions too. Visitors to Aachen in the mid-eighteenth century (then usually known as Aix-en-Chapelle) reported that the locals gave the coal balls “so much the preference to coal alone that, though the town is surrounded with collieries [coal mines], they burn in all their best rooms no other fuel.” In Ireland, close to the inland coal mines of Leinster, coal balls were in the early nineteenth century said to be “the principal fuel of every class of persons”. Even as late as the 1940s, with the disruptions to global coal supplies brought on by the Second World War, the Leinster newspapers reported on the resurgence of coal balls as an “old yet familiar substitute for coal”, albeit “perhaps a novelty to the younger generation, especially those in towns and cities”.
And they were not just a phenomenon beyond Britain. In the 1760s, coal balls were said to have already been in use near the coal mines of southern Wales for centuries, to the great mystification of visitors: “in a country abounding with coal pits, where there is no scarcity of any sort of fuel, one would not expect to meet with this economical preparation”. One English visitor supposed that the seemingly irrational practice of making them had originated centuries earlier, before the coal mines were discovered, commenting that “it proves how tenacious countries are of once-adopted customs”. Most others thought it simply reflected the Welsh national character, which included a marked propensity to scrimp: “nobody understands better than a Welshman”, explained one visitor, “the tenor of the old adage ‘a penny saved is a penny got’”.
Yet there was nothing peculiarly Welsh about the practice, because coal balls were also long used in many of the coal-producing regions of England, too. In the 1760s, coal balls were said to be in use near the coal mines of Brislington, just east of Bristol — a custom that had apparently started thirty or forty years earlier. And in the 1810s, up in the Pennine mountain range separating Cumbria and Northumberland, coal balls were reportedly in use near the many coal outcrops at Alston Moor and Cross Fell, and had probably been in use there for centuries.
So if it wasn’t the peculiar character of the southern Welsh, or of the inhabitants of Leinster, Liège or Aachen, what explains the use of coal balls where coal was at its most abundant? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that not all coal is the same. One thing that all of these regions had in common was that they produced a particularly pure, hard, rock-like coal known as anthracite, then usually called “stone coal”. As I noted in previous posts, anthracite was so smokeless as to be the highest-quality fuel used in drying malt, and had always been a luxury fuel in people’s homes. When Londoners imported coal from as far away as Wales or Scotland, rather than from Newcastle, they were importing the very largest and highest-grade coals for the parlours and bedrooms of the rich, as an alternative to smokeless, expensive charcoal.
What this meant, however, is that those who lived in the regions where anthracite was mined, or who were even the miners themselves, were priced out of being able to buy the good stuff, outbid by the needs of industry and by the wants of the wealthy in distant lands. What the locals burned instead were the much cheaper by-products of mining anthracite: the tiny shards, flakes, and fragments that chipped away from the larger coal rocks, or which in some places were only ever present in the ground in that form. In the mines of the Pennines, for example, the lower coal seams were already made up of small brittle flakes that immediately crumbled “to powder when exposed to the air”. This coal dust, or coal slack, was known in Liège and Aachen as clute or clutin; in the north of England as crow-, craw-, or crop coal, being typically found on exposed outcrops; and in Wales, Ireland, and the west of England as culm (although, confusingly, culm was also sometimes the name given to Welsh coals in general when sent outside of Wales). At Mt Billingen in Sweden, the dust was also known as kolm, which was later discovered to be rich in radium and uranium — their culm balls, if they made them, must have really glowed.
There was often some industrial demand for culm, as with the other smaller sizes of coal: for burning limestone into lime, evaporating seawater into salt, and sometimes for the use of blacksmiths. But such demand was usually limited to the immediate locality or at best to any nearby coastlines, because unlike larger chunks of coal, which were expensive to transport even at the best of times given their high weight per value, culm dust also needed to be barrelled up before any major journeys, to stop it all from blowing away in the wind. This perhaps explains why most of the coal-ball-using regions were to be found far inland. Without an easy way export it, and without immediate access to the sea for making salt, for the coal mines of Aachen, Leinster, Liège, and the Pennines, culm would have been almost entirely wasted had it not been used in the homes of the local population. And to be burned in the home, it actually needed to be worked up into balls with dirt or clay, because as mere dust it could not be burned in a fire-grate at all.
Indeed, much like the anthracite rock from which it had chipped, culm was in general very difficult to set alight. Working it up into coal balls helped somewhat, by spreading the particles of coal dust amongst the clay and increasing the fuel’s surface area to the fire. But even then, it often took such a great heat, made with so much other fuel, that people often took great pains to avoid the cost of starting coal-ball fires by preventing them from ever going out at all. The Welsh built their coal-ball fires with a hollow in the top, to help draw air through the bottom of the grate below; before going to bed, they would cover it over with a ball of damp coal dust, so that the fire continued to smoulder throughout the night until it was uncovered in the morning again and sprang back to life. Carefully replenishing the balls as needed, many Welsh homes reportedly kept their fires burning continuously for decades.
And there were even advantages to the mines of using up the culm. As the English report on the 1867 Exposition Universelle put it, coal dust had “formed an encumbrance rather than a source of gain to the proprietors of coal mines”, and warned that “its introduction into the English coal districts can hardly be postponed any longer.” Coal dust had, in other words, become so plentiful, valueless, and even inconvenient, that mine owners should have been paying to have it made up into balls and briquettes just to have it taken away.
There was a crucial difference, then, between the fuels available where coals were dug, and the fuels on offer where they were sent. Londoners received only the most expensive and largest coals that Newcastle, Wales, or Scotland had to offer — the kinds of coals could bear the cost of transportation for hundreds of miles by sea. For Londoners to work these into balls involved either sweeping up the miniscule amounts of culm or coal dust that were shed from the coals piled up in their cellars or on the city’s wharves, or else to take the effort to break their large coals — which had specifically been sold to them at high prices for their largeness — down to dust. Plat in 1603 had recommended taking a bushel of the “best” coal, strewing it on a paved floor, and breaking it down with mallets. Aaron Hill in 1716 had even recommended that better-off Londoners invest in buying a small mill made of iron, to be kept in their cellars for their servants to grind their coals to dust. But to have done so was not only in itself costly, but fundamentally misunderstood the market for coal. It would have been the equivalent of buying rare books just to pulp them for use as toilet paper — something that might make sense during a particularly severe shortage, but never, ever else.
To those who lived in the coal-producing regions, however, where so much of the coal was already dust, and extremely cheap, it made perfect sense to use it at home while exporting the larger coals elsewhere for a much higher price. In fact, the larger the gap in price between local culm and exported coal, the more likely it was that coal balls would be used in the region as fuel: the greater the gap, the more it would cover the costs of mixing the culm with additives and working it into shapes, while still leaving the resulting balls or briquettes much cheaper than ordinary coal. As one writer astutely put it in the 1880s, when commenting on the mechanised mass-manufacture of various patented coal briquettes and their continued failure to break into the British market, they could “be financially successful only so long as there is sufficient difference between the prices of dust and best coal to cover the entire cost of manufacture, with the requisite profits”. The reason that even the British-made briquettes sold 90% of their tonnage abroad was, quite simply, that ordinary coal was so abundant in Britain that its price was too low for the briquettes to compete, while coal in other countries was relatively scarce.
Even in coal-producing regions, if the gap between the prices of culm and coal became too narrow, then the coal-ball-using locals might switch to using ordinary coal instead. This probably explains why the balls eventually went out of use in even Leinster and Wales, as coal in general became increasingly abundant, and why I’ve not been able to find any evidence of coal balls being widely used along the coast of Scotland’s Firth of Forth, and hardly at all in Newcastle.
The smaller and cheaper Scottish coals and their dust, which were often mined right by the coast, had since the sixteenth century been used for making salt practically on the spot. And as for Newcastle coals, they were generally much softer and more bituminous, with relatively little dust being produced except on the few outcrops of crow coal. For most locals the price difference between the crow coal dust and ordinary coal seems to have been so small that they simply used the ordinary coal, with only the very poor resorting to making coal balls: the only mention that I’ve been able to find is a 1750s account of how coal balls had “been long practised by the wretched inhabitants of the coasts of Cumberland and Northumberland: they roll a ball of clay in the small coal which is found on the surface of their declivities … but as they have no better fuel to kindle the ball and keep it glowing, it is a poor succedaneum [substitute] for sea coal, and the fires thus made are scarce worthy of the name” — exactly the same problem that the Welsh had in lighting their culm. It seems that the narrower the gap in price between the culm and coal, the more restricted the use of coal balls, until they were made exclusively by those who experienced the same kinds of conditions that prompted coal balls to be popularised in places like London: those who could hardly afford fuel at all and had too many hours of enforced idleness to spare.
Far from being an irrational economy, as English visitors to Wales had supposed, the relative prices of culm and coal explained all. But there was, at one vital technological juncture, a point at which the coal ball might have had a heyday.
Simon Says “Smelt Iron”
In 1612, just nine years after Plat published the secret recipe for making coal balls, a patent was granted to one Simon Sturtevant for smelting iron ore with coal rather than charcoal. Although Sturtevant published a rather vague treatise describing the process, it sounds a lot like he tried to use an alternative form of coal ball to achieve his aim.
Back in 1606, Sturtevant had had great success in applying a kind of mechanical crushing and compressing machine, which he dubbed his “lenicke instrument”, to the mass-manufacture of earthen water-pipes. The courtier tasked by the king with assessing it, Sir Thomas Chaloner, was an experienced backer of other innovators, and after two years reported that Sturtevant’s machine could “easily cast 700 or 8000 yards in one day [I’m not sure which is the typo] as just and even as a printer prints his letters”, compared to just 40 yards a day when made by hand. Sturtevant could apparently even make his pipes at just a tenth of the cost per yard compared to pipes of lead. Chaloner reported that the person responsible for the king’s buildings was very eager to buy them, and I suspect that he did, for a few years later Sturtevant made almost two thousand yards of earthen pipe for the Earl of Salisbury’s gardens at Hatfield Park, quoting him — for everything including the manufacture, trench-digging, pipe-laying, joint-soldering, trench re-filling, and 18-mile delivery overland from his factory at Highbury — even less than the shockingly low price of manufacture that Chaloner had reported.
Encouraged by this success, and probably having heard of Plat’s coal balls — Chaloner was one of Plat’s acquaintances, telling him how to make a camera obscura, a man-powered paddlewheel boat, and various alchemical secrets — Sturtevant then claimed that his lenicke instrument could prepare coal for smelting iron, saying that it would be used “for the tempering, stamping, and comixing of seacoal or stone coal, that a kind of substance being there made of them like unto paste or tempered clay, the pressmould may form and transfigure that claylike substance into hollow pipe coal as it does earthen pipes”. He was proposing the mechanised mass-manufacture of a kind of tubular coal briquette, or “pipe coal”.
Sturtevant claimed that his method would make coal just like charcoal. Singling out Scottish coal as most fit for making metals for its lack of sulphur, but noting that it “consumes at once”, rather than being “lasting and durable”, he claimed he would make coal burn with charcoal’s steady, high heat — much as making it into coal balls would. He claimed he would remove coal’s “nocive”, or noxious properties compared to charcoal — much as making it into coal balls would take away the soot and smoke. And, he claimed, his method would involve coal’s “addition and infusion” with charcoal’s beneficial properties — just as making coal balls involved infusing it with loam or clay.
But for all that working coal into briquettes could make it burn like charcoal, Sturtevant failed to change its all-important chemistry. For all that he removed its visible soot or smoke, the coal’s invisible fumes would still have been far too high in sulphur and other impurities to smelt a usable iron. Whereas economics had banished the coal ball from the capital’s domestic hearths, it was physics that prevented it from revolutionising one of the country’s most important industries. For that task, as we’ll see in a future post, only coke could be king.
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If London’s brewers had made the switch to burning coal in the 1580s, heating up water via the walls of the flue, and so preventing the brew being tainted by coal’s sulphurous fumes — a technique known as the holzer-sparungs kunst, or wood-saving art — how did this fit with another popular story, of how pale ales had arisen from brewers switching to coal much later, in the 1640s?
The answer is to do with how the heat was being used, involving two very different processes. The process in the 1580s was about using coal in the brewing itself, to boil the water ready for the malt to be mixed in. What changed in the 1640s, however, was not to do with brewing, but with the preparation of the crucial raw ingredient, the malt — grain soaked in water, allowing it to begin germinating, at which point it was dried to prevent it growing any further, and then lightly milled. Malt was a substance that brewers typically bought ready-made, so what changed was really nothing to do with brewers at all, but with with their suppliers, the maltsters.
[I thought this would be a quick and easy post to write — one I could get down in a matter of just a day, and no more than a few hundred words long. Seven weeks later, however, here we are, because it turns out that the road to mass-produced pale ale was a lot longer, more winding, and more interesting than expected, but with nobody ever having written it all up before.]
To appreciate what maltsters were trying to achieve, we first need to understand why it mattered for ale to be pale. It was essentially a sign that the malt used in making it had been dried well, and with minimal smoke from whatever fuel had been used. The smokier a malt, the worse the ale, taking on a dull, reddish hue said to “hurt and annoy the head of him that is not used thereto, because of the smoke.”1 As a physician put it in 1691, beer or ale with “a high martial colour … proves injurious to the drinkers; it sends fumes and cloudy vapours in to the crown, hurts the eyes, heats the blood, and a great friend to the stone and gravel” — that is, to kidney stones.2
There were already some longstanding ways to get around this. If malt could be dried in a hot sun, for example, as has probably been done since ale was first brewed thousands of years ago, then it was entirely smoke-free and pale. In especially windy places too, the warm summer air could be caught and directed to dry out the malt. But such conditions are relatively rare in the wet and rainy northwest of Europe, so to produce malt in any quantity, and all year round, it would have to be dried in a kiln, and by burning something — which meant there was the risk of it being infected by smoke.
The kiln worked as follows. Once the germinating grain had been drained of its excess water, the maltster spread it evenly across a haircloth, which was placed on a mat woven of straw, wicker, or thin wooden splints. The mat was designed to allow hot air to pass up through the gaps from below, rising up through the sodden grain to carry all its moisture away. This porous mat — called the malt kiln’s “bedding”, or floor — was then placed over the top of a widening furnace flue, with the fire lit at the narrowest point some distance below.
A traditional malt kiln with an open hearth
Given the fire was placed directly beneath the grain, one of the maltster’s most important skills was their ability to manipulate heat. Unlike brewers, who merely piled on the fuel to bring liquids up to the point of boiling as quickly as possible, the maltster needed to get enough hot air through the mat and quickly enough to stop the grain from germinating any further, but not so much heat that the malt began to roast, destroying the all-important enzymes needed to convert starch into sugars when brewing. As one seventeenth-century writer put it, “too rash and hasty a fire scorches and burns it, which is called amongst maltsters ‘firefanged’; and such malt is good for little or no purpose”.3
Too large a fire could also be dangerous given it was not far beneath the highly combustible material of the kiln floor. Unattended malt kilns were a major cause of house fires, and so maltsters — usually women — were supposed to sing while they stoked the flames. As one old proverb put it, “Take heed to the kell, sing out as a bell”, and another “Let Gillet be singing, it does very well, to keep her from sleeping and burning the kell”. (Gillet is a name contracted from Aegidia; in seventeenth-century works you’ll often see “Jack and Gillet” to mean the ordinary man and woman, rather than “Jack and Jill”.)4
So malt-drying, unlike brewing, required the heat to be sustained over the course of days, and above all gently. As one well-known proverb put it, “soft fire makes sweet malt”.5But this was easier said than done. In stoking the fire and turning the malt, the maltster had to account for the humidity and temperature of the air and of the sodden grain, the thickness and evenness with which the grain had been laid on the haircloth, and the difficulty of getting a fire to give out a steady heat without the use of thermometers or hygrometers. Drying the malt both gradually and evenly took great experience and skill. As one writer put it, “to keep a temperate and true fire is the only Art of a most skilful maltster”.6
And the art could be all the harder depending on the fuel they used. Wood could be used to give out a fairly steady fire, but it was far too smoky: “when at any time drink is ill-tasted, they say straight [away], ‘it was made of wood-dried malt’”. Or as another writer it, “the unpleasantness … I leave to the judgement of them that have travelled in Yorkshire, where, for the most part, is nothing but wood-dried malt only.”7 Much better was wood that had been baked into charcoal, freeing it of its smoke-producing impurities. But charcoal was much more expensive, only really affordable for the home-made malts and ales of the country houses of the rich.
Cheaper than wood were options like furze, gorse, or bracken, but these tended to be smoky too, so the most widely-used fuel was straw. As one writer put it in the 1620s, “the best and most principal fuel for the kilns (both for sweetness, gentle heat, and perfect drying) is either good wheat-straw, rye-straw, barley-straw, or oaten-straw; and of these the wheat-straw is the best, because it is most substantial, longest-lasting, makes the sharpest fire, and yields the least flame.”8The proverbs agreed: “Some dry with straw, and some dry with wood. Wood asks more charge, and yet nothing so good.” Straw, however, was difficult to maintain at a constant temperature, demanding the most of the maltster’s art.
Although straw was certainly the cheapest and most widely-available fuel, there were a few places blessed with a much cleaner and steadier one, such as the coal mined in Pembrokeshire in southern Wales. By 1600, by which time it must have been used in drying malt for centuries, this Welsh coal was described as being so smokeless as to dry even cloth “without stain or blemish”, and thus also “a most proved good drier of malt, therein passing wood, ferns and straw”.9 Even as late as the 1750s it was said to make a “more true and complete malt … than any other fuel, because its fire gives both a gentle and certain heat, whereby the corns are in all their parts gradually dried”. The fickler fire of straw could only come near it when handled by maltsters of uncommon skill, and was smokier to boot.
But Welsh coal was an especially pure, hard, and rock-like coal, known as anthracite, and relatively rare. The more commonly-found coals of Britain were full of smoke-producing impurities, and so despite being the cheapest fuel of all, were utterly unusable for drying malt. As one writer put it plainly in the 1620s, smoky fuels like coal were “not by any means to be used under kilns”.10
If only maltsters could take even these more sulphurous and smokier coals, and find a way to prevent the smoke from touching the malt, then they would have a fuel that burned much more regularly and evenly than straw, and which was much cheaper too. Vast quantities of high-quality straw, burnt to mere ash in the malt kilns, would instead be freed up to feed livestock in winter, and so be processed by their guts into fertilising manure. If they could find a way to shift to burning cheap and sooty coals, maltsters would not only save their own costs, but make meat and grain more plentiful for everyone else as well.
Inventing the Smokeless Kiln
There was an obvious way to achieve this, which was by simply separating the fire’s from the malt, so that it was heated indirectly — the exact same principle as the holzersparungs kunst, discussed last time, which in the 1580s so revolutionised London brewing. As early as 1573, for example, the English spy William Herle sent his master, the secretary of state William Cecil, a drawing of a malt kiln he had seen in Holland with a note that “the chief effect hereof is that it is without all danger of fire, it will dispatch a great deal quickly with small fuel and attendance, and lastly seacoal [that is, cheap, sooty Newcastle coal] is as sweet a fuel for it as any straw.”11
Herle’s drawing seems to have gone missing, unfortunately, but in any case nothing seems to have come of it. Seven years later the mathematician John Blagrave petitioned for a patent for a kiln “to dry malt, beans, peas, starch, biscuit, dyers’ wool, hops, or such like without damages of firing or smoke”, with the fire “to be made but morning and evening without any more attendance to be given in respect of the fire”. Blagrave added that it might even be used to heat rooms that had no chimneys, and to dry gunpowder too.12 But his petition came to nothing, and another sixteen years later, in 1596, the son of a successful London brewer, Hugh Plat, published a short tract describing yet another version, calling it “a secret both new and profitable for our English maltsters, whereof as yet there is not so much any model extant”. Rather than laying the sodden grain over a porous kiln floor made of wicker or wood, Plat suggested placing it upon an impermeable thin sheet of lead. The fire thus simply heated the lead and then gently sort of toasted the grain, rather than smoke-drying it, allowing any fuel to be used. Plat even suggested heating the lead with the steam from brewers’ boilers, so as to recycle their waste heat.13
Hugh Plat’s malt kiln, based on his description. He mentions “four vents within a foot of the floor, made in equal distance each from the other, both to draw up the heat and steam of the fire, as also to convey the smoke by small leaden pipes into some wooden trunk or tunnel of brick or plaster.” I’ve interpreted this as flues to help draw the smoke once it passes the leaden floor.
Despite being published, however, Plat’s indirectly-heated malt kiln does not seem to have taken off. In 1613, almost another two decades later, an entrepreneur named John Rovenzon, or Robinson, published some details of a patent he had acquired for smelting iron with coal. Rovenzon’s process involved indirectly pre-drying the iron furnace using a coal-burning stove, and this stove, made of iron, had “funnels or passages to vent the smoke”. Thanks to this, he suggested, it might also be applied to using sooty Newcastle coal to dry malt (or starch, or hops, or saffron) “exceeding sweet and fair without scent, taint or touch of the fuel or any smoke proceeding therefrom”.14Rovenzon doesn’t seem to have done anything with this hint, and I can’t find any other details of how it looked. His iron project amounted to nothing, and the only other record I can find of him is from the very same year as one of the three patentees for the colonisation of the South American coastline between the rivers Amazon and Essequibo — a stretch of land including Suriname, French Guiana, the Brazilian state of Amapá, and some of modern-day Guyana — which also miserably failed.15
Yet there are a few hints of the principle being put into practice, though without any indication of who was responsible. In a book probably written around the same time, but published a decade later,16 is a note about some kind of smokeless malt kiln becoming popular: “there is a kiln now of general use in this kingdom, which is called a French Kiln … ever safe and secure from fire, and whether the maltster wake or sleep … and in these kilns may be burnt any kind of fuel whatsoever, and neither shall the smoke offend or breed ill taste in the malt, nor yet discolour it, as many times it does in open kilns, where the malt is as it were covered all over and even parboiled in smoke”.17
What’s frustrating here is that the French Kiln was apparently too popular to even bother describing: “of the form or model whereof I will not here stand to entreat, because they are now so generally frequent among us, that not a mason or carpenter in the whole Kingdom but can build the same, so that to use more words thereof were tediousness to little purpose.” Argh! Will nobody think of the historians?
But the author — the agricultural writer Gervase Markham — does give us hints of how it worked. In another volume he says that whereas English kilns are typically “composed of wood, lath and clay, and therefore subject to some danger of fire”, the French kilns were “of brick, lime, and sand, and therefore without all peril”.18The floor or bedding of the French kilns was still, however, of porous wicker or wood — which suggests that if the smoke was not affecting the sodden grain upon it, then it was not just a matter of better materials, but of design. Although I don’t think it removed the smoke entirely — for reasons that will become clear — it sounds as though the French kiln involved installing a series of brick baffles between the flame and the kiln floor, so that by the time the smoke reached it, it had lost much of its soot and was mostly just hot air.
Did the “French Kiln” work something like this?
We may never know for sure. I painstakingly checked every version of Markham’s book, which went through many editions over the course of decades, but his text on malt kilns was never updated. Nor can I find any other reference to it. But he does at least give us the description of another kiln he’d seen used in the West Country, which likewise helped to reduce the smoke and may have worked similarly. Although it was too small to be applied to industrial-scale malting — Markham described it as having a “profitable quaintness” — it involved opening a vent from an ordinary kitchen fire so that some of the heat instead went down a tunnel to a small malt kiln. With the vent competing with the kitchen chimney’s ordinary flue, and with plenty of soot being lost in the tunnel along the way, it seems to have made for a relatively smokeless malt.19
Yet neither the French nor West Country malt kilns seem to have entirely solved the problem of smoke. In 1622 the general idea was mentioned in a book on trade as an illustrative, but hypothetical, example of a hugely beneficial invention: “If a kiln for the drying of malt for all the Kingdom over were invented to be done with pit coal, better cheap than with wood fire, and more pleasing, without the scent of smoke”, argued the author, then if granted a patent monopoly, it wouldn’t be considered unjust — an argument that just a year later was put to the test.20
Burning Ambition
In 1623, a partnership was formed to promote and patent a newly-invented smokeless malt kiln. The partners were the governor of Pendennis Castle, a Cornish gentleman named Sir Nicholas Halse of Fentongollan; a Cambridgeshire knight named Sir Henry Mallory; and one John Shotbolt, alias Battalion, of Ardeley in Hertfordshire.21 Although Halse was the chief mover of the project — the entrepreneur — the kiln’s actual inventor, I suspect, was Shotbolt, who a few years earlier had invented an instrument to repair highways;22 was leading the drainage of the peaty Sedgemoor in Somerset;23 and, most strikingly of all, had approached king James I about some kind of stove for drying saltpetre, the key ingredient in gunpowder.24
Over a decade later, Shotbolt’s saltpetre-drying method was to get the financial and political backing of a Dutch-born gentleman, Sir Philiberto Vernatti, a knight of both Venice and England, who bought a baronetcy by funding the colonisation of Nova Scotia, set up glassworks in Scotland, led a consortium of Dutch investors in the drainage of the English Fens, and was to fund new attempts — after Rovenzon’s failure — at smelting iron with coal. Vernatti and Shotbolt petitioned the king in 1634 to allow them to take over the perpetual patent monopoly on saltpetre production, arguing that the current patentee had failed to keep to the Crown’s terms.25 And although this seems to have failed, soon afterwards Vernatti patented the saltpetre-drying stove in the Dutch Republic.26
What’s so interesting about Shotbolt’s saltpetre-drying stove is that the heat had to be applied gently, and that the risk of hot soot coming into contact with the saltpetre might potentially have been explosive. So if his stove could apply a gentle, smokeless heat to drying saltpetre, it could almost certainly be applied to drying mere malt. Indeed, what’s striking here is that Shotbolt’s malt kiln also suddenly re-emerged, also after about a decade’s silence, in 1634.
According to the inventors themselves, the reason for the decade’s delay was simple. In 1625, king James I had instructed his officials to draw up the partnership’s malt-drying patent, granting it to Sir Nicholas Halse for the unusually long term of 31 years — far longer than the 14 years permitted to patents for new inventions under the Statute of Monopolies, passed just two years before. The idea seems to have been similar to the patent then in force for making glass with coal instead of wood. In order to preserve wood and timber, seen as a matter of strategic necessity, the making of glass with coal was not just protected as a newly-invented process, but the older use of wood was banned as well, giving its patentees a full monopoly on English glass-making. Halse seems to have reasoned that if a special exception could be made for a small industry like glass-making, then it could also be made for a much larger one like drying malt. But before the patent could receive the king’s seal, and so become official, the king died.27
With the court in upheaval, Halse may have lacked the connections to apply for the patent again, though I suspect that the setback simply allowed Shotbolt to get distracted. Just a few months after the king’s death, both he and their other partner, Sir Henry Mallory, were to receive a patent to search for gold, silver, and copper mines in various counties. And a year after that, Shotbolt was complaining that delays to his drainage works at Sedgemoor meant he now faced financial ruin.28 What happened in the intervening period is unclear, but in 1634, having now acquired the backing of Philiberto Vernatti for his saltpetre-drying, Shotbolt resurrected the partnership with Halse and tried to promote the malt-drying invention again — this time with Vernatti’s help as well.29
What they now proposed was even more ambitious than before. Playing on Charles I’s constant need for cash, the partners proposed that the invention form the basis of a powerful new corporation, the Society of Maltsters, of which Vernatti would be the first master, with Halse and Shotbolt as its wardens, and for which they had found 92 alleged maltsters to sign their names in support.
There were several advantages to incorporation. One of them was that when the restrictive Statute of Monopolies had made its way through Parliament a decade before, various guilds, universities, towns and cities — all self-governing corporations — had worried that the new law might undermine the patents and charters that granted their own members certain exclusive rights. They had managed to get a clause inserted in the bill to exempt all corporations from the restrictions it imposed, and so created a loophole: that if an inventor could get a patent in the name of a new corporation, rather than just as an individual, then his monopoly would not be limited to just 14 years, but could be perpetual.
Moreover, by presenting a business partnership as a new and necessary guild, officially regulating and speaking for an entire profession, then they could also force the entire industry to use the invention. As Vernatti, Halse and Shotbolt put it, their new Society of Maltsters would bring about a “reformation” of abuses, as well as raising the standards of the industry by ensuring the “sweet, neat and wholesome drying of malt … without any touch of smoke”. Nobody would be allowed to be a maltster unless they became a member of the corporation, and nobody could become a member of the corporation without both using the invention and paying a membership fee — which would, in effect, be the invention’s licensing fee. And to sweeten the deal for the king, they proposed that the corporation pay him a share of those fees. So the corporation would, in effect, raise a major new tax on malt.
Although another such scheme had recently been approved for monopolising soap-making, for some reason the partnership’s proposals were rejected. Perhaps the government worried that malt-making was simply too vast an industry to regulate in this way, and that it would prove too unpopular. By Halse’s own estimation there were some 40,000 practising maltsters in the country,30 which would have accounted for almost 1% of the entire population, and an even higher proportion of its working adults. Or they may have just been beaten to the punch by someone better connected.
A brewer and naval captain named James Duppa, whose younger brother was the king’s chaplain and tutor to the royal princes, had already been petitioning for a an alternative means of effectively taxing malt, and a few years later was given the go-ahead by a royal commission to suppress the “unnecessary and unlimited number of common maltsters” — common in that they made malt for the public rather than for their own use at home — and to prevent all innkeepers and alehouse-keepers from brewing their own ale or beer.
Although there was no mention of any new invention, Duppa’s scheme established an even more direct licensing regime to cover all malt and beer made for public consumption, forcing maltsters and brewers to pay up or else be forced out of business. Despite being put into operation, Duppa’s new, nation-wide excise tax proved short-lived. With maltsters dissuaded from supplying the market, and with malt in even shorter supply thanks to a poor grain harvest a few years later, the rising price of malt and the resulting outcry from the brewers forced the government to water down the terms of Duppa’s licensing regime. And with London also being exempted from the scheme because of its ancient civic privileges, the government raised hardly any cash while managing to foment a great deal of discontent. It was one of the many, many straws to be laid on the camel’s back, which led just a few years later to civil war — a war that Parliament won, ironically, because in 1643 it instituted a proper, no-exceptions excise tax on making ale and beer.31
In the meantime, however, in 1635 Sir Nicholas Halse and his partners had to console themselves with the grant of an ordinary, 14-year monopoly on the use of their invention. Halse didn’t get long to enjoy it, as he died the following year, but the people who got his share were soon trying to stamp out the competition, the trouble being that a few other people had already patented a very similar-sounding idea. In 1634, while Halse was still petitioning for the creation of a maltsters’ corporation, a patent for another smokeless malt-drying kiln had been granted to an appropriately-named clerk, Nicholas Page. And a few months after that, yet another was granted to the disappointed heirs of Cornelis Drebbel, who had apparently made himself penniless in the process of inventing a smokeless malt-drying stove.32
Unfortunately, we don’t know how exactly these malt-drying devices differed, yet there are some tantalising hints. For details about the kiln Halse patented, and which Shotbolt likely invented, we have to thank a physician, Dr Edward May, who at around the same time was promoting his invention of a hanging “pendant furnace” to use on ships. May’s device was mostly made of iron, with the idea being that it would replace the huge weight of brick and mortar — about seven tons — required for the ship’s oven, usually located in its bow. That weight, he noted, “makes the forepart of the ship draw deep in the water, and so slugs the ships”, slowing it down, and so the idea was that that the pendant stove, weighing less than half a ton, could be hung from iron bars, staying ever upright even as the ship pitched and rolled, as well as potentially being carted around the deck on wheels. May’s invention was apparently recommended for trials, after which all mentions cease. It wasn’t until over a hundred years later that iron stoves — non-hanging ones — were introduced as standard on new naval ships. But May did, helpfully, mentio a few ways in which his device differed from the Halse/Shotbolt one.
For a start, he noted that Halse’s partners claimed “only unto the standing and fixed furnaces and ovens” — that is, of a permanent structure largely of brick, rather than a portable iron stove. And, he noted, he had made a licensed addition to his own design based on how Shotbolt’s worked: “upon the consideration of the furnaces of Sir Nicholas Halse, Doctor May was put in mind to add unto his pendant furnaces the stove roaster which himself had seen often times in Germany and Helvetia [Switzerland], and the further parts of Lorraine.”33 From this, and some mentions elsewhere of it being reliant on iron,34 my current best guess is that the Shotbolt/Halse device separated the smoke from the malt entirely, but that this involved the smoke being walled off with iron plates to conduct and retain the heat.
Might Shotbolt’s malt kiln have looked something like this? I suspect he was more sparing with the iron, but without further details I don’t know where he’d have placed it.
As for Page’s competing kiln, the Halse partnership argued that he had simply stolen their idea. Halse had apparently shared a lot of drawings and descriptions around — it would be wonderful if one of these turned up one day — and Page had, they alleged, simply rushed to patent it first.35 After a short investigation the government agreed, and Page’s grant was suppressed. But he wasn’t really given the chance to defend himself.
The problem Page faced was that Halse’s investors had included one William Howard, who it appears was one of the Howards — a family whose members included the earls of Arundel, Berkshire, and Suffolk. Indeed, I suspect that this William was the youngest son of the earl of Arundel — the most powerful of the three earls, as Lord Marshal, Lord High Constable of England, and a member of the king’s privy council. If so, this William was about to be given the title Lord Stafford, and in a few years raised to a Viscount. As a friend of their other competitors put it, “now my Lord Arundel pretends to have the same skill and likewise has a patent for it”.36 And very soon, Arundel’s cousin, the earl of Berkshire, was to emerge as the Halse partnership’s new leader.37
So Page faced formidable foes. When the Howards petitioned the king to ask for Page’s patent to be withdrawn, the king’s legal advisers pointed out that while this was in theory perfectly doable — he could grant and retract a patent at will — determining who was actually first in the invention could only properly be decided by a court of law. Page would likely have expected at least a trial. But in May 1637 the Howards instead persuaded the king to refer the question to a committee of courtiers, most of whom seem to have been Howard clients.38 “Summer is”, the Earl of Berkshire argued, “the time to build kilns, and winter to use them”, and the potential benefits to the country were too important to allow any delay.39 Poor Page was left without any time to prepare, imploring the king, to no avail, that he could not, with just a few days’ notice, “suddenly be provided of commissioners, and draw up interrogatories, and bring in witnesses”, his lawyers informing him that it would cost him far more than a simple trial as well.40He never stood a chance.
I suspect that Page was not a an intellectual property thief at all, and had actually patented a different kind of malt kiln. At some point he petitioned to continue using the invention, pointing out that it didn’t use iron plates like Shotbolt’s, and promising to pay more of his profits to the Crown.41 He may, of course, have just been making this up, and unless new evidence turns up we’ll probably never know for sure. But what we do know is that the other competitor the Howards wanted to crush — the smokeless malt kiln patented by the heirs of Cornelis Drebbel — was actually a major technological breakthrough.
The Government of Fire
A Dutch engraver and alchemist, Cornelis Drebbel is not a widely-recognised name today. But he was one of the most influential scientists of the early seventeenth century, and easily Europe’s most famous inventor. Considered a maverick even at the time, he was the da Vinci of his age, but significantly better, as he actually put his most outlandish designs into practice. As one admiring scientist put it in 1649, when comparing Drebbel to the now much more celebrated Descartes, the best natural philosopher was not only one who understood “nature’s works”, but “knows how to rule them in order to the procurement of good to Mankind … Till Monsieur des Cartes has proved himself a philosopher in this sense, I shall prefer Cornelius Drebbel before him, though he understood no Latin — one that has done more though said less.”42
One of Drebbel’s core insights about the world was that he could exploit changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure to produce motion. By harnessing the perpetual motion of the universe, but in miniature, he caused a sensation throughout the courts of Europe when he unveiled a clock that would never stop. Showing the time, day, months, and years, the signs of the zodiac, the phases of the moon, and seemingly — though not actually — the ebb and flow of the tides, its internal springs were rewound by the expansion of some trapped mercury pushing upon a piston every time it got warmer during the day. (I hypothesised this as a plausible explanation in a post I wrote three years ago, and it’s how I had it shown in a 3D animated reconstruction that you can play around with here, but in the process of researching this piece I accidentally stumbled across some actual evidence to confirm it!)43 In exactly the same way, he amused the court of the English king by applying the principle to getting statues to sing or play music whenever the sun shone on them.
But he also had more useful applications in mind. At some point in the 1610s he was not just exploiting changes in atmospheric pressure, but measuring them too, using this to predict storms. Drebbel’s barometer became known in Dutch as the donderglas, or the thunder-glass, and in England as the weather-glass or kalender-glass (drawing up a calendar in the seventeenth century was not just a matter of listing dates for holidays, but of using astrology to predict the weather for the days ahead). And because the countervailing effects of changes to temperature were not to be separated and isolated until decades later, Drebbel’s device could also double as a thermometer — one known as the “Dutch” or “Drebbelian” thermometer, as opposed to the near-identical “Italian” one invented in the 1610s by the professor of medicine at Padua, Santorio Santorio.
By using his device as a thermometer, Drebbel was to go beyond just exploiting or measuring temperature, discovering a way to control it. Drebbel, as an alchemist, needed to be able to precisely control the temperature of a furnace so as to manipulate minerals and metals. Just like the chief art of the maltster, this art of the alchemist, known as pyronomia, or the regimen ignis — the governing of fire — demanded the cultivation of an exceptional sensitivity to heat, so as to judge by feel and by look the varying intensities of the flame and then do what they could to keep it at a constant level. Drebbel’s mercury thermometer immediately made this easier, but he went much further, removing the need for any art at all. By placing a cork to float atop the thermometer’s mercury, its rise and fall could then push a lever to either open or restrict the fire’s air supply, and so keep the oven at a stable heat automatically. Drebbel had invented the thermostat, allowing him to simply choose a desired temperature and let the stove do the rest.44
Drebbel’s thermostatic stove was to be widely adopted, and became a major source of business for the husbands of his daughters, the brothers Abraham and Johannes Sibertus Kuffler, to whom he passed many of his secrets (Drebbel seems to have liked them more than he liked his own two sons). The Kufflers successfully used the invention to artificially incubate chickens, to distil seawater on ships — especially useful on long-distance voyages to the Indian Ocean — and to make portable baking ovens for armies, used by the Dutch in their successful campaigns against Spain.45 In terms of drying malt — just one of many other applications considered by the Kufflers alongside salt-making, warming rooms, heating bath-houses, and drying saffron, hops, fruit, sweetmeats, guns, gunpowder, saltpetre, and the timbers of freshly-built homes — it sounds as though it would have worked just like a radiator heats a room today, the stove simply needing to be placed in the malt’s proximity. What really differentiated it from Shotbolt’s method, however, was that it it would have allowed maltsters to choose the heat they wanted and then to leave it be. Instead of singing to stay awake, they would have been able to go and get a good night’s rest, only returning periodically to top up the fuel. And it would have allowed even the most bumbling of maltsters, utterly inept at managing a fire, to produce an even, gentle heat, and thus a high-quality malt.
But rather than spreading in England, Drebbel’s thermostatic stoves first became popular abroad. Just as with the poor clerk Nicholas Page, it seems that Drebbel’s invention was suppressed by the powerful Howards. As a friend of the Kuffler brothers reported in 1635, the earl of Arundel’s meddling meant “that Kuffler is kept down” despite his invention being “conceived to be the better.”46And with the onset of England’s civil war a few years later, the brothers in any case fled to the Netherlands, where they spread Drebbel’s inventions instead.
With the competing kilns of Page and the Kufflers suppressed, the way seemed clear for Shotbolt’s invention to achieve the prize of allowing cheap coal to be burned in the making of pale malts. Even though we don’t know exactly how it worked, all the efforts that the Howards went to even without the chance of a full monopoly corporation suggest that the Shotbolt invention was widely considered valuable. In 1638, the earl of Berkshire had Halse’s patent reissued in his own name, tightening up its wording to prevent any further encroachment, and extending the uses and fuels to which it applied. And there was even, it seems, more demand than initially expected for the kilns,47 with shares in the business still being worth something a few years later in 1640.48 But a year after that, with the country now on the verge of civil war, the Shotbolt smokeless malt kilns were being lampooned in a satirical pamphlet as a typical example of a project doomed to fail, after which all mentions cease.49
In 1656 the Kufflers returned to England, bringing back with them the secret to thermostatic ovens.50 But by then there was no point in applying it to drying malt. By then, another much simpler and less capital-intensive method had been developed to use cheap coal. Instead of removing its smoke from the kiln, a way had been found to remove the smoke from the coal itself.
More on that in Part II.
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John Rovenzon, A treatise of metallica. Bvt not that which was published by Mr. Simon Stvrtevant vpon his patent, which is now by order cancelled and made voyd (Thomas Thorp, 1613)
The first appearance of a section on malt-making in Markham’s work appears in the second, 1623 edition of The English Huswife, appended to Countrey Contentments. But in the 1613 edition of the first part of The English husbandman (p.103) he discusses hop-drying — which was often done on a malt kiln — and the difference between the English and French kilns, while noting that “because I have hereafter more occasion to speak of the nature, fashion, and edifice of kilns in that part of this Volume where I entreat of malting, I will cease further to mention them than to say that upon a kiln is the best drying your hops”. I think it’s clear from this aside that he had already drawn up his notes or perhaps even written the manuscript for his section on malt-drying, but he then excluded it from the second part of TheEnglish husbandman published the following year, perhaps as his vision for the book’s structure had changed, and then forgot to put it in the first edition of The English Huswife published the year after that. Only when the latter went to a second edition in 1623 did he correct the oversight.
The document is referred to in an inquiry into the priority of Halse’s patent in SP 16/323 f.31 as “articles of agreement made the 16th day of May in the 21st year [1623] of the reign of your [Charles I’s] late royal father King James of ever blessed memory made by the said Sir Nicholas Halse, Sir Henry Mallory knight, and one John Shotholt [Shotbolt] mentioning the said invention of Sir Nicholas Halse”.
SP 16/268 f.42 - in an 18th May 1634 petition by Sir Philiberto Vernatti and John Shotbolt to king Charles I they note how Shotbolt “has about a dozen years since [c.1622] been often admitted into your Majesty’s gracious father’s presence … acquainting his highness … with the great and beneficial secret of making and composing of excellent saltpetre and powder”
G. Doorman, Octrooien voor Uitvindingen in de Nederlanden uit de 16e-18e Eeuw (Martinus Nijhoff, 1940), p.197, patents G 364, G 365 and G 367 (which is an amendment to G 365)
SP 16/323 f.31 mentions the 31-year term apparently granted by James, and that “before the patent could pass the seal the late king died, thereby the said invention was for diverse years discontinued”. SP 16/307 f.120 sets out the plan for a 31-year patent involving a dispensation from the Statute of Monopolies and a ban on any competing malt-kilns, with each new kiln to pay the Crown an annual rent of 40s per year.
SP 16/323 f.31 mentions an agreement dated 7th April 1634 between Sir Nicholas Halse, Sir Philliberto Vernatti and others. This is followed by SP 16/438 f.120-1, the petitions for incorporation, which despite being calendered under 1639 cannot be, as the chief petitioner is Halse, who died in 1636. They instead must belong to May, June or July 1634, after the agreement and before, SP 16/272 f.46, dated 19 July 1634, which contains a list of answers by Vernatti to a series of objections to the incorporation.
John R Krenzke, ‘“Moneys Unreceived”: Attempts to Tax the Brewing Trade in London and Its Environs before the Excise Ordinance of 1643’, Brewery History, no. 162 (2015): 2–14.
The patentees also complained of two other rival patents, though less applicable to malt-drying, and which may have had something to do with the exact form of the invention itself. One of these was the 1635 patent to Serjeant-Major Henry Sibthorpe for a very similar-sounding smokeless oven for cooking and baking. The other was a 1636 patent to Robert Lindsey, Esq. and John Hobart, gentleman, for a way to reduce the smoke and heat loss in boiling by brewers, dyers, chandlers, cooks, soapboilers, and hatmakers.
Incidentally, Shotbolt’s brother, Philip, was the Earl of Berkshire’s deputy for the patent in Hertfordshire, as mentioned in articles of agreement from May 1637: SP 16/385 f.185
These were Sir Richard Wynne, Sir Thomas Hatton, Sir Henry Spiller, and Laurence Whittaker Esq. All four had legal training and held various government offices, Whittaker being involved with Duppa’s malting and brewing scheme too. Wynne, who led the committee, started his career in the household of the earl of Berkshire’s father; Hatton would later be a trustee for the earl of Arundel’s son, suggesting a connection; and Spiller was definitely a client of the earl of Arundel. Although a quick search doesn’t yield much, the chances are, I think, that Whittaker had some Howard connection too.
Hartlib papers, 45/1/16A-17B. I’d missed it because it was in Latin, but I’ve learned some new tricks for searching things over the last few years. The letter, by Henry Appelius to Samuel Hartlib, discusses the idea of perpetual motion in a general sense before giving some examples: “Drebbel had [a device] which sang as long as it was illuminated by the sun, but when a cloud passed over, it would stop: namely, the sun would release quicksilver: whose distilling droplets, caught in capsules [or receptacles / compartments] connected around the circumference of a wheel, would turn the wheel, which added motion to that instrument. The ruins of this are still seen at his son-in-law’s: as well as his Perpetual Motion, which likewise (as the same son-in-law reported to us) was driven by droplets of quicksilver gradually falling down along an oblong iron rod, which perpetually moved a small bronze [or brass] ball sitting on it.”
Vera Keller, ‘Re-Entangling the Thermometer: Cornelis Drebbel’s Description of His Self-Regulating Oven, the Regiment of Fire, and the Early History of Temperature’, Nuncius 28, no. 2 (1 January 2013), p.243–75
In John Evelyn’s diary in 1666, he reported how they had formerly been used for the Prince of Orange’s army. L. E. Harris, ‘Cornelis Drebbel : A Neglected Genius of Seventeenth Century Technology: Presidential Address’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society 31, no. 1 (January 1957), pp. 195–204. Samuel Hartlib’s notes for 1639 mention its use in the Prince of Orange’s army too, thus narrowing down both the date and the prince in question. Johannes Kuffler in 1654 told Hartlib that when Charles I had wanted to send an army to suppress Scottish religious rebels in 1639, he had asked for portable ovens for the army, but that the king never saw the invention as he was away at the time. Hartlib papers, 39/2/20A-25B. This appears to be confirmed by a document in the state papers, SP 16/414 f.267, dated 15 March 1639, which both mentions portable copper ovens being used in the Netherlands and an offer of even lighter ones made of some other material - almost certainly a reference to Kuffler’s ovens.
Hartlib ephemerides for 1635, part IV; confirmed also by 29/5/83A-94B, Hartlib ephemerides for 1656, Part III, where Kuffler “intimated that he had an invention for drying of malt, and that another heretofore by another form only had appropriated the invention to himself”. NB also that this kind of political intervention was very plausible. We have evidence of one of the Howards, the earl of Berkshire, for example intervening in how Dr Edward May’s pendant furnaces would be treated by the government in 1637: SP 16/348 f.20
SP 16/372 f.69: a partnership to supply £200-worth of iron for the kilns in 1637 was the following year raised by another £100. The agreement involved one William Davenport, a barber of London, who it appears was the patentees’ deputy for Hertfordshire.
SP 17/E f.81 - this is an indenture dated 8 May 1640 between the earl of Berkshire and the widow of William Davenport, the partnership’s agent for Hertfordshire.
Thomas Brugis, The discovery of a proiector (Richard Hearne, 1641), pp.8-10. On p.16 Brugis notes that the brewer “finds malt very dear, and never worse, which he conceives to proceed from the new kilns, and his customers cry out on him for hopping too much; whereupon he is resolved to petition his Majesty that the new project of kilns may be suppressed, and likewise the [Duppa] patent of incorporating maltsters”. This suggests that perhaps the kiln failed because it was associated with the Duppa project, though it’s unclear.
Negotiations to return seem to have begun in 1654 - see Hartlib papers, 39/2/20A-25B, dated 13 November 1654. In 1656, however, Hartlib was still negotiating for Kuffler to impart the secret of “that way of regiment of fire (that one need not look often unto it and may go abroad, etc) which his father-in-law Cornelis Drebbel prized at £1,500” - a huge sum of money in those days - which suggests that it was still not widely known in England. See also the draft of the agreement, Hartlib papers 27/13/7A-B, which mentions the “invention to govern an oven in such manner that the oven cannot exceed nor want the very same degree of heat as is desired, governs itself of his own accord, without help of any man”
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Over the course of 1570-1600, people all along the eastern coast of England, and especially in the rapidly-expanding city of London, stopped using wood to heat their homes. They instead began to burn an especially crumbly, sulphurous coal from near Newcastle in Northumberland — a fuel whose thick, heavy smoke reeked, stinging their eyes, making them wheeze and cough, and tarnishing their clothes, furnishings, and skin.
As I set out last time, the usual story — that this was caused by deforestation, making firewood so scarce that people resorted to burning an inferior but cheaper fuel — simply does not stack up. England’s deforestation — along with the draining of its peat-filled fens and marshes, and the clearing of its gorse-growing heaths — was instead itself caused by the arrival of cheap coal. Coal freed up huge tracts of land that had been set aside to warm the hearths of people’s homes, allowing them to be used instead for crops or pasture — food to fill the bellies of man and beast, and make England extraordinarily abundant in muscle.
By the 1780s even the visiting son of a French duke was astonished at the large and varied diets of English people working in factories or down mines. He was just as impressed — like a visitor to late twentieth-century America seeing the sheer scale of car ownership — at the number of English horses, estimating that “in proportion to the inhabitants, I think the number of horses in England must be double that of France.” English gentry families each had at least three — two to pull a carriage, and another to ride. But what truly inspired awe was that even ordinary farmers could spare at least one for merely riding to town or market, rather than having to tether them all to the plough.
English horses were also all of an astonishing power and size — “in France we have no idea of their quality: all tall, well-made”.1London’s industries in the eighteenth century — fulling cloth, pumping up the water supply, pounding rags into paper, flattening metal into sheets, boring pipes and guns, grinding the pigments for dyes and paints, tobacco for snuff, charred bones for shoe polish, tannin-rich oak bark for leather, flint for glass and ceramics, and grain for flour, beer and spirits — were overwhelmingly powered by horse. Many more hauled the city’s goods and people too.2
But if deforestation and the resulting expansion of both tillage and pasture were not the causes of coal’s rise, and merely one of its dramatic consequences, what was its cause?
Home is where the Hearth is
The most influential alternative theory is that in the mid-sixteenth century the English invented better ways to burn coal in the home. To remove coal’s most noxious effects, the smoke could be drawn up and out of a room by burning it under a chimney. Chimneys were already becoming common long before coal-burning became widespread, especially in towns and cities with multiple-storey buildings. Out in the countryside, a typical single-storey home could burn firewood in an open central hearth, allowing the light smoke to rise up into the large space beneath its tall-set rafters, and to dissipate through unglazed window holes, or through an opening in the roof. Adding another storey, however, as in cities, tended to lower the ceiling of the ground floor considerably, leaving little space for the smoke to dissipate to, while the occupants of a second storey also needed to be able to breathe fresh air. So wood fires in multiple-storey buildings were increasingly lit under a hood or mantle, the smoke venting through a chimney outside. In the 1570s the chronicler William Harrison noted how one of the great changes of the previous decades was “the multitude of chimneys lately erected”.3
But hearths and chimneys suitable for wood fires were not, by themselves, suitable for coal. Wood-burning hearths were often built wide, with the chimneys merely providing a passage through which to vent outside. But coal fires needed the hearth to be compact, and the chimneys to actually lift a much thicker, heavier smoke, which would otherwise suffocate the room. As a result, burning coal needed a much narrower hearth, and for the chimneys to have a more powerful draught by being both tall and narrow. Unfortunately, a strong-draughted chimney also took a great deal of the heat out of the house along with it, and the draught sometimes even needed to be helped along by keeping a door or window open to the cold outside.4 So a cast iron plate, or chimney back, had to be placed behind the fire to try and reflect some of the heat back into the room.
Yet even with a suitable hearth and chimney, coal fires also required a means to keep the coals heaped together while allowing air in at all sides, and for the ash to fall away rather than building up until it smothered the fire. One suggestion in 1603 involved using a loose stack of bricks, with iron cannonballs placed amidst the coal.5But the ideal method was to use an iron fire-grate — a kind of iron basket raised off the ground — which allowed one of coal’s big advantages to shine through: once a coal fire got going, it needed far less time and attention than when burning wood. “I prefer coal to wood,” noted a foreign visitor in the eighteenth century, though only after they’d become accustomed to the soot and smell, “because one isn’t constantly having to mend it”.6 Provided you had the right kind of building and equipment, replacing wood with coal was an early tedium-saving invention for the home — the washing machine or dishwasher of its day.
An iron grate for burning coals, as illustrated in 1628. Note the cast-iron chimney back with a coat of arms behind it, to reflect the heat back into the room.
It’s certainly plausible, then, that England’s shift to coal was helped along by the widespread adoption of chimneys and grates. Here was potentially a new set of technologies to increase the demand for coal in people’s homes, like how the invention of the car increased the demand for oil. And as the economic historian Robert Allen argues, the rapid expansion of London in the late sixteenth century may have provided both the opportunity and the means. Londoners’ growing wealth allowed them to afford the new iron grates and chimney backs, while the quadrupling of the city’s population meant that builders could introduce coal-burning chimneys into the city’s growing number of homes, making coal a commonplace even before any of the older homes needed to be retrofitted. Having been adopted in London — “the laboratory that brought coal into the home” — Allen suggests that the grates and chimneys then spread elsewhere.7
I had long believed this narrative, and have even helped spread it. See, for example, this piece I wrote last year. I’d always intended to look deeper into it, however, as I’ve never been a fan of vague stories of adaptation, or of invention simply springing forth due to need. So I set out to find exactly when the changes occurred, and who was responsible. Someone or some group of people were the inventors and adopters, and I intended to find out who they were.
But in doing so, I kept discovering a steady drip of annoying facts that simply did not fit. And so I now have to conclude that this wasn’t at all how coal use first spread.
Some Inconvenient Truths
The first annoying fact is that the coal-burning house was significantly older than the mid-sixteenth century, and had been invented not in London, but in the places — unsurprisingly, really — hundreds of miles up the coast, where the coal was dug. By as early as the 1300s, for example, monks at Durham, at Jarrow on the Tyne, and on the isle of Lindisfarne, were already using chimneys and iron grates to burn the very same sulphurous Northumbrian coal.8
And there’s plenty of evidence that coal continued to be burned in the homes of people near to where it was mined. Foreign visitors to Britain always remarked on the burning of coal because it was so unusual, but they never mentioned London in this regard — not until much later. A visiting Venetian in 1551, for example, reported that it was in Scotland that “they burn stones … of which there is plenty”,9 while a Frenchman in 1553 remarking that the Scots “do not warm themselves with wood, but with coals.”10A 1556 description of England drawn up for queen Mary I’s new husband, king Philip II of Spain, the north was likewise described as a place where “they burn a certain hard, black stone mined from the earth, which gives a great deal of heat, and which they call ‘sea-coal’”.11We can also just look at a drawing of Newcastle in 1545 to see that every single home had a chimney, almost certainly for burning coal:
Newcastle as drawn in 1545. Almost every single house already has a chimney.
By the 1570s, too, when there’s still no mention of coal being burned in the homes of Londoners, it had apparently already become one of the main fuels of Dublin and the Isle of Man, likely supplied from the coal mines of Cumbria, as well as near the coal mines of inland England and southern Wales.12 And much the same could be said of coal mines abroad, such as in modern-day Belgium. A Greek visitor to Liège in 1545 remarked on how “in this city and all the neighbouring country they are accustomed to burn a certain black substance, stony and shining”, visiting the coal mines and describing them at length. But he doesn’t mention any coal being burned in London, which he visited next.13
The very first hint of coal’s rise, cited without fail by all historians who discuss it, comes from a work published in 1577 by the chronicler William Harrison. In the process of lamenting deforestation, he mentions a long list of fuels, including peat, gall, reeds, rushes, straw, gorse, furze, heather, bracken, and even tufts of grass, as well as coal, which were “to be feared … will be good merchandise even in the city of London”. But if we read this carefully, he only says that they might eventually be resorted to in the city if the trend continued, not that they had already become common. And while he does then say that some of these fuels had already arrived in London and “gotten ready passage and taken up their inns in the greatest merchants’ parlours”, he never tells us which. Coal may or may not be one of the few. Given his mention of new fuels making their way into the living rooms of the rich, who decades later were still the remaining holdouts against burning coal, I’d say it’s much more likely that he’s actually referring to twiggy plants like gorse or heather having started to replace the more smokeless, luxury domestic fuels like charcoal.14
Indeed, Harrison is much more explicit in noting that coal was already one of the main fuels being burnt, not in London, but in Cambridge,15 having been shipped from Newcastle to King’s Lynn, and then up the River Cam. So what he actually tells us is that the burning of coal in people’s homes was in the 1570s only beginning to creep down the coast from Newcastle, where it had already been in use for over two centuries, reaching the hearths of Cambridge, about 300km away by water, before it reached London, which was 550km away — almost as far again. Rather than being pulled by a growing London’s demands, coal was instead pushing its own way out of Newcastle, finding new markets by itself. Much like the visitors’ reports of the 1550s, detailed descriptions of London by a visiting Frenchman in 1578 and by a German in 1584 still made no mention of coal being burnt in people’s homes at all.16
Far from being the laboratory that brought coal into the home, then, London was actually a laggard — all the more so given it had been buying coal from Newcastle for centuries. The city had long imported some coal to make lime, used in the mortar of its grander buildings made of brick or stone. And coal fuelled the forges of its blacksmiths, “to soften their iron”.17 As the Venetian ambassador in London put it in 1554, coal was “extensively used, especially by blacksmiths, and but for a certain bad odour which it leaves it would be yet more employed”.18 By the 1560s the city’s blacksmiths were regularly consuming about 10-15,000 tons of Newcastle coal per year.19
Coal for the forge, however, did not automatically lead to coal being used in the home. Otherwise our story would be focused on the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands) or northern France. Writing to government ministers in 1552, an English merchant proposed that the export of coal to France be controlled. Newcastle coal was, he said, “that thing that France can live no more without, than the fish without water”, because without it “they can neither make steelwork, nor metalwork, nor wirework, nor goldsmith work, nor guns, nor no manner of thing that passe the fire”. As soon as the fishing season was done, he said, dozens of French ships from Normandy and Brittany descended upon Newcastle to buy up coals for their smiths back home. Having traded on and off with France for almost forty years, he had even profited from its demand for coal himself.20When in the 1570s Harrison recounted how coal’s “greatest trade begins now to grow from the forge into the kitchen and hall … in most cities and towns that lie about the coast” — the passage that historians always love to quote — this was only after noting how they were “carried into other countries of the main”.21Coal’s creep into the homes of England’s coastal dwellers may have been remarkable, but it was still mainly a commodity exported to smiths abroad.
So if the coal-burning home had already been in continuous use elsewhere for at least two centuries, in which time London had imported coal for its smiths, why then by around 1600 had it so dramatically made the switch?
Allen argued that London’s growth in the sixteenth century had put pressure on the city’s supply of firewood, making it so expensive that coal looked sufficiently cheap to prompt the switch. But as I noted last time, demand for fuel in the early 1300s was even more intense than on the eve of coal’s rise. London’s population in the mid-sixteenth century was only about 50,000, compared to a much larger 70-80,000 in the 1300s. And even when London’s population began to exceed this in the late sixteenth century, the medieval city had had to draw firewood from much farther away, cropping nearby woodlands much more intensively for fuel.
A potential answer to this is that the London of the mid-sixteenth century was much wealthier than that of the 1300s, even if it wasn’t much larger, and so might have better afforded to make the switch. Supposing it was wealthier — and we don’t really know if it was or not — the switch to coal was certainly expensive. It required hundreds of thousands of households, most of them of only modest means, to invest in buying a grate made of expensive wrought iron, in a chimney back made of cast iron, and to make extensive alterations to their homes using stone or brick. Even houses that already had a chimney — London was regularly drawn with plenty of chimneys before it made the switch to coal, because it had so many multi-storey buildings — would have needed to narrow their hearth, and either narrow or heighten their chimney flue too. Like installing gas boilers and central heating in the 1970s and 80s, or a heat pump today, the switch to coal did not come cheap, and so a wealthier London may well have been better able to make the change.
But, if anything, a wealthier London would have made the switch to coal less likely, not more. Unlike the shift to central heating, which for the first time made bedrooms and bathrooms warm enough to bear without being covered in layers of clothes, the switch to coal involved both considerable up-front cost and a loss of comfort rather than a gain. (The convenience of not needing to spend quite so much time tending a coal fire than a wood one would only really be appreciated later, once the coal-burning home had become widely adopted and it was too late to go back.) A wealthier London could have simply drawn its firewood from slightly further away, as it did in the 1300s. And as we saw last time the sustainable production of firewood could readily expand to meet demand. A wealthier London would have had the means to avoid making the switch to an inferior fuel. Coal was at first the fuel of servants and the poor, only more gradually making its way into the hearths of the rich.22
So if coal’s conquest was not launched from Londoners’ homes, and cannot be explained by a shortage of wood or by the growth of the city’s population or wealth, where then did it start? What I’ve unexpectedly discovered, when carefully sifting the precise sequence of events, and by reading many of the archival sources for myself — one of the main reasons for the long delay in writing this piece is that I first had to teach myself to read sixteenth-century secretary hand, in which most of them are written — is that coal’s conquest was actually launched instead from Germany.
The Wood-Saving Art
Unlike in England, in Germany supplies of wood fuel really did feel the strains of increasing demand. Lacking England’s long coastline, many centres of population and industry in the German interior could not so easily import more wood from further afield. In 1617, for example, when the salt springs of Reichenhall wanted to expand production, the brine needed to be piped for 30 kilometres, and pumped over a mountain, in seven stages, to a height of 300m, just to get to a forest where there was enough wood fuel to evaporate it into salt. It was in inland Germany that the pressures to save fuel, and to invent new ways of doing so, were at their most intense.23
At Strasbourg in the early 1550s the carpenter Friedrich Frommer and the Swiss Protestant preacher Konrad Zwick, a religious refugee, both invented a process to significantly save on wood fuel. Quickly joining forces, they began to stage demonstrations of their process in dozens of cities, raising capital from investors and publishing a catalogue for their customers, which helpfully gives us lots of detail about the invention. Calling it the holzersparungs kunst — the wood-saving process, or art — it came in various forms. It could be used for various industrial processes, like making soaps or dyes or brewing beer, while in the home it could be used in the kitchen or for heating rooms, for which they suggested installing one of their stobenofen, or stove-ovens, which could be lavishly decorated with ceramic tiles. What the holzersparungs kunst always involved, however, was to separate the flame and smoke from whatever was being heated, warming things indirectly via the pipes of the flue, and recycling some of the heat that would otherwise have been lost in merely venting smoke — a method that saved about a third of the fuel.24
The Frommer-Zwick furnaces for various industrial processes, from their 1560s catalogue
The demonstrations were wildly successful, and Frommer, Zwick, and their partners were soon sending agents throughout Europe to get their invention protected by patent, eventually getting monopolies covering Strasbourg, various Swiss cities, the Duchy of Saxony, and even the entire Holy Roman Empire. And probably even further afield. When Zwick died in 1557 — his share was inherited by his young son, but administered by a Protestant pastor named Jakob Funcklin — the wood-saving process was said to have received patents “from emperors, kings, princes, and republics”, and to have already spread as far as “Rome and Constantinople”.
This may not have been mere exaggeration, as we do not yet know the full scale of their operations. The consortium did not always patent under their own names — patents were often only granted to a country’s residents, or at least to someone who was physically present to petition its ruler — and unless we have surviving correspondence with their agents, we cannot always tell for sure if very similar-sounding inventions were actually theirs. For example it’s only thanks to a few scattered references in the well-known letters of a much more famous go-between, the Swiss Protestant theologian Heinrich Bullinger, that we know they sent an agent to Poland, who managed to secure a patent to cover the distant Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The reference to Rome suggests that they may have secured patents in Italy, too, and I’ve seen some historians suggest that they obtained patents in France, though I haven’t been able to chase the source and confirm this for myself.
Given this range, it’s highly likely that they attempted to patent their invention in the Habsburg-ruled Low Countries, too. A wood-saving method patented in the early 1560s by Jan de Jonghe, known as Doctor Junius of Antwerp (more on him later), sounds quite similar to the Frommer-Zwick invention. As does another, patented in 1568 by a Willem Aemissen, citizen of Leeuwarden, which saved fuel by a suspiciously similar proportion of a third. (I hope that this will prompt someone in Belgium or the Netherlands to look into the potential connections.)25
But most importantly of all, the invention seems, with great difficulty, to have eventually made its way to England.
The German Connection
The first hint comes from a patent in 1557 — one of the first ever granted for an industrial invention in England, but which I don’t think has ever been noticed as such before26 — to a John Herdegen, citizen of Nuremberg, for a “new fashion of making all sorts of furnaces” for the use of brewers, dyers, soap-makers, and salt-boilers, “with much less firewood than is presently expended.”27
Herdegen was well-known to the English government. Back in the early 1540s, appearing in various records as Hans Hardigan, Herdygen, or Herdyger — Hans being short for Johannes, the German form of John — he had been recruited from Nuremberg, the European capital of metalworking, as an expert prospector for ores. In February 1545 he had been appointed Henry VIII’s “master of the assays of our mines” at a substantial salary of £40 per year, and a few months later was sent over to Ireland to lead the search for precious metals, reporting back a year later that he had struck silver. That silver, at Barrystown near Clonmines, in county Wexford, was exploited a few years later — again using experts from Germany — and turned out to not be worth the cost. But Herdegen’s role seems to have been over, and by then he had presumably returned home.28
I have not yet been able to track down the movements of Johannes Herdegen over the decade that followed his trip to Ireland, but by 1557 the Frommer-Zwick holzersparungs kunst was already rapidly spreading throughout southern Germany, and it received its Empire-wide patent in the early part of that year. Whether the consortium had yet sent the invention to Herdegen’s native Nuremberg, we don’t yet know, but his connections would have made him an obvious choice to be their agent to England. And so towards the end of the year, presumably after a lot of travel and negotiations, he managed to secure a monopoly on the wood-saving process in England for the next five years.
Unfortunately, we may never know whether Herdegen actually managed to introduce the invention. After the patent itself, he suddenly disappears from the record again. He may never have come to England to put it into effect. And if he did, he may not have had much chance. He may even quite simply have died, as over the next couple of years a deadly strain of influenza — England’s deadliest pandemic since the Black Death — quite literally decimated the population, killing off so many of the parish priests who kept the burial registers, and even sometimes their intended replacements, that the records often suddenly went silent.29
But just two years later, the holzersparungs kunst pops up again in a petition to Elizabeth I by a Protestant from Trento in northern Italy, Jacopo Aconcio, who had fled religious persecution first to Swizerland and then Strasbourg — exactly the same places and social circles as his co-religionists Zwick and Funcklin — before being hired by the English government in 1559 as an expert on fortifications. Within months of his arrival, Aconcio was asking the queen for a monopoly over some designs for a windmill able to automatically turn into the wind, for a mill moved by non-flowing water — perhaps an early atmospheric steam engine — as well as for “a new design for building furnaces for dyers and those who make beer, and for other uses, with a great saving of fuel.”30 Travelling from the very birthplace of the Zwick’s Frommer’s wood-saving art, and having rubbed shoulders with the members of the consortium there, it would have to be an extraordinary coincidence if Aconcio was not acting on their behalf.
But the invention failed to take root yet again, as his petition was ignored. Aconcio had plenty of work cut out for himself already. The English paid him a generous salary of £60 a year for his services in modernising their fortifications, and it sounds like his water-raising machinery, which may actually have been his invention — a strikingly similar “Jacomo of Trento” had been named in a Venetian patent for such a device in 1545 — was applied to draining English marshlands.31 He wouldn’t have had much time left over to devote to further lobbying on the consortium’s behalf.
But despite Aconcio’s distractions, the holzersparungs kunst was too good an idea to wait a long time. In the summer of 1562, an English diplomat at Antwerp in the Low Countries, George Gilpin, wrote to the queen’s secretary of state, William Cecil, to update him on the petition by a consortium led by “Peter Stowghbergen”, sometimes spelled Stowghberghen, Stoughberken or Stochberghen — I haven’t yet been able to work out the true spelling — who were asking for a ten-year patent “for making of ovens or furnaces for brewers, dyers, and others, saving at least a third part of the fuel” — the exact same saving, yet again, as the Frommer-Zwick holzersparungs kunst.32
We have only the barest of hints about Stowghberghen’s background, which is that Gilpin mentioned he had been in Liège in the summer of 1562, “for the visitation of certain mines there” — presumably its coal mines. But Stowghberghen’s full offer, sent in October 1562, was rather charming. He promised to install a couple of his furnaces in English breweries at his own cost, to serve as a trial, and if successful would then charge an installation fee of £1 for every additional furnace, along with “meat and drink during the time the furnace is a-making, which shall not be above three or four days at the most”. Otherwise, the only payment he would ask would be a year’s worth of the cost of fuel that his invention saved, along with a rather boozy rent: “during six years, three barrels of the best beer a year.” As an afterthought, he decided that dyers and others who might need his furnace could give him “some like gratuity”. He also included various testimonials — from brewers and dyers in Antwerp, Ghent, Mechelen, Machelen near Brussels, and even the brewery of the Franciscan Friars at Leuven — showing just how widely the German wood-saving art had already been adopted.33
Perhaps because of Johannes Herdegen’s false start, Gilpin advised Cecil to include a condition in the patent that it would only be valid if Stowghberghen would come to England within a certain period of time. Despite at first suggesting a year, however, by the time the patent was actually issued in February 1563, to both Gilpin and Stowghberghen, the deadline was set at just two months.
But although Gilpin did send a technician to England “to make the proof”, presumably meeting the deadline, almost two years later in October 1564 he was writing to Cecil again to explain why he had still not made a “full trial”. The main thing to blame, he said, was “the great plague which reigned in England” in the latter half of 1563, which had killed about a quarter of all Londoners.34 This could well have made any foreign technicians reluctant to make the trip to London, and Stowghberghen especially so — when Gilpin first wrote about him, it was to report that he had only just recovered from being “dangerously sick”.
But the main purpose of Gilpin’s letter was to reassure Cecil that the project was still going ahead. Stowghberghen had, he noted, sold his share in the English patent, with the new investor promising “both offer and put in good sureties for the perfection of the work”. This was Godert von Bocholt, the lord of Wachtendonk, Pesch, and Grevenbroich, a diplomat and cavalry officer, who was the trusty and experienced lieutenant to William the Silent, the Prince of Orange, the Habsburg emperor’s commander in the Netherlands. Originally from the duchy of Gelderland, von Bocholt had once served England as a mercenary, having captained over 500 lancers and mounted arquebusiers in the 1540s for Henry VIII (for which he was still owed a lot of money, and which he was never to get back).35 With von Bocholt presumably providing the necessary funds, Gilpin was now preparing to send the same technician again as before, along with, most importantly, “another who pretends to be of more knowledge and cunning in those devices than the first”.
This new workman was, I suspect, someone peddling a competing holzersparungs kunst. Long before Zwick or Frommer had arrived on the scene, another consortium led by a Conrad von Gittelt had been promoting a wood-saving invention specifically for brewing — and which also claimed to save about a third of the fuel. Von Gittelt, apparently acting on behalf of an inventor named Sebastian Bräutigam, had managed to get a monopoly covering the kingdom of Bohemia in 1550, the whole Holy Roman Empire in 1551, and the electorate of Saxony in 1552.36
What precisely the Bräutigam invention involved, or how it differed from the Zwick-Frommer invention, I’m not yet sure. Frustratingly, I’ve not yet been able to confirm even the basic details about the names and dates, let alone to track down more. There’s even another fuel-saving invention I’ve seen mentioned from around the same time, associated with the name Götze, but the details seem to line up so exactly with the von Gittelt patents that I suspect they’re actually one and the same. But because anything written in German is so extraordinarily difficult to access — this has easily been my most expensive and time-consuming post to research by far — I can only hope that someone in Germany will read this and decide to devote some of their time to helping me flesh out the story. (Please do get in touch if this might be you!)
Although I’m reasonably certain that Aconcio’s petition was on behalf of the Frommer-Zwick consortium, given the strong Strasbourg Protestant connection, it’s possible of course that Herdegen’s earlier 1557 patent was actually on behalf of the Bräutigam consortium. Or even that he wasn’t acting as an official agent at all, and simply attempted to pirate the invention in England for his own gain. But in the case of Gilpin we at least have some stronger evidence. When the invention finally arrived on 20th April 1565, the mayor of London and a couple of other city worthies sent the government the testimonies of two brewers who had tried the furnaces, which were installed by a German they called “Sebastian Brydigonne” — seemingly none other than Bräutigam himself.37
It was natural that the process should have been tried by brewers, because theirs was a large and profitable industry, their product second in importance only to the bread, and requiring stupendous amounts of fuel. The brewer’s very first task was to boil lots of water, skimming away any impurities, and then leaving it to cool in a vat until the point that the steam had dissipated enough to see their face in it again — what we now know to be approximately 65°C, or 149°F. Then the brewer added malt — grains that had been soaked, allowed to germinate, and then dried and milled — stirring it with the water into a mash, and then tried to keep it at that warmth for the next few hours. After that the brewer allowed the liquid — or wort — to cooled, straining it, and in the case of making ale then leaving it with some yeast to ferment. To the brewer of ale, Bräutigam’s invention would already have offered a major saving by reducing the amount of fuel needed by a third. But the invention was especially valuable for the brewer of beer, as the wort, after straining, then needed to be brought to a rolling boil for at least an hour or two, at which point they also added the hops. Only then could they leave it to ferment. London’s beer-brewers testified that Bräutigam had not only saved them a third of their wood fuel, but had taken two hours off the whole process, presumably in the time it took to bring the liquids to a boil.
The demonstration was thus a resounding success, and brewers had both the means and the need to adopt it. But what precisely happened next is still, unfortunately, impossible to disentangle. There are too many loose ends.
To complicate matters immediately, neither Gilpin nor von Bocholt were actually named in the testimonial, though I’m certain that they were behind the demonstration. Von Bocholt wrote to Cecil in mid-February 1565 to say that he was going to put the patent with Gilpin into execution,38and there’s a memorandum by Gilpin dated to the same month of the demonstration that says he’s about to make a full trial imminently.39 Given Gilpin’s diplomatic duties tied him almost permanently to the Low Countries, and von Bocholt was based there too, they would have needed to rely on agents in England to manage the patent on their behalves. And so the testimonial from the mayor mentioned these agents instead, saying that he had been “credibly informed” of the invention by a Richard Pratt and a Cornelius de Vos — both names that raise an extraordinary number of loose ends.
De Vos was a Protestant from the Low Countries, but resident in London, whose business involved cutting and engraving gems, as well as being “a most cunning picture maker”, probably a portrait painter.40 De Vos had recently acquired a monopoly patent to mine alum and copperas, had recently bought a German mining expert’s patent for a technique to pump water out of mines, and was a shareholder in the nascent Company of Mines Royal, which used German expertise to find copper in Cumbria. A year later he was to be off to Scotland, where he installed salt-boiling pans at Newhaven on behalf of English investors, and where he searched for gold on Crawford Moor.
I haven’t yet been able to tie him directly to von Bocholt, but I did accidentally stumble across a curious other piece of evidence, which hints further at a link. In the late 1560s, von Bocholt’s friend and captain William of Orange spearheaded a largely Protestant uprising in the Low Countries against the Habsburg Spanish emperor Philip II — the revolt that was to eventually lead to the independence of the northern provinces, now known as the Netherlands. When England sided with the rebellious Dutch in 1569, Philip II ordered the arrest of English merchants in the Low Countries, and so Elizabeth I retaliated by arresting many Dutch merchants in England — a group that included Cornelius de Vos. But a few months later, when the rebels sent representatives to London, one of the delegates wrote to Cecil to explain that de Vos was in fact a loyal supporter of the Prince of Orange, much like von Bocholt. And the delegate who pleaded for him was none other than Jan de Jonghe, or Doctor Junius of Antwerp, the early 1560s patentee in the Low Countries of the holzersparungs kunst!41 If I were to hazard a guess, von Bocholt and de Jonghe were probably partners in the monopoly of the process in the Low Countries, in addition to the share of Gilpin’s patent that von Bocholt acquired to cover England.
Where things start to get really messy, however, is with the other named agent, Richard Pratt. I’ve been able to find next to nothing about him except that his name also pops up, simply as a merchant taylor of London, in a draft patent among Cecil’s papers for a 21-year monopoly on the “instruction, art and knowledge of some expert men (having skill)” to reduce the consumption of fuel in furnaces — the holzersparungs kunst again — but this time with his partner not being de Vos, but one Steven van Herwijck of Utrecht.42 Van Herwijck, just like de Vos, was a Protestant gem engraver and portrait artist. He’s best known as a portrait medallist, and probably a painter too.43 I think it’s likely that they were partners. In fact, de Vos’s career even hints at the existence of a broader circle of collaborating artists, as his partners in the search for gold in Scotland were the portrait painter Arnold van Bronckhorst and none other than the goldsmith Nicholas Hilliard, the most talented and famous English portrait miniaturist of the Elizabethan age.
But just as the plot starts to thicken, the available evidence throws an unexpected spanner into the pot. This is a petition in Cecil’s papers by a “Peter Jordayne” and associates to introduce various inventions into England. Along with a kind of rotisserie oven, a pump for mines, and improvements to baking ovens and brick kilns, the list is headed by furnaces for brewers and dyers to save — you guessed it — at least a third of the fuel.44 And the patent itself was to be in the name of yet another person, George Cobham, or Brooke. The younger brother of William Brooke, Baron Cobham, and the queen’s own second cousin, George Cobham was, like Gilpin, employed as some kind of diplomat or agent abroad. He’s named on just one other patent — for a the river-dredging machine invented by a Venetian merchant based in Antwerp — but other than that he left frustratingly little trace, and I’ve not been able to find any further details about Peter Jordayne at all.
The big problem with fitting the Jordayne-Cobham petition into any kind of narrative is that there’s no clue as to when it was written. Despite the petition being filed amongst various documents for 1575, Cobham was most certainly dead by 1571 because his widow remarried.
Although we have a similar problem with the Pratt-Herwijck draft patent being undated, we can at least narrow that one down. Van Herwijck seems to have come to England before, but at the end of March 1565 — just a month after von Bocholt wrote to Cecil, and just a month before the ovens were to be demonstrated in London — he was petitioning the city leaders of Antwerp to be excused certain municipal taxes so that he could leave town with his family for three years “because he had agreed to make certain works for the queen of England, which works he has already begun”.45 The request was rejected because he then refused to reveal any specifics or certification — a kind of paranoia typical of people dealing in inventions — but I suspect it’s a reference to the holzersparungs kunst, especially as his draft English patent wasn’t just for a monopoly on the technique itself, but would also have made van Herwijck a full English denizen, “in all things to be handled, reputed, holden, had and governed as our faithful liege subject born within this our realm of England.”
Unfortunately for van Herwijck, he wouldn’t have had much time to enjoy his new rights. Just over a year later, in August 1566, he had apparently become sick enough to make his will, and by March 1567 he was dead.46
Given this evidence, the Pratt-van Herwijck draft patent very probably dates to 1565, right after the successful demonstration by Bräutigam. But to thicken the plot yet again, to the point of becoming almost entirely indigestible, in that same year — just five months after the demonstration — the patent petition of Jacopo Aconcio from seven years earlier was suddenly granted too!
So what on earth was going on? What we’ve seen are the hints I’ve so far been able to track down, at least from the English sources. But until any more evidence turns up, most likely from archives abroad, I think we can at least piece together a likely chain of events.
One Patent to Rule them All
The key thing to note is that patents were not quite the same as today. Today, dozens or even hundreds of tiny tweaks to ovens will be patented every year, each of them outlined clearly and examined by specialised officials to see that they’re original and don’t overlap. The patented invention has to be specified with detailed descriptions and drawings, and the monopoly is over copying it exactly, with the courts ultimately deciding how much leeway to give. But in 1560s England, patent monopolies were much more broadly construed. Instead of letting hundreds of minor inventions compete in the market on their merits, potential competitors were instead forced to combine their efforts, so that there was typically only one patent per industry at any one time.
Patents were intended as the key tool to actually introduce a whole new industry or technique — as a tool of what we’d now call industrial policy — and so they restricted competition as far as was practicable to make an otherwise extremely risky venture attractive to investors. After all, introducing a new industry or process meant having to find sufficiently skilled foreign technicians, persuading them to move to England, transporting, feeding, and lodging them when they arrived, and persuading them to stick around and actually put their skills to good use — all before the costs of securing materials, premises, and erecting unfamiliar machinery. But granting such a strong monopoly usually came with conditions, such as having to introduce the new technique within a certain amount of time, meeting certain production quotas, selling at particular prices, teaching the technique to native English workers, or paying a high annual rent to the Crown (the theory being that this would replace the revenues lost by a new industry replacing imports, on which customs duties were charged).
When we see multiple patents granted for the same industry over just a handful of years, this typically meant that the original patentees had failed to keep to the terms of their patent, had gone bust, or had even simply died, requiring a new one to be reissued to new entrepreneurs. It’s what we see with many of the better-documented patents — for making salt, glass, sulphur, copper, and mine-draining — where what would otherwise appear to be a spate of new inventions is actually, as we know from their petitions and letters, just the exact same monopoly having to be re-issued to a new group of investors or entrepreneurs.
So with that in mind, what I suspect happened with the English patent for the holzersparungs kunst was the following:
Shortly after the successful demonstration of the furnace by Bräutigam in April 1565, Gilpin and his new partner, the mercenary commander von Bocholt, decided it would be a good idea to get a new patent in the names of their agents, who would then take over the whole project and most likely pay them some kind of dividends for their trouble. There were several good reasons for this. Peter Stowghberghen, who had sold his share to von Bocholt, was still named on the old patent, and Gilpin’s career was preventing him from actually going to England to oversee its execution. Most importantly of all, however, given the competing versions of the holzersparungs kunst in the rest of Europe, the original patent had neglected to stipulate what the punishment would be for infringement.
In a telling letter by Gilpin to Cecil in 1564, when excusing his delays, he worried how “we have no refuge but to your Honour, whose assistance, if need require, we must humbly desire, as well against such as should attempt to counterfeit our work during the time of our placard [patent] as other hinderers of the same, for which sort of men no penalty is ordained by special words in the privilege”.47 So I think they must have tried to get their patent renewed and strengthened in the names of their agents, Richard Pratt, Cornelius de Vos, and most likely Steven van Herwijck too, who as we’ve seen was already preparing his departure to England just a month before Bräutigam’s demonstration. The reason van Herwijck isn’t mentioned in the mayor’s testimonial is most likely because he wasn’t an established enough figure in London to be a credible informer, whereas de Vos had been in the city for years, and was already naturalised, even marrying an English woman — he’s described in his 1564 alum patent as the queen’s “liege-made subject”.48
But as de Vos was busy with so many other projects, and was soon off to Scotland in any case to search for gold, I suspect that his role as von Bocholt’s agent was only ever intended to be temporary, until his fellow gem engraver and portraitist Steven van Herwijck had arrived. Once that occurred, van Herwijck and Pratt then applied for the new and stronger patent, which this time did not fail to include harsh punishments for infringers: a whole year of imprisonment without bail, along with the forfeiture of an eye-watering £100 for every offence.
In the process of applying for this new patent, however, I suspect that Aconcio got wind of this and raised a fuss, pointing out to Cecil that he had applied for a monopoly on the fuel-saving furnace long before even Gilpin, and perhaps also that the Frommer-Zwick invention he had tried to patent was slightly different to the one being peddled by Bräutigam. One interesting feature of Aconcio’s patent is that it explicitly mentions how “the licence shall not derogate from any grant heretofore made to any person” —something you only ever see in the tiny handful of cases where more than one patent was granted per industry, and which I suspect was a direct reference to the Gilpin-Stowghberghen patent. But the experiment in allowing competing patents was to be very short-lived, as just a year later Aconcio was dead.
It doesn’t seem as though the Pratt and van Herwijck draft patent was actually granted. It’s not copied into the patent rolls, which is where you’d expect to find it if it had been, and after his death his family were recorded as not being denizens. But then Aconcio very probably delayed it when getting his own patent, and had died the following year just as van Herwijck himself became fatally ill. Perhaps by the time the delays were dealt with, it was already too late. Or perhaps Cecil thought that Gilpin’s original patent with Peter Stowghberghen was sufficient to protect the partnership, and that with enough political protection from himself, a new one would not need to be issued after all. Or perhaps, as was very common at the time, the partners recognised that Aconcio’s patent was most likely to be granted based on priority, dropped their own attempt to lobby for a patent of their own, and then bought a licence from Aconcio only for him to immediately die. Whatever truly happened, it would have involved considerable expense, and may well have curtailed the effort to spread the invention.
As for George Cobham’s undated petition to patent the invention on behalf of a Peter Jordayne, however, we can only guess. It’s possible that Gilpin’s long delays in putting his patent into practice opened an opportunity for rivals to step into the breach, and to attempt to acquire the monopoly for themselves. Perhaps Jordayne’s company were the counterfeiters and hinderers that Gilpin referred to when he anxiously wrote to Cecil to ask for his support, and that’s why the petition went nowhere. Perhaps Jordayne’s company were the official agents of some other, slightly later German consortium with a holzersparungs kunst of their own, or perhaps they weren’t officially acting on anyone’s behalf at all, and were simply trying to pirate the invention in England for themselves. Or perhaps they petitioned later, once Aconcio and van Herwijck had died, and with the invention’s adoption having therefore stalled, only to find that Gilpin’s patent was still in force to block them. Ultimately, until further evidence turns up from abroad, we may never know for sure. But what is clear is that between Herdegen, Aconcio, Gilpin, Stowghberghen, von Bocholt, Bräutigam, de Vos, Pratt, van Herwijck, Cobham, and Jordayne, there was a huge amount of effort in trying to bring the invention to England, which in terms of saving wood fuel had an obvious value to the country’s major industries like brewing.
Which brings us, finally, to the invention’s ultimate success.
A Royal Brew-haha
While all this jostling for the English monopoly was going on, back in Strasbourg the art of wood-saving was developing further. Although the Frommer-Zwick invention saved at least a third of the fuel, it took some effort and skill to get it to work well. With only a small chamber in which to burn the wood, it required frequent refuelling along with plenty of additional chopping and splitting of the wood into smaller pieces, careful placement of the chopped wood on the grate in the furnace chamber, and lots of fiddling about with allowing in more air for the fire and releasing the smoke — inconveniences, ultimately, that brought the invention into disrepute in Germany, as when forced to choose between saving costly wood or even costlier labour, saving on labour won out.49
In 1563, however, a Strasbourg gunsmith, one Michael Kogmann, sometimes spelled Khagman or Cogman,50 had invented a way to eliminate these inconveniences while still saving a third of the fuel, and once the Zwick-Frommer monopoly drew to an end, in 1571 he persuaded the city authorities to back him and his partners — his brother Heinrich, a soapmaker and tavernkeeper, and his fellow gunsmith Jeremias Neuner — for a patent monopoly of their own. Neuner and the Kogmanns got a patent for the whole Holy Roman Empire in 1572, demonstrating their improvements to acclaim in Vienna, Cologne, Leipzig, Mainz, Kassel, Mansfeld, Eisleben, Wetzlar, at the Hallstadt salt pans, and in Moravia, in modern-day Czechia. Many localised patent monopolies followed, and in 1575 the Imperial patent was renewed and extended to cover further potential applications.
But most importantly, in 1574 the invention made its way to England. Finding a merchant in Strasbourg who had dealings in England — someone to make the necessary introductions — Neuner himself made the trip. He and the merchant, one Georg Zolcher, soon got a patent monopoly. Gilpin’s ten-year term, if still in force, would have expired just the previous year. But the new patent gave them a monopoly for only five years — an unusually short term, which perhaps reflected Cecil seeing it as only a minor improvement, rather than a major new technological feat.
Either way, neither Cecil nor the inventors realised the value of what they had achieved. When Neuner and Zolcher applied for their patent in England they mentioned industrial applications like brewing and dyeing, seemingly only to cover all their bases, and instead focused on on how they would save fuel “chiefly in the great halls of noblemen”, as well as in hearths used for cooking, all “without any exceptional trouble in changing flues”. And their focus was entirely on saving fuel in the form of wood.
But the evidence we have of its actual application — one of those most precious of things in the history of sixteenth-century invention — gives the first hint at the invention’s extraordinary effects. It consists of a brief minute in the records of the Privy Council, the central organ of England’s government, from four years after the patent, in which the mayor of London was ordered to “call before him such brewers and others of that City as put in practice the device of the two strangers [that is, foreigners] for the sparing of wood” — an unequivocal reference to Neuner and Zolcher’s patent, which shows that the wood-saving art had once again proving most popular among London’s brewers.51
That alone is something, and in the printed calendars of the Privy Council records, that’s pretty much where it ends. But in one of those immensely satisfying cases where all my over-the-top double-checking immediately paid off, it turns out that in the manuscript itself there’s a line crossed out. And having spent the last few months teaching myself to read scrawly sixteenth-century “secretary hand” so that I can read all the original manuscripts for just such an occasion, I’m fairly sure that the crossed out line is an order to the mayor of London “to inhibit them the use thereof” — that is, to stop the use of the Kogmann-Neuner invention in its tracks.
If you’d like to practise your sixteenth-century secretary hand, here’s the all-important line: “A letter to the L Maior of the citie of London, willinge him to call before him such brewers & others of that citie as put in practise the devise of the two strangers for the sparinge of wood & to inhibite them the use thereof &c accordinge to the m[inute] remayninge in the counsell chest.”
Why did the authorities try to stop its use? Or, if the line was crossed it out because they decided to give the brewers a chance to respond, why would it have been cause for complaint?
The answer was that by adopting the holzersparungs kunst, the brewers had discovered a way to save far more than a third of the cost of their fuel. They had discovered that instead of burning wood, they could now use much stinkier, but much cheaper coal. The original inventions of Frommer, Zwick and their rivals had introduced the principle of heating things up via the flue, achieving their fuel saving by separating the smoke of the fire from whatever was being heated — something that would immediately have allowed coal to be burned in brewing instead of wood, by no longer risking the thick, heavy coal soot tarnishing the brew. And I suspect that after Bräutigam’s successful demonstration in 1565 it did occur to brewers to try. Indeed, many of the supposed problems with their invention as used in the rest of Europe, largely to do with not having enough space in the furnace chamber for the wood, would have been mitigated by using coal because it’s so much denser a fuel by volume — it would have taken up roughly half the space in the furnace chamber.
Whether this was realised in the late 1560s, prior to Neuner’s patent, is so far impossible to say. I’ve not yet seen any solid evidence of it beyond some of the patents covering “other fuels”, which I think was just as a precaution. The closest thing to it is an estimate of brewing costs — in which the fuel is unequivocally described as being “coals” rather than wood — labelled as being from “about October 1574”, or just a couple of months after Neuner’s patent, though such labels are often unreliable, so should be taken with a pinch of salt.52
What we know for sure, however, is that after Neuner introduced Michael Kogmann’s improvements, the use of coal by brewers had soon become universal in London, and become major source of complaint. Less than a year after the Privy Council’s letter to admonish brewers using the invention, in January 1579 the offensive stench of coal smoke had apparently become so common that it was too much for the queen to bear, the Privy Council ordering London’s brewers to no longer “burn any more sea coal during the Queen’s Majesty’s abiding at Westminster”. When this order was ignored — switching back to wood, especially on short notice, would have been extremely costly — fifteen brewers and a dyer were even hauled off to jail. The brewers protested, pointing out the vast amounts of wood that the switch to coal had saved, but a month later they had reached an agreement to no longer burn coal on specified days when the queen was in town, so long as they were given advance warning.53
But seven years on, the sulphurous stink of London’s breweries had become so great that it put the queen off from visiting the city at all if she could avoid it. Apparently assaulting her senses whenever her barge wended its way down the Thames, in early 1586 the authorities ordered the brewers to cease their burning of coal along the river. This time, however, the brewers responded in a way that reveals just far the use of the wood-saving art had spread. The city’s dyers and hatmakers, they said, as well as the brewers, had now all “long since altered their furnaces and fire places and turned the same to the use and burning of sea coal.” Dutifully, they offered to switch two or three of the breweries nearest to the Palace of Westminster back to burning wood, though pointed out that even just this would have a huge effect on the city’s fuel supplies, consuming a whopping 2,000 loads of wood per year.54
Nothing more is heard of the matter in the state documents, so presumably the queen accepted their sacrifice. But it’s also possible that she simply gave up: given the huge cost savings to such a vital industry, there was no holding coal’s conquest back. By the late 1570s, given the sheer quantities of beer and ale being produced in the city amounted to some 400,000 barrels a year, the breweries alone would have required a near doubling of the city’s coal total consumption, adding some 10,000 tons of coal per year to the 10-15,000 tons consumed by the city’s blacksmiths and lime-burners,55 not to mention the amounts consumed by the dyers, hatmakers, soapmakers, and others who could most readily adopt the holzersparungs kunst.
And, crucially, with that doubling of demand for coal from Newcastle, the mines had to be dug deeper, soon striking coals that were much larger and less crumbly, with less sulphur than before — coals that, with the grates and chimneys that had already been in use elsewhere for centuries, were much more easily burned in the homes of Londoners too. Indeed, based on the experience of the century and a half that followed, it was believed to be a rule that the deeper the mine, the larger coals — a myth only busted when the adoption of the steam engine allowed miners to drain the mines of their water, reaching far deeper than ever before.56
By the 1590s, London’s consumption had expanded by eight- or even tenfold over what it had been in 1560, with the vast majority now burned in people’s homes.57 But what I believe the evidence shows us is that London’s voracious appetite for coal did not start in the hearths of its homes. Instead, thanks to some enterprising Germans whose names had largely been forgotten, it was instead first whet by ale and beer.
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Norman Scarfe, ed., A Frenchman’s Year in Suffolk: French Impressions of Suffolk Life in 1784 (The Boydell Press, 1995),pp.5, 51, 137; Norman Scarfe, Innocent Espionage: The La Rochefoucauld Brothers’ Tour of England in 1785, First Edition (The Boydell Press, 1995), p.24
William Harrison, The firste volume of the chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (1577), p.85; for some of the best descriptions of coal-burning technology in the home, see also Ruth Goodman, The Domestic Revolution (Michael O’Mara Books, 2020)
Hugh Plat, A nevv, cheape and delicate fire of cole-balles wherein seacole is by the mixture of other combustible bodies, both sweetened and multiplied (1603)
'Venice: May 1551', in Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 5, 1534-1554, ed. Rawdon Brown (1873), pp.338-362, accessed via British History Online
Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum,or Theatre of the Whole World (John Norton, [1570] 1606), in ‘Of the Orkeny Iles, West Iles, Man, &c’; also see the various mentions of coal in Harrison
Luis de Granada, The Singularities of London, 1578: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Reg. Lat. 672: Number 175, ed. Ian W. Archer, Derek Keene, and Emma Pauncefoot, New Edition (London Topographical Society, 2014); Lupold von Wedel, in Queen Elizabeth and some Foreigners (John Lane and Bodley Head, 1928), pp.313-46
Quoted and translated from John Caius in 1555 in Robert L. Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade (The Colliery Guardian Company Ltd, 1898), p.109
'Venice: August 1554, 16-20', in Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 5, 1534-1554, ed. Rawdon Brown (London, 1873), pp.531-567, via British History Online
“Thomas Barnaby to Sir William Cecil, proposing methods of distressing the French, 1552”, in Henry Ellis ed. Original Letters, Illustrative of English History, Vol. II (Harding and Lepard: 1827), p.199
Harrison, p.115; see also TNA SP 12/105, “Discourse on the establishing a staple at Newcastle for coals, and for tin and lead in other places”, dated August 24 1575, which notes how “coals have been known beyond the seas as well in the Low Countries where they have no coals to serve smiths but such as with great charges are brought out of the lands of Liège, as well in Picardy, Normandy, Brittany and other places of France that for the smiths’ occupying they have no coals to be brought unto them so good cheap as Newcastle coals, which has been manifested and proved in long while for the great number of those countries’ ships [that] usually every year in summertime repair to Newcastle for coals”.
Graham Hollister-Short, ‘The Other Side of the Coin: Wood Transport Systems in Pre-Industrial Europe’, in History of Technology, ed. Graham Hollister-Short and Frank James, vol. 16 (Bloomsbury, 1994), pp.80-1
Unless otherwise stated, details of the consortium are from Hans Rudolf Lavater, “Der Bieler Dekan Jakob Funcklin und die Anfänge der „Holzsparkunst“ (1555-1576)”, in Ulrich Gäbler, Martin Sallmann & Hans Schneider, éd., Schweizer Kirchengeschichte - neu reflektiert. Festschrift für Rudolf Dellsperger zum 65. Geburtstag (Basler & Berner Studien zur historischen & systematischen Theologie, 73, 2011), pp.63-145
G.Doorman, Patents for inventions in the Netherlands during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries: with notes on the historical development of technics (1942)
I came across this completely by chance. It’s listed in a couple of sourcebooks, but seemingly has never been written about. It doesn’t appear in any of the lists of early patents for inventions, and I don’t see it mentioned in any books or articles on the subject.
Jack Williams, Robert Recorde: Tudor Polymath, Expositor and Practitioner of Computation (Springer Science & Business Media, 2011) has all sorts of details about the Clonmines project
For a recent summary see John S. Moore, ‘Demographic Dimensions of the Mid-Tudor Crisis’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 41, no. 4 (2010), pp.1039–63. But there’s actually even more evidence been piling up since in local studies.
For many details about von Bocholt, see Piet Dekker, Godert van Bocholt enige heer, grootgrondbezitter en zoutzieder van de Zijpe (Pirola, 1998). But even this very thick tome seems to miss lots of details about his life, particularly to do with his investments in inventions.
Hansjoerg Pohlmann, ‘The Inventor’s Right in Early German Law’, Journal of the Patent Office Society 43, no. 2 (1961), pp.121–39, particularly footnote 68.
SP 70/82 f.88 - this is labelled by the calenderer as 1566, assuming that the year was being counted from Annunciation Day on 25th March instead of from 1st January. Although English writers could go back and forth on this, most other European countries had made the shift by then to a January start, and the letter is clearly dated “February 1565” by von Bocholt himself. And it’s also the only date that actually makes sense given the context. Incidentally, this letter has never been attributed to von Bocholt before, being mislabelled as from “M. Bochet”. But it very clearly states that it is from the lord of Grevenbroich.
See, for example, Bendor Grosvenor, ‘The Identity of “the Famous Paynter Steven”: Not Steven van Der Meulen but Steven van Herwijck’, The British Art Journal 9, no. 3 (2009), pp.12–17. There is lots written about him as an artist, but not his role as an inventor. The only person to have ever written about him in this capacity before, but without making the connection to the famous medallist, is Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (Yale University Press, 2007).
Victor Tourneur, ‘Steven Van Herwijck. Médailleur Anversois (1557-65)’, The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society 2 (1922), pp.100-4.
See Lavater for details, as well as some key facts about the Kogelmanns and Neuner. Lavater calls Neuner a fortifications engineer, which he was later on from about 1579 onwards, but he was usually described as a gunmaker.
For the alternative spellings see their own advertisement of the imperial patent here, and a testimonial written for them by the manager of the Hallstadt saltworks at SP 70/147/2 f.411.
For the fullest and most detailed account of the 1579 and 1586 controversies, which corrects some errors found in other works, see William M. Cavert, The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.45-8
Ibid., and SP 12/127 f.117. Cavert notes that this document has been mis-dated to 1578, and is instead the response of the brewers to the orders of 1586.
Cavert 2017, p.430, and especially 436. I think Cavert’s estimate of over 10,000 tons is far likelier than that of 8,000, though I’d hesitate to put that figure for 1574, and rather for 1579. Hence why I’ve written “late 1570s” to fudge the difference, and because it will only ever be a rough figure in any case.
