Once James came to rule both nations — he became king of England exactly 423 years ago today — it was the far fewer Scots who most vigorously took advantage of the opportunities of a united Britain and the empire it soon conquered. John Rae and George and Thomas Simpson finally found the North-West Passage. David Livingstone – who had once worked as a child in a cotton mill – pursued the source of the Nile and ended up having his heart famously buried in Africa. A Glaswegian, John A. MacDonald, became the first prime minister of an independent Canada.

Beyond the grasping of opportunities for exploration and administration, however, tiny Scotland was most remarkable for its originality, as a seedbed of globally significant ideas. From anatomy to zoology, and everything between – botany, economics, electromagnetism, mechanical engineering, medicine, telecommunications, and more – Scotland has been unusually impactful.

Take even a single field like civil engineering. John Loudon McAdam revolutionised road-building; Thomas Telford built canals to cross rivers using cast-iron aqueducts; Robert Stevenson transformed the safety of our coastlines thanks to his work on lighthouses and their lights. Not to mention John Rennie, William Fairbairn, and hundreds more.

Why were Scots so overrepresented in the annals of so many fields?

Thanks to the rise of Calvinism in the 1560s, and the subsequent establishment of a country-wide system of tax-funded schools, one common refrain is that Scots were unusually literate. With better education, the thinking goes, the Scots were better able to pursue opportunities.

But the laudable intentions of Kirk and State did not automatically translate into results, and in the eighteenth century literacy rates among men were hardly different to those of England, which lacked any such purposeful system of education, and still much lower among women.1 Only in the 1870s, once Scotland had already been punching well above its weight for a while, were its literacy rates appreciably any better. And by then the advantages were slim: 90% literacy among Scottish men, compared to 80% to the south.2

By the nineteenth century fewer than a third of Scottish schoolchildren were being educated in the tax-funded schools, the vast majority instead being taught in private, fee-paying schools.3 To the extent that the spread of literacy was a factor at all in Scottish success, then it was one that owed its origins to Scots’ ability to pay. Scots became literate because in the late eighteenth century they were increasingly able to afford it. They were able to punch above their weight because of their growing, newfound wealth.

Scotland’s Economic Miracle

That wealth was far from inevitable, and from the vantage point of the seventeenth century would even have been surprising. Scotland before the 1740s was significantly poorer than England. Overwhelmingly agrarian, in good years it exported grain, along with fish, hides, skins, wool, cattle, coal, kelp, and salt, but with much of the population scratching a living at the very edge of subsistence.4 Scotland was the last part of Britain to banish famine, unemployment was often rife, and insufficient coin often forced its population to resort to barter and payment of wages and rents in kind.5 Scottish society was vastly unequal, with a tiny handful of aristocrats owning almost all the land, and with the vast bulk of the population occupying it without proper leases, liable to eviction or rent raises at the drop of a hat when the demand for their goods either fell or rose.

With the markets for the goods on which people depended being both fragile and small, there was hardly a middle class of artisans, merchants, and urban professionals in between. As an English spy reported in 1580, merchants and artisans were “few and mean for wealth by reason of the small exportation which the country affords”, manufacturers had “but small trading by reason that the people are but poor and accustomed to live hardly, without much variety of diet, apparel, etc”, and those who worked the land were largely serfs at subsistence, paying to the lord “all the commodities that rise from their labours to him, reserving to themselves at the year’s end, in a manner, nothing else but to live.”6 Even after the Union in 1707, despite the opportunities that this brought in terms of freely exporting to England and its empire, the economic gap remained wide, and there was every chance that the pull of London, as a place for Scotland’s landlords to live and spend their rents, could have prevented it being reinvested in Scottish enterprise, siphoning it away.

But by the 1740s, the first signs could be seen of a spectacular change. Glasgow, whose merchants had long ago carved out a respectable share of the tobacco imported to Britain from Virginia, suddenly and rapidly came to dominate the trade. From controlling just 10% of tobacco imports in 1738, just twenty years later Glasgow had surpassed even gargantuan London. Another ten years on, by 1769, Glasgow accounted for more than every other British port combined, while all the time the total amounts of tobacco imported grew and grew.7 Contemporaries estimated that the shipping tonnage on Glasgow’s river, the Clyde, had increased more than tenfold.8 Edinburgh meanwhile saw its shops fill with luxuries, and its university become a centre of excellence in medicine and chemistry, drawing students from across northwestern Europe, while the city itself expanded, elegantly, with the building of the New Town.

Other urban centres, like Dundee, Paisley and Perth, grew rich and large from the manufacture of linen, and later cotton, while in the century after 1750 Scotland became the most rapidly urbanising region in the world, soon employing a greater proportion of the male workforce in industry than even England.9 Having accounted for about a tenth of British output in the 1820s, by the 1850s Scotland accounted for over a fifth.10

The countryside also rapidly transformed, as landlords in first the Lowlands and the Borders, and then, most infamously, in the Highlands, ruthlessly reorganised and expanded their farms to be as efficient and profitable as possible, eliminating employment for all but a fraction of the workers they had had before. Lowland farms were soon a wonder to even the English, long used to rapid agricultural change. They become in the words of one 1830s English visitor, vast “factories for making corn and meat”.11

For many of those who lived through it, such as the agricultural labourers who faced eviction in the name of improvement, or the slaves on American plantations who grew the tobacco with Scots linen on their backs, Scotland’s transformations were painful, or even strictly for the worse. Yet all the transformations, for better and worse, all had a common root – a factor that made possible the sheer pace of Scotland’s simultaneous agricultural, industrial, and urban revolutions, squeezing into the space of just a few decades what had taken England at least a century and a half, and then allowing it to grow even faster still. Each of the changes required extraordinary levels of investment, which was only made possible because despite the Union, Scotland retained a difference in law and institutions that made it uniquely supportive of the raising and deploying of capital.

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Capital Advantage

South of the border there was only a single chartered bank – the Bank of England – along with lots of tiny, unchartered banking partnerships outside of London. In Scotland, however, by 1750 there were not only three chartered banks competing with one another in Edinburgh alone, but the unchartered partnerships in the rest of the country were able to grow into extensive operations covering whole regions, a few of them soon outcompeting chartered banks.

Whereas in England a company needed a royal charter or a special act of parliament in order to be a distinct legal entity, with partnerships according to English common law being no more than the sum of their parts, Scots law instead enabled unchartered firms to be distinct from their owners in lots of important ways, able to outlast the partners who died or went bankrupt, with shares able to be easily traded or transferred, and enabling profits to be preserved for reinvestment in the firm rather than being dissipated in dividends. As a result, even the unchartered banks in Scotland could have dozens or even hundreds of partners drawn from across the upper and middle classes, whereas the average in England had just three.12

Scottish banks started up with more capital, grew faster, drew on a much deeper pool of investors, and were significantly more stable and resilient to shocks. And in all having to compete with one another they offered financial services that were unheard of south of the border – they had local branches, paid interest on deposits, and readily offered short-term loans on personal security rather than just on land. The second of the chartered banks, the Royal Bank of Scotland, in 1728 seems to have been the first bank in the world to have ever offered overdrafts, called the “cash credit” system.13 In the 1810s Scotland developed the savings bank, which paid interest on even the tiny deposits of artisans and labourers.14

And the Scottish banks issued plentiful banknotes in small denominations that were able to circulate in the economy as currency, finally satiating Scotland’s decades-long want of coin.15 Indeed, Scots law made it much quicker and easier than in England to enforce all sorts of debts.16 With creditors made confident, they were much more willing to lend, making more capital available to grease commerce’s wheels.

It was thanks to this capital advantage that Glaswegian merchants were able to both out-borrow and out-invest their competitors in the English ports, rising above Whitehaven, Liverpool, and even London. Glaswegian merchants could afford to invest in much larger ships, taking advantage of economies of scale, as well as in building their own warehouses in Virginia to buy up the tobacco before the ships had even arrived. They could also afford to sell an increasingly varied array of European goods to the tobacco planters at rock-bottom prices, and on generous credit, sometimes even lending the planters cash so that they could secure their eventual tobacco crop.

When the Virginian tobacco planters all defaulted during the American Revolution, and the warehouses were all seized, Glasgow’s merchants were so well-capitalised that they could largely take the loss, and simply switch to dominating the trade in Caribbean sugar and cotton in the same ways instead. Indeed, by out-lending their competitors in order to capture the trade, and so allowing planters to clear land and buy slaves before they’d even grown their crop, Glasgow’s merchants provided the capital that enabled the plantations of first Virginia and then the Caribbean to so rapidly expand.17 Although it’s often said that slavery and colonialism funded Glasgow’s growth, it was largely the other way around: the Atlantic economy’s heyday was built on the savings of Scots.

As to Scotland’s own exports, particularly linen and later cotton cloth, these likewise owed their success to Scotland’s extraordinary ability to marshal capital. In the early eighteenth century the Scottish linen industry faced fierce competition from Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland, especially as it produced hardly any flax of its own, having to import it from the Baltic. Yet when the British parliament instituted export subsidies for linen in the 1740s, merchants in Edinburgh seized on the opportunity, forming the British Linen Company in 1746. It began by raising an enormous amount of equity, most of it subscribed from within Scotland itself, to immediately make it one of the best-capitalised firms in Britain – an advantage compounded by making use of the newfangled overdrafts to meet its short-term needs, and by borrowing extensively by issuing promissory notes, with its lenders including even kirk parishes and hospitals.18

Although it began as a manufacturer, the British Linen Company soon discovered that its main advantages were in marketing and credit. In the face of razor-thin profit margins, and by itself bearing the costs of transporting linen to London for sale, it managed to carve out a market for Scottish linens abroad. But most importantly, by extending credit to linen manufacturers – even at its peak, the company itself never made more than a tenth of Scottish linen itself – it allowed the industry as a whole to grow. In the 1770s it decided to concentrate on its strengths and become entirely a bank.

Just as the credit advanced by Glasgow merchants had allowed for tobacco and sugar plantations in America and the Caribbean to expand ahead of each crop season, the credit advanced by the British Linen Company allowed for the creation of bleach-fields, as well as for cloth manufacturers in Scotland to fund every stage of the process. British Linen Company credit allowed manufacturers to buy stocks of foreign flax that they would take to the women who spun for them in the countryside; it allowed them to pay the women for the yarn to take to the weavers; and to pay those weavers for their cloth — all before any cloth was actually sold.19

Much the same can be said of how Scotland assembled the capital for its mills, mines, ironworks, farms, and a host of other trades,20 as well as how it built its infrastructure, from harbours, bridges, canals, and later railways, to city water supplies, street paving, hospitals, and civic buildings. When new industries were invented, it was Scottish capital that ensured the country pursued it on a large scale. The St Rollox chemical works in Glasgow, founded by a former weaver and bleacher, Charles Tennant, was in the 1830s and 40s reputedly the largest heavy chemical plant in the world.21

But even more fundamentally, Scotland’s unique financial system in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made it possible for ambitious individuals to borrow even when they owned no land, based only on the personal security of themselves and their guarantors, and so to raise the capital that merely their reputation, skill and acumen might command. Scotland was thus uniquely supportive of the ambitious “lad o’ pairts”, or of the artisan with a new idea for an invention, who wanted only capital to make it real. It was the obvious place, thanks to Samuel Smiles in the 1850s, to have spawned the entire literary genre of self-help.

As the benefits of Scotland’s financial system became increasingly obvious, it was soon regarded with envy elsewhere – especially to the south. The core elements of its banking were extended by legislation to the rest of the UK in the 1820s,22 and there were attempts in the 1850s to do the same for its debt-enforcement provisions, though these failed to get voted through.23 So Scotland eventually lost most, though not all, of its edge in marshaling wealth. Yet it retains that capacity to be different, more so now than even then. Perhaps it may do so again.

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(It’s also thanks to demographic change that this post, which follows the labour laws into the sixteenth century, has been so delayed. Life, quite literally, intruded, because I became a father.)

As I hinted last time, the labour laws — having already been downright dystopian — were soon to become especially biting. Some historians have assumed they were resurrected, rather than continued, after England had descended into on-and-off strife — a period usually known as the Wars of the Roses, but better termed the Cousins’ Wars.

For those who don’t know this not-at-all complicated or convoluted history, King Henry VI became mentally incapacitated in the 1450s, just as England lost much of its territory in France, leading to violent clashes between rival court factions until he was deposed by his third cousin, Edward IV, in 1461, before being re-installed as king in 1470, and then re-deposed (and killed) by Edward in 1471.

Then, a few months after Edward IV’s death in 1483, his two sons and heirs were pronounced illegitimate and mysteriously disappeared into the Tower of London, so that he was succeeded instead by his brother, Richard III, who in turn was deposed just a couple of years later by the French king’s second cousin, who killed Richard in battle during a second invasion attempt launched from France. This spurious pretender to the English throne — the grandson of a Welsh knight who had married Henry VI’s French mother, and the great-grandson, on his mother’s side, of Henry VI’s grandfather’s illegitimate half-brother, whose line had been explicitly barred from the succession by Parliament — became Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs.

But Henry VII then had to spend much of the 1480s and 90s seeing off the foreign-backed invasion attempts of a boy claiming to be Edward IV’s nephew, the earl of Warwick (a boy of that description was also held by Henry in the Tower of London), and another young man claiming to be Edward IV’s mysteriously missing younger son, Richard, allegedly emerging out of hiding — a would-be Richard IV.

We can see, given this on-and-off chaos, why many historians have assumed that the labour laws ceased to be enforced. Yet one of the first things on the agenda of every new regime was to remind everyone that they were still in place.

This was least urgent in 1461, when Edward IV first usurped the throne, as England was in the midst of a severe slump and falling prices, when wages would have in any case been stagnant or falling even without being capped. But in 1472, when Parliament met to confirm his return to power the previous year, its first act was to ask him to see that the labour laws were put in execution as part of a wider push to restore general order.1 He soon issued a proclamation reminding local officials of their duty to crack down on unlicensed, unemployed travellers — so-called vagabonds and idlers, who were often just people wandering and often begging while in search of work or higher wages. In London, where some of the relevant records of actual enforcement survive, the crackdowns most certainly commenced.2

Likewise, within just months of killing Richard III in battle and usurping the throne, one of the very first acts of Henry VII in 1485 was to give “straight commandment to see the statute and ordinance made and provided heretofore for the punishment of vagabonds, beggars, and other suspect persons to be put in effectual execution”, by which he meant the fundamental, by now ancient labour laws of 1349, 1351, 1383, and 1388. The order to stick to the law — which was soon to be extended and augmented — was not some wholesale resurrection, but a mere continuation. It was business as usual, restored again after only a brief interruption from the coup.

But there were soon to be changes. Henry’s order was so effectually executed, that after just five months the new regime was forced to relax the punishments: the gaols and prisons of the realm had so quickly become “repleted and filled with vagabonds, beggars, suspect persons, and other persons”, that the costs and risks of keeping them had become untenable, with many of the prisoners languishing there indefinitely and even dying. Prisoners, in order to be released, needed to find surety from some reputable person willing to put their own wealth on the line for their good behaviour, but this was not exactly easy when they were a stranger locked up far from home (if they even had any reputable friends or family at all). Many simply had no way out. So, out of practicality, Henry ordered the royal officials responsible for enforcing the labour laws — the Justices of the Peace — to visit the gaols and prisons each month and assign the vagabonds and idlers to nearby employers, for whom they would be forced to work for the term of at least a year.3 The punishment was relaxed in order to focus on the law’s intention, which was to force people into employment.

Yet despite further periodic roundups of the illegally unemployed, just eight years later the Tudor regime noted that “the due effect of them has not ensued for all of their due execution”.4 This was perhaps because convicted vagabonds, who by definition were already used to breaking the law, were simply running away from their enforced employers and going back to their wandering ways as soon as they were released. The worst that could happen was for them to be popped back in prison briefly and released all over again. But it may also have been difficult to find employers willing to take on the vagabonds at all, even when the vagabonds were willing to work, whether through fear of them committing other crimes — rootless wanderers were widely associated with theft, assault, and even murder — or simply because there were no opportunities in the area for employment.

So Henry proclaimed a sort of compromise, making the punishment for the unemployed more unpleasant, but also absolving the Justices of the laborious task of finding the vagabonds employers. In 1493 he ordered idlers and vagabonds to be put in the stocks for three days and three nights, “there to have none other sustenance but bread and water”, after which they were to be sworn to leave the area (with a double penalty if they were caught there again). This was to punish the wanderers and beggars considered able to work, whom the government referred to as being “sturdy”, “valiant”, “mighty”, or “strong”. But just in case these sturdy beggars were using the pretence of sickness or infirmity to avoid punishment, Henry also made life harder for all beggars who legitimately couldn’t work. He ordered the sick and infirm to comply with the letter of the law passed over a century earlier in 1388, and to hurriedly return to the places they had last permanently dwelled or been born, there to remain forever.

This was the state of play in early 1493, with the laws being adjusted by proclamation so as to see them better enforced. It was business as usual, with a bit of tinkering to make it work. Yet the labour laws were almost immediately forced to be more radically overhauled, because one of the main, underlying causes of vagabondage was to get significantly worse. There was, quite suddenly, a straightforward lack of opportunities for employment. And it was Henry VII himself who was to blame.

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The Spectre of Prince Richard

Having usurped the crown by invading England and taking it by force, Henry VII was willing to sacrifice everything, including the wellbeing of his new subjects, to prevent someone else from doing the same to him. In late 1492, the young man claiming to be the rightful king Richard IV arrived in the Low Countries (more or less modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands), and was there publicly recognised by one of its de facto governors, the dowager duchess of Burgundy, Margaret of York — Edward IV’s sister, and thus the real Richard’s aunt.

Henry’s government responded quickly, claiming that the young man was actually a Flemish merchant’s son named Pierrechon de Werbecque, anglicised as Perkin Warbeck, who was employed as a sort of male model for a cloth merchant, showing off his silks in various trading towns. But the effect of Margaret’s recognition, coming from a member of Richard’s own close family — he allegedly had all three of the true prince’s one-in-a-million distinguishing marks, on his eye, mouth, and thigh — had a dramatic effect on public opinion. It gave many in England a focus for their discontent at the usurper’s regime — including among some of Henry’s own household — and it isolated him abroad. The courts of Scotland, Denmark-Norway, and Germany’s Holy Roman Empire began to act as though this Richard was the rightful king. The old enemy France refrained, but only because Henry had invaded it just the year before, being persuaded to leave before battle commenced by a bribe and a promise to give up his enemies — which was what, ironically, had prompted the supposed Richard to flee the French court for the Low Countries in the first place. To Henry VII, Margaret’s recognition of Richard was an urgent threat.

But Henry’s options for responding were limited. He could claim all he liked about the boy, but this was unlikely to convince. And open war with the Low Countries was a non-starter. The Low Countries were significantly wealthier than England, and ruled by the teenage son of the Habsburg emperor of Germany, Maximilian, who now gave the supposed Richard his full backing, lending him money and men, and presenting his case to the Pope.5 Open war between England and the Low Countries risked opening a whole other can of worms as well, because Maximilian had a far stronger dynastic claim to the throne than Henry did — via a legitimate line of succession, the Habsburg was both a second cousin once removed of Henry VI and a third cousin once removed of Edward IV. Maximilian’s son, Philip, could even claim the English throne twice over, because he had a claim via his mother’ as well.6 When Maximilian supported the supposed Richard IV, he believed that he was restoring his own fourth cousin’s rightful place on England’s throne, after which both he and his son were the next in line — something that Richard made explicit, naming them as his heirs until he could have some children of his own.

Henry spent the summer of 1493 hunkering down for defence, expecting to be accosted at any moment by an invasion force sent by Margaret and the Habsburgs, to be joined by a fomented rebellion in England too — the kind of invasion forces that had successfully overthrown reigning English kings three times in just the past thirty years, and the last of which he had himself led. And when the invasion failed to materialise that year, in September of 1493 he took one of the only options available to him, which was to try to hit the Habsburgs economically, by banning all direct trade with the Low Countries.

England’s exports were overwhelmingly of woollen broadcloth, which was usually sent over to the Low Countries unfinished. Strictly speaking, exporting cloth unfinished had been banned early on in Henry’s reign in 1487, on the purported grounds of supporting native cloth-finishing industries — napping and shearing the cloth until it was silky smooth, as well as dyeing it. But in practice, the law simply enabled Henry to exert his control on the trade. Using his royal prerogative, he sold special dispensations from the law to only certain merchants — particularly the members of a sort of regulatory professional association for trading to the Low Countries, known as the Company of Merchant Adventurers — allowing him to threaten to amend or revoke their dispensations whenever he so chose, and so periodically extort from them. In practice, then, English cloth was generally finished in the cities of Brabant, a region of the Low Countries — particularly Antwerp — before being sold further inland into Germany, France, central Europe, and even across the Alps into Italy.

So when Henry forbade the export of English cloth in 1493, its main target would have been the Brabantine urban artisans who did all the finishing, along with the merchants who sold the cloth inland. Urban artisans were unruly at the best of times, and all the more so when unemployed. Indeed, the Habsburgs had only just finished putting down a major French-backed rebellion by the cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres, joined by Brussels, Leuven, and Sluis. The rebels had taken Maximilian’s son hostage, and at one point even captured Maximilian himself. He had been helpless as they proceeded to torture and execute many of his closest advisers. If the disruption to trade were to tip the cities of the Low Countries back into rebellion, it would hit Maximilian where it really hurt. Given Henry had not long ago sent ships to help the Habsburgs put the rebellion down, he no doubt hoped to show that what his friendship could help them win, his enmity could just as easily take away.

Henry had good reason to believe that a trade ban would work, because it was a tactic sometimes used by his predecessors, and he had even it before himself, apparently with success. In late 1487, when on the cusp of agreeing a new commercial treaty with the Low Countries, the revolt of the cities against Maximilian had prompted Henry press his advantage by hardening his stance. By suspending trade on the grounds that Maximilian and Margaret had supported the invasion of England by the other pretender — the boy who had claimed to be Edward IV’s nephew, the Earl of Warwick, now known to history as the imposter Lambert Simnel — he had forced them to return to the negotiating table with more concessions. Maximilian, then at his weakest, had been especially spooked by Henry opening parallel negotiations with the rebel cities, and was quick to sound accommodating (though Henry took too long to press his advantage to the full, as by the time a new commercial agreement was reached in early 1489, he urgently wanted Maximilian’s help against an expansionist France).7

Back in 1487, however, the trade with the Low Countries had been much smaller and more uncertain, regularly disrupted by piracy, rebellion, and on-and-off war between the Low Countries and France. But by the time Henry tried the tactic again in 1493, the circumstances had changed. This time the trade — and England’s reliance upon it — had had a good few years to grow, with the Habsburgs now able to respond from a position of stability and strength. The Low Countries had become by far and away England’s most important trading partner, while England was just one of many trading partners for the Low Countries. And, unlike the last time, in 1494 the Habsburgs retaliated, banning the entry of English cloth to the Low Countries outright.8 They closed off England’s single most important market, and made it extremely difficult for the cloth to get through to its final consumers more inland.

Henry had grossly miscalculated. Not only did the cities of the Low Countries fail to revolt, but he actually ended up inadvertently consolidating the Habsburgs’ control. This was because Henry had made an exception from the embargo, to allow the export of raw wool. The reason for this was probably because the export of wool was a major source of revenue for him. Wool had long been more heavily taxed, per weight, than when it was manufactured into woollen cloth. So although he would lose customs duties from the declining export of cloth, this would be at least partially offset by exporting more of it as wool. Indeed, the ban caused the volume of English raw wool exports to more or less triple after just a couple of years — much of it sold to the clothmaking industry of Flanders, a region in the southern Low Countries.

Although the cloth-finishers of Brabant suffered, then, the cloth-makers of Flanders rejoiced. Henry’s policy of allowing wool exports created an abundance of raw material for them to use, while the Habsburgs’ outright ban on English cloth in 1494 was to grant the Flemish a captive domestic market (English cloth had already been banned from entering Flanders itself for well over a century, but not to the Low Countries as a whole).9 The Flemish could not have asked for a better policy of protectionism, while Maximilian could not have asked for a more advantageous situation. The Flemish were by far the most rebellious of his subjects, and Henry had inadvertently placed their economic fortunes within his gift.

Maximilian initially sought to profit from the embargo by selling a few special cloth import licences in spite of it, but the Flemish cities soon came cap in hand to him, begging him to make the ban more absolute.10 Although Maximilian accepted their petition, he soon landed upon a way to balance the interests of both Brabant and Flanders, while principally benefiting himself. In September 1495 he quietly dropped the ban on English cloth entering the Low Countries, but insisted that from henceforth it was all to enter the country via the Brabantine port of Bergen op Zoom, where it would pay a hefty new tariff.11 The cities of the Low Countries jealously guarded their privileges, and the imposition of such a tax would ordinarily have provoked outrage or even rebellion. But Henry had done Maximilian a favour by resetting the starting point for any negotiations. When the alternative was that there was to be no import of cloth at all, imposing a major new tax on it instead now looked like Maximilian was doing the Brabantines a favour. And the tariff was high enough to dissuade all but a trickle of English cloth into the Low Countries, so that it still served to keep out competition for the Flemish as well. By starting the trade war, Henry had given Maximilian a golden opportunity to consolidate his control over the Low Countries. And to profit from it too.

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Sacrificial Lambs

At the same time, the costs to Henry’s own subjects were severe. The English Merchant Adventurers, being barred from trading with the Low Countries directly, tried to adapt by taking their cloth across the Channel to the English continental outpost at Calais, from whence it might then be sold on to foreign merchants to take to the Low Countries. This alone was costly, and when it was rumoured that German merchants were being permitted to circumvent the ban, Germans in London were attacked by rioters until their permissions were revoked as well.12 Yet when the Habsburgs retaliated with their outright ban on English cloth, the Merchant Adventurers were almost entirely deprived of their trade, and even the German merchants were forced to use more expensive routes instead. Foreign merchants who hoped to transport English cloth to its final consumers in inland Europe were soon landing it hundreds of kilometres further north and east at Hamburg, or else using the Dutch port of Kampen, whose harbour was wholly inadequate, but which at least was ruled by the neutral prince-bishop of Utrecht — something that many of them continued to try, even after Maximilian replaced the ban with a tax, because the tax was so high.13 Either way, the final cost to consumers abroad was greatly raised, and the demand for English cloth significantly reduced.

With English cloth so hindered from being sold abroad, pretty much all imports to England became more difficult to afford. The Low Countries, for a start, were where England sourced its linen, copper, and all sorts of metalwares, including weapons, armour, and anything one could think to make of brass, bronze, iron, or steel. All of this was banned under the terms of Henry’s embargo. But the cloth sold in the Low Countries was also used to fund the importation of essentials from other markets too — iron from Spain, used for ploughs, harrows, carts, and various other tools; salt from France, essential for preserving food; grain from the Baltic, which helped keep the country alive whenever it suffered a bad harvest. Food, in the event, at least stayed cheap, presumably due to a run of decent harvests. Cloth made for export would have also been temporarily plentiful and cheap, lying unsold for the lack of foreign demand. But the disruption to trade meant that almost everything else rose in price.14

And just as the costs of living rose, many of the poor English clothworkers were thrown out of work. We do not know exactly how badly English cloth exports were affected, because the records for the years of the disruption have not survived. But we can make a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate from the records that have, because we know by how much exports of raw wool suddenly surged. Assuming that this increase represented the very same wool that would otherwise have been made into and exported as cloth, then England’s cloth exports declined by about two thirds,15 and its entire cloth industry shrank by about a sixth — an estimate that is strikingly corroborated by the number of cloths that entered via Bergen op Zoom when the ban was relaxed.16

If my estimate is at all close, then at least 29,000 people were thrown out of full-time unemployment — about 2.4% of the entire country’s workforce. And even this is an underestimate of how many in England would actually have been harmed, because clothmaking was often done as a side gig, part-time. Tens of thousands of England’s poorest families, who relied on clothmaking as a means to supplement their meagre incomes, would thus have been among the hardest hit: children who used wooden paddles fixed with small hooks, called cards, to disentangle and align the wool fibres; women who sat at their wheels or wandered with their drop-spindles, spinning the fibres into yarn; men who stood at looms, weaving that yarn into cloth; and hundreds more who de-greased the woven cloth and then fulled it, soaking it in warm water and pounding it with their feet or with wooden hammers powered by a watermill, forcing the fibres of the cloth to mesh together to be felt-like, thick, and strong. All now saw their opportunities for employment disappear, while the wool they had once worked on was used instead by the spinners and weavers of Flanders.

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Woolly Thinking

Bizarrely, Henry VII’s control of export licences and trade bans are often described as a case of early home-biased industrial policy — an idea most recently popularised by the bestselling economics author Ha-Joon Chang.17 Henry’s policies have been presented as a purposeful stimulus to England’s export of cloth, allowing English industry to rise up through protectionism before it later “kicked away the ladder” for other countries by imposing trade rules free of tariffs and import bans. But Chang based his information almost entirely on a 1720s writer, Daniel Defoe, who was seeking precedents to justify protectionism in his own time, and who got some crucial details utterly garbled.

This is not just me being pedantic. Henry VII’s trade policies are frequently cited as an example of how protectionism works, and the misunderstandings have made their way into more general historical accounts — just look at the economic achievements listed on Henry VII’s Wikipedia entry. A few years ago I spoke on a panel at a conference where Lord Sainsbury, a former minister in the British Department of Trade and Industry, pooh-poohed what I had said about England having lacked much industry before the mid-sixteenth century on the grounds that Henry VII had favoured cloth over wool. I was not given the chance to reply back then, but better late than never.

What Defoe failed to realise — actually getting things completely back to front — was that the 1493 embargo mainly harmed the export of English manufactured goods. He failed to mention that Habsburg retaliation in 1494 made the damage significantly worse. And he failed to realise that a specific exception had been made to allow raw wool to be exported instead. Far from what Defoe set out, and has been uncritically echoed ever since, Henry’s trade ban was really the kind of policy you’d pursue if you were trying to destroy England’s manufacturing, not boost it.

And in any case, the embargo only lasted two and a half years — hardly an event to cause a major shift in England’s long-term economic trajectory. The supposed Richard IV’s invasion of England finally materialised in the summer of 1495, by which time Henry had had a chance to round up most of the pretender’s supporters at home. The invasion foundered as soon as it tried to land in Kent, and was forced to turn back. Rather than return to the Low Countries, Richard was invited to Scotland, from which he hoped to launch another attempt. But in the event, the Scottish king merely used his claim as an excuse to conduct an inconsequential border raid. Henry prepared for a large-scale retaliatory invasion of Scotland, for which he raised taxes. But this prompted major revolts in the southwest; it’s probably no coincidence that the southwest produced most of England’s exported broadcloth, and so would have been the region to have suffered most from the ban on trade.18 Richard joined up with the rebels, who proclaimed him king. Yet when Henry sent his army to meet him in battle, Richard lost his nerve before the fight and fled. He was captured, forced to say that he had been the imposter Perkin Warbeck all along, and eventually executed.

It was not long after Richard’s failed first invasion, however, trade relations between the Low Countries and England had already begun to normalise. In February 1496, while the pretender was off in Scotland, the two sides had signed a treaty to restore trade. Thanks to one of Henry’s biographers in the seventeenth century (none other than the godfather of empiricism, Francis Bacon), the treaty is often described as a major achievement, and termed the Intercursus Magnus, or Great Commerce. But it would not have seemed so great to the English at the time.19 It simply restored general trading conditions to the way they had been for the last half a century, but with some serious omissions.

Although the treaty contained various clauses about the Low Countries ceasing to support English rebels and traitors, it was signed by Maximilian’s son, doing nothing to limit Maximilian’s own, open support for the claim of Richard IV. Indeed, in the very same week that the treaty was was signed, Maximilian was reluctant to admit Henry VII to a big anti-French coalition, on the grounds that Richard’s victory over him might still be imminent.20 Even more significantly for England itself, the Habsburgs continued to direct all English cloth via Bergen op Zoom, where they continued to levy their hefty new tariff. Within a month of the treaty being signed, the Merchant Adventurers were complaining to Henry about these conditions, arguing that upon a strict reading of the agreement they should not be allowed. He agreed, ordering his merchants not to pay it.

But the Habsburgs recognised their far stronger negotiating position. They levied the tax anyway, adding insult to injury by adding on various tolls, and seizing the merchants’ goods if they refused. By September 1496 — just six months after the supposedly “great” treaty had been signed — Henry was forced to take the costly step of once again suspending direct trade, ordering all merchants in England to send their cloth to Calais again instead. This seems to have at least served to re-open negotiations, during which the Habsburgs offered a partial and temporary reprieve from the tariff on cloth.21 But the moment Henry once again permitted the Merchant Adventurers to return to the Low Countries, the Habsburgs turned up the pressure again, banning their subjects from wearing any garments made from English cloth, and so effectively banning its retail — the idea was that the Flemish clothmakers would continue to get their captive domestic market, while the Brabantine cloth-finishers would continue to buy English cloth wholesale so that they could dye and finish it, solely exporting the finished product into inland Europe.

Eventually, in 1499, Henry was able to reach a new agreement with the Low Countries. English merchants were no longer forced to use Bergen op Zoom, and the Habsburgs completely dropped the new tariffs and tolls. The 1499 treaty, if anything, is more deserving of the title of Intercursus Magnus. But it really only partially turned back the clock, because Henry failed to get the Habsburgs to remove the new ban on retailing English cloth in the Low Countries. And even a partial reset came at a price: in order to secure the abolition of the new tariff, Henry was forced to reduce the fixed prices that the English charged for raw wool.22

We should be clear on what really happened then, when in 1493 Henry decided to suspend trade. This was no enlightened industrial policy to serve as a model for today. Instead, an insecure usurper, fearful of a rival being supported by a more powerful foreign ruler, readily sacrificed the livelihoods of tens of thousands of his poorest subjects in an attempt to change that ruler’s mind. Not only was that sacrifice futile, but the end result — after six years of costly negotiation — was that English trade with the Low Countries was restored on worse terms than before.

Rather than some major victory it showed the Habsburgs just how limited England’s economic leverage was, such that they had no hesitation in angering Henry even further. It was not long, for example, before they took in yet another potential pretender to the his throne — another of Edward IV’s nephews, Edmund de la Pole. The Habsburgs used him as a bargaining chip to extort gargantuan cash bribes — at one point Henry coughed up more than a full year’s worth of his ordinary revenue — just to stop them supporting de la Pole’s claim.23 The only time Henry got the upper hand was through sheer chance in 1506, when Maximilian’s son and heir Philip, by now an adult ruling the Low Countries properly, was shipwrecked in England while on his way to Spain to claim its throne. As Henry’s “guest” for a few months — a prisoner of his hospitality — Philip finally extradited de la Pole and agreed to major trade concessions, including a promise to lift the protectionist ban on retailing or wearing English cloth. Henry insisted — prudently, it turns out — that the pretender be taken into his custody while Philip was still on English soil. But once Philip was gone, the trade concessions evaporated into a mist of excuses and denials.

The reality then was that Henry’s trade ban did more to hinder the English economy than help it — which is also very clearly borne out by the data on cloth exports. It was only when he stopped declaring on-and-off trade bans with the Low Countries that England’s cloth exports finally gained a secure basis for growth. With trade allowed to grow for the next fifty years, this time with relatively few further interruptions, the weight of English cloth exports more than doubled, and increased by even more in terms of value.24 It was not by imposing embargoes, but by refraining from them, that England’s main manufacturing industry finally had the chance to expand.

Yet Henry’s trade ban did have one lasting legacy, because it prompted some major changes to the labour laws.

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Juries Out

Two years into the stoppage of trade, and faced with rising import prices and rising unemployment, England’s Parliament was forced to act. With tens of thousands of people being forced out of work and having to wander and beg, Henry’s proclamation of 1493 — of three days in the stocks for able-bodied vagabonds and idlers, and the order for all the sick and infirm beggars to return to their home towns — was put into law. Yet this was no mere confirmation, because it also came with a powerful incentive to see it enforced: whenever a local official failed to immediately punish a vagabond who had come into their knowledge or sight, they were now to be punishable by a heavy fine. And that fine, rather than just disappearing into the justice system and eventually making its way to the king, was to be paid instead to the superior or colleague who dobbed the lax official in. The fines were explicitly to be awarded to the informers’ “own use and profit”. It suddenly became extremely profitable to crack down on officials who were being too lenient, and very risky to turn a blind eye.25

And that was not all. Parliament did something similar to catch those avoiding the other labour restrictions too. Presenting juries — what we’d now call grand juries — were solemnly sworn by the Justices of the Peace to present all wrongdoers in their communities for punishment. But the government became worried that they were failing to do their duties in the face of local bribery, intimidation, or even straightforward bias — an especial problem when it came to dobbing in their neighbours and friends for infractions that they might have considered minor, or which they didn’t think should be punished at all, like taking wages above the caps. It will have been hard for juries not to be sympathetic about their neighbours’ demands for higher wages when the disruption to trade had caused the costs of many essential imported goods to rise as well.

The problem of overly sympathetic or corrupted presenting juries had been brought up before. As I mentioned last time, Justices of the Peace had long been empowered to circumvent juries when it came to enforcing the caps on wages. Since the 1420s they’d been able to examine suspects without first needing a formal presentment by a jury, and could even summarily convict them based only on their own opinion of the case. Again without a jury. Although the Justices were given such powers, however, the onus was still on them to follow up on informal complaints and hearsay, rooting out offenders themselves. The law empowered the magistrate who was diligent, but not every magistrate was, or even had the time if they were.

So in 1495 Parliament circumvented the presenting jury another way, by handing over its powers to the public. It enabled anyone and everyone to bring lawbreakers before the Justices, encouraging them with the prospect of winning a substantial portion of the fines that would be due if they were successfully convicted — an even more generalised version of what it had done to encourage officials to crack down on their too-lenient subordinates and colleagues. Encouraging the public to become informers had precedent already for the punishment of some laws, but the 1495 act was a more general and wide-ranging informers’ charter. The policing of essentially all minor offences — including, explicitly, those who broke the labour laws — was now put into the hands of mercenary litigators.26

Merely tightening up the enforcement of the labour laws, however, did nothing to address what was causing them to be broken in the first place — something that Parliament seems to have at least partially recognised. It was all very well to reinforce the restrictions on people being unemployed or demanding higher wages, but wages did need to reflect rising costs if people were to survive. So in conjunction with these measures, Parliament in 1495 also slightly raised the levels at which wages were legally capped — the first time they had been updated in fifty years.

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All Caps

When historians discuss the 1495 change to wage caps, they often describe it as a raise that merely reflected an already long-established reality, during which the old 1445 caps were merely a dead letter. The 1495 law is presented as a kind of resurgence of the labour laws after a long hiatus of non-enforcement, suddenly capping wages again anew.27 Part of their reason for assuming this is that there were protests in 1496 shortly after it came into effect: two risings in coastal Kent, and difficulties among London’s journeymen carpenters — those who typically worked by the day, the week, or the task for the master carpenters, who in turn sold their labour to clients. It’s hard to imagine that they would have been protesting a raise, and so it’s assumed that the 1495 law must have effectively lowered their wages by imposing a new cap.

Yet there are some big problems with these assumptions. For a start, there’s a smattering of evidence that the 1445 wage caps were being enforced in the early 1490s before the change.28 And the update to them only makes sense in the economic context of Henry VII’s trade war if the government believed that the old caps mattered. The new caps were made law in late 1495, two years into the embargo but before there was any end to it in sight.29 It came just as rising costs were beginning to really bite, when the fifty-year-old caps would have prevented wages from adjusting, where necessary, in response to rising costs. And it was a measure intended to last, because the higher prices of imports were beginning to look like a new normal.

In the event, however, trading relations were restored just a month before the new caps came into effect. And so after a bit of delay — no doubt because there was some uncertainty about whether the embargo might resume when the Habsburgs immediately refused to reduce their tolls and tariff, and because it took a while for imports to start flowing in again and for their prices to fall — the update was repealed. Historians have assumed that this repeal was at least in part a response to the disturbances by the London carpenters and in Kent: with the 1495 law assumed to have imposed the caps anew, it’s also assumed that they were protesting the law having lowered their wages by capping them, agitating for those caps to be removed.30

But this is not what the evidence suggests. Legally, the revocation in 1497 instead lowered the wage caps back to the rates that had been set in 1445, and for some jobs even earlier still. The older cap had never been removed from the statute books and were still considered by the authorities to be in force. For example, when there was once again some mild inflation in 1511, a royal proclamation noted how poorer workers were now suffering because they were forced to accept “such convenient wages as have heretofore been to them taxed [i.e. set] by diverse statutes”, and that lawbreaking was becoming more frequent through “the enhancement of the said wages contrary to the statutes in such case ordained”.31 This can only be referring to the old statutes of 1445 and before. Indeed, the old caps were probably more widely publicised than ever, because of the advent of the printing press. A surviving guide for Justices of the Peace printed in 1510 — one of many editions, and probably not the first — sets out the 1445 law and its implications in detail.32

When Parliament revoked the new caps in 1497 then, it did not lift a new restriction. It instead withdrew a raise. With trade restored, imports resumed, and with costs now falling, there must have been no need from the perspective of Parliament — the perspective of employers — for wages to be allowed to continue to be so high. Interestingly, we have evidence that London’s carpenters’ guild, whose journeymen had been so riotous, was among those who lobbied for the revocation (though we unfortunately don’t know the content of their lobbying, just the fact that they lobbied and seemed happy with the result). Historians have assumed that they had the same supposed motivation of their riotous journeymen, to get all wage caps repealed, and so obtain higher wages. But if the repeal actually lowered legally permissible wages, this interpretation must be entirely back to front.

How to make sense of it? Well, the guild was controlled by the master carpenters, not the journeymen — the employers, not the employees. With journeymen carpenters being so violently demanding, their masters would no doubt have been paying them nothing less than whatever the legal maximum was, if not being forced by their workers to illegally pay more. And so they would have been especially desperate to lower their wages again — in line with everyone else’s, so as not to lose out — once the costs of important imports, like the iron for journeymen’s tools and nails, had begun to fall again in price.

But if the 1495 change raised wages then, why exactly did the journeymen carpenters and many of the workers of coastal Kent revolt? It’s possible that it was not the change to the caps themselves, but some of the other aspects of the law that angered them — it was the first time, for example, that the law set out precise working hours, with a provision for employers to dock pay accordingly. But I think the most likely explanation is simply that the raise was, for certain occupations and in certain parts of the country, simply not sufficient. It’s not that they were angry because Parliament had lowered their wages; they were angry because Parliament had not raised their wages by enough.

In much of the country this would not have been an issue. Although we don’t have much to go on, it appears as though wages for much of the fifteenth century often lagged below the ancient, 1445 caps, which perhaps explains why there was no disorder elsewhere. In most of the country then, the raise in 1495 would have been a welcome change that perhaps even more than made up for rising costs. But London and the Kentish coast were some of the wealthiest regions in England, where wages would already have been the highest, right up to if not illegally exceeding the old caps. And — as the closest regions geographically to the Low Countries — they were the places most reliant on imports, where the costs of Henry VII’s embargo would have been most keenly felt. The professions of the Kentish rioters, for example, were not just agricultural workers, but included carpenters, shearmen, and blacksmiths, who like the carpenters of London would have been dismayed at the rise in the cost of imported metals for their materials and tools, and probably much more besides.

The places that protested, in other words, were where the raising of the wage caps would have felt the most out of step with their rising costs; but also where their costs would have fallen furthest and fastest upon the resumption of trade, which would explain why there was no further complaint upon the wage caps being lowered again the following year.

In any case, regardless of what really happened in 1495-7 to the wage caps, the effects were brief. But the labour laws were indisputably in force in again, and their enforcement had been significantly tightened. They were soon — as I’ll explain in the next instalment — to become more painful and restrictive than ever before. If the effects of Henry VII on England’s economy were severe, the son whose succession he readily sacrificed it for, Henry VIII, were to be downright devastating.

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 thought possible, 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 history in economic history, and a remarkable testament to the power of ideas to persuade.

[A version of this post was posted earlier today over at , in reaction to the news]

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.

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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.

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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.17 On 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.

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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 In 1450 and again in 1455, the town of Oxford unsuccessfully petitioned for its own dispensation from the law.33 And 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.34

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,35 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.36

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).37 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.38

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.39 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.40

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.41

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.42 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.43 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.44

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,45 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.46 In the 1430s, when the sheriffs of Herefordshire took it upon themselves to act like Justices in enforcing the labour laws, Parliament was quick to rein them in.47

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 see48 — 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.49 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.50

This is not to say that enforcement was perfect. Various employers’ account books sometimes show workers being paid above the wage caps set in 1445.51 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.52

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.53

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.54

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.55 Unsurprisingly, its population was also remarkably slow to recover after the Black Death, taking even longer than England’s.56

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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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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[P.S. I’ll be adding the dozens of footnote references to the web version of this post over the next few days]

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I had a great question in response to the last post on how coal usage first expanded in late-sixteenth-century England.

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.

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”.5 But 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.”8 The 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.

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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

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”.14 Rovenzon 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”.18 The 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.

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.

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.40 He 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.

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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.”46 And 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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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”.1 London’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.5 But 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.

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.

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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.”10 A 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’”.11 We 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:

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.20 When 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”.21 Coal’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 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.

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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,38 and 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.

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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.

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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In the last part we looked at how the Dutch took the dirty, solar-evaporated salt of France, Portugal and Spain, known as “bay salt” or black salt, and refined it to a white salt fit for butter, cheese, and preserving herring, which they made by burning their plentiful supplies of peat — the economic underpinning for the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age. Soon, however, Dutch peat was to face a new competitor: British coal.

Now, you might think you’re about to hear a very straightforward story. A given cart- or boat-load of even a nice, dry peat yields only about a sixth the heat of the same volume of coal,1 and only about half the heat by weight.2 With that kind of difference in energy density, coal seems like the obvious eventual winner as a source of heat for any industry, not just for refining salt.

But the story turns out to be lot more interesting than that, though we’ll first need to take a very long detour to fully appreciate why. Before we follow the history of salt-making even a single step further, we first need to delve — deeply — into the history of both wood and coal.

Coal Conundrum

It’s long bothered me as to why coal became so important in Britain. It had sat in the ground for millennia, often near the surface. Near Newcastle and Sunderland it was often even strewn out on the beaches.3 Yet coal had largely only been used for some very specific, small-scale uses. It was fired in layers with limestone to produce lime, largely used in mortar for stone and brick buildings. And it had long been popular among blacksmiths, heating iron or steel in a forge before shaping it into weapons or tools.4

Although a few places burned coal for heating homes, this was generally only done in places where the coal was an especially pure, hard, and rock-like anthracite, such as in southern Wales and in Lowlands Scotland. Anthracite coal could even be something of a luxury fuel. It was burned in the palaces of the Scottish kings.5 But otherwise, the sulphur in the more crumbly and more common coal, like that found near Newcastle, meant that the smoke reeked, reacting with the moisture of people’s eyes to form sulphurous acid, and so making them sting and burn. The very poorest of the poor might resort to it, but the smoke from sulphurous coal fires was heavy and lingering, its soot tarnishing clothes, furnishings, and even skin, whereas a wood fire could be lit in a central open hearth, its smoke simply rising through the rafters and finding its way out through the various crevices and openings of thatched and airy homes. Coal was generally the inferior fuel.

But despite this inferiority, over the course of the late sixteenth century much of the populated eastern coast of England, including the rapidly-expanding city of London, made the switch to burning the stinking, sulphurous, low-grade coal instead of wood.

By far the most common explanation you’ll hear for this dramatic shift, much of which took place over the course of just a few decades c.1570-1600, is that under the pressures of a growing population, with people requiring ever more fuel both for industry and to heat their homes, England saw dramatic deforestation. With firewood in ever shorter supply, its price rose so high as to make coal a more attractive alternative, which despite its problems was at least cheap. This deforestation story is trotted out constantly in books, on museum displays, in conversation, on social media, and often even by experts on coal and iron. I must see or hear it at least once a week, if not more. And there is a mountain of testimonies from contemporaries to back the story up. Again and again, people in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries complained that the woods were disappearing, and that wood fuel prices were on the rise.

And yet the deforestation thesis simply does not work. In fact it makes no sense at all.

Not out of the Woods Yet

This should immediately be obvious from even just a purely theoretical perspective, because wood was almost never exploited for fuel as a one-off resource. It was not like coal or peat or oil, which once dug out of the ground and burned could only be replaced by finding more. It was not a matter of cutting swathes of forest down and burning every branch, stump and root, leaving the land barren and going off in search of more. Our sixteenth-century ancestors were not like Saruman, destroying Fangorn forest for fuel. Instead, acres of forest, and even just the shrubs and trees that made up the hedges separating fields, were carefully maintained to provide a steady yield. The roots of trees were left living and intact, with the wood extracted by cutting away the trunk at the stump, or even just the branches or twigs — a process known as coppicing, and for branches pollarding — so that new trunks or branches would be able to grow back. Although some trees might be left for longer to grow into longer and thicker wood fit for timber, the underwoods were more regularly cropped.6

Given forests were treated as a renewable resource, claiming that they were cut down to cause the price of firewood to rise is like claiming that if energy became more expensive today, then we’d use all the water behind a hydroelectric dam and then immediately fill in the reservoir with rubble. Or it’s like claiming that rising food prices would result in farmers harvesting a crop and then immediately concreting over their fields. What actually happens is the precise opposite: when the things people make become more valuable, they tend to expand production, not destroy it. High prices would have prompted the English to rely on forests more, not to cut them down.

When London’s medieval population peaked — first in the 1290s before a devastating famine, and again in the 1340s on the eve of the Black Death — prices of wood fuel began to rise out of all proportion to other goods. But London had plenty of nearby woodland — wood is extremely bulky compared to its value, so trees typically had to be grown as close as possible to the city, or else along the banks of the Thames running through it, or along the nearby coasts. With the rising price of fuel, however, the city did not even have to look much farther afield for its wood, and nearby coastal counties even continued to export firewood across the Channel to the Low Countries (present-day Belgium and the Netherlands) and to the northern coast of France.7 A few industries did try to shift to coal, with lime-makers and blacksmiths substituting it for wood more than before, and with brewers and dyers seemingly giving it a try. But the stinking smoke rapidly resulted in the brewers and dyers being banned from using it, and there was certainly no shift to coal being burnt in people’s homes.8

As for conditions on the eve of coal’s rapid rise in the late sixteenth century, they were actually even less intense. Following the Black Death, London’s population took centuries to recover, and by 1550 was still below its estimated medieval peak. Having once had over 70-80,000 souls, by 1550 it had only recovered to about 50,000. And the woodlands fuelling London were clearly still intact. Foreign visitors in the 1550s, who mostly stayed close to the city, described the English countryside as “all enclosed with hedges, oaks, and many other sorts of trees, so that in travelling you seem to be in one continued wood”, and remarked that the country had “an abundance of firewood”.9 Even in the 1570s, when London’s population had likely begun to finally push past its medieval peak, the city seems to have drawn its wood from a much smaller radius than before. Whereas in the crunch of the 1300s it seemingly needed to draw firewood from as far as 17 miles away over land, in the 1570s even a London MP, with every interest in exaggerating the city’s demands, complained that it only sometimes had to source wood from as far away as just 12 miles.10

And not far along the coast from the city were also the huge woodlands of the Weald, which stretched across the southeastern counties of Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and which did not even send much of their wood to London at all. Firewood from the Weald was not only exported to the Low Countries and the northern coast of France, but those exports more than tripled between 1490 and the early 1530s, from some 1.5 million billets per year to over 4.7 million. That level was still being reached in 1550, when not interrupted by on-and-off war with France, but by then the Weald was also meeting yet another new demand, for making iron.11

Ironmaking was extremely wood-hungry. In the 1550s Weald, making just a single ton of “pig” or cast iron, fit only for cannon or cooking pots, required almost 4 tons of charcoal, which in turn required roughly another 28 tons or so of seasoned wood. England in the early sixteenth century had imported the vast majority of its iron from Spain, but between 1530 and 1550 Wealden pig iron production increased eightfold. The expansion would have demanded, on a very conservative estimate, the sustained annual output of at least 50,000 acres of woodland — an area over sixty times the size of New York’s Central Park. Yet even this hugely understates the true scale of the expansion, as pig iron needed to be refined into bar or wrought iron in order to be fit for most uses, which required twice as much charcoal again — or in other words, a total of 86 tons of seasoned wood had to be first baked and then burned, just to make one ton of bar iron from the ore. And all this was just the beginning. By the 1590s the output of the Wealden ironworks had more than tripled again, for pig iron alone (though the efficiency of charcoal usage had also halved — a story for another time, perhaps).12

Given the rapidity of these changes, it will come as no surprise that there were complaints from the locals about how much the ironworks had increased the price of fuel for their homes. No doubt the wood being exported was having a similar effect as well. But the 1540s and 50s were also time of rapid general inflation, because of a dramatic debasement of the currency initiated by Henry VIII to pay for his wars. This not only made imports significantly more expensive, and so likely spurred much of the activity in the Weald to replace increasingly unaffordable iron from Spain, but they also made exports significantly cheaper for buyers abroad — and thus unaffordable for the English themselves.

In 1548-9, in a desperate bid to keep prices down, royal proclamations repeatedly and futilely banned the export of English wheat, malt, oats, barley, butter, cheese, bacon, beef, tallow, hides, and leather, to which the following year were added — like a game of inflation whack-a-mole — rye, peas, beans, bread, biscuits, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, ale, beer, wool, and candles. And of course charcoal and wood.13 For us to have records of the Weald exporting large quantities of wood in 1550 then, they must either have been sold through special royal licence, or have all been shipped out before the ban came in force just halfway through the year in May. Presumably a great deal more than recorded was also smuggled out. In 1555, parliament saw the need to put the ban on exporting victuals and wood into law, adding severe penalties. Transgressing merchants would lose their ship and have to pay a fine worth double the value of the contraband goods, while the ship’s mariners would see all their worldly possessions seized, and be imprisoned for at least a year without bail.14

It’s perhaps no wonder that the Weald’s ironworks continued to expand at such a rapid pace: the export ban would have freed up a great deal of woodland for their use. And ironmaking soon spread to other parts of England too, to where it did not have to compete for fuel with people’s homes. Given iron was significantly more valuable by both weight and volume than wood, it could easily bear the cost of transporting it from further away, and so could be made much further inland, away from the coasts and rivers whose woodlands served cities. In the early seventeenth century, iron ore and pig iron from the southwest of England was sometimes shipped all the way to well-wooded Ireland for smelting or refining into bar.15 In the early eighteenth century scrap iron from as far away as even the Netherlands was being recycled in the forested valleys of southwestern Scotland.16

Whenever ironmaking hit the limits of what could be sustainably grown in an area, it simply expanded into the next place where wood was cheap. And there was almost always another place. England, having had to import some three quarters of its iron from Spain in the 1530s, by the 1580s was almost entirely self-sufficient, after which the total amount of iron it produced using charcoal continued to grow, reaching its peak another two hundred years later in the 1750s.17 Had iron-making not been able to find sustainable supplies of fuel within England, it would have disappeared within just a few years rather than experiencing almost two centuries of expansion.18

And that’s just iron. The late sixteenth century also saw the rapid rise in England of a charcoal-hungry glass-making industry too. Green glass for small bottles had long been made in some of England’s forests in small quantities, but large quantities of glass for windows had had to be imported from the Low Countries and France. Just as with iron, however, the effect of debasement was to make the imports unaffordable for the English, and so French workers were enticed over in the 1550s and 60s to make window glass in the Weald. Soon afterwards, Venetian-style crystal-clear drinking glasses were being made there too.

What makes glass even more interesting than iron, however, is that its breakability meant it could not be made too far away from the cities in which it would be sold, and so had to compete directly with people’s homes for its fuel. Yet by the 1570s crystal glass was even being made even within London itself. Despite charcoal supplies being by far the largest cost of production, over the course of the late sixteenth century the price of glass in England remained stable, making it increasingly common and affordable while the price of pretty much everything else rose.19

What we have then is not evidence of a mid-sixteenth-century shortage of wood for fuel, and certainly not of those demands causing deforestation. It is instead evidence of truly unprecedented demands being generally and sustainably met.

And despite these unprecedented demands, the intensity with which under-woods were exploited for fuel seems to have actually decreased. During the medieval population peaks, the woods and hedges that supplied London had been squeezed for more fuel by simply cropping the trunks and branches more often, cutting them away every six or seven years rather than waiting for them to grow into larger poles or logs. After the Black Death killed off half the population, the cropping cycle could again lengthen to about eleven. But under-woods in the mid-sixteenth century were being cropped on average only twelve or so years — about twice as long a cycle as before the Black Death — which by the nineteenth century had lengthened still further to fourteen or fifteen.20

The lengthening of the cropping cycle can imply a number of things, and we’ll get to them all. But one possibility is that in order to meet unprecedented demands, more firewood was being collected at the expense of the other major use of trees: for timber.

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Preserving the Planks

To be used as timber for tools, carts, furniture, ploughs, buildings, and ships, trees need to be allowed to grow a very long time. Whereas coppices could be cut for fuel after just a handful of years, a typical elm would not be ready to be used as timber in a ship for at least a few decades, and an oak for a century. Growing timber could often be a multi-generational affair, and it was typically only preserved by those with a permanent interest in the land on which it grew — the families of the nobility and gentry who owned it. (Even these aristocrats, however, were often be tempted to fell a tree early to meet their own expenses rather than allowing it to grow to maturity to benefit their children or even grandchildren. They could be especially tempted when times were tough, or when fuel was in high demand.) Given timber had a much greater value per volume than firewood, it could also bear the cost of being transported from much further inland, or even imported from Norway or the Baltic. Indeed, sourcing timber from further afield allowed the trees planted closer to London to concentrate on producing fuel — something that made the coppices even more efficient, too, because the taller timber trees would no longer put the twiggy underwood exploited for fuel in the shade.21

Yet timber was, increasingly, a material of war. In the 1540s, in preparation for an invasion of France, Henry VIII oversaw the biggest build-up of the royal navy that England had ever seen. For a few years at least, timber must have been in higher demand than at any time before. But given their slow-growing nature, domestic supplies could not immediately be expanded to meet demand. Other than buying timber from abroad, and so potentially placing England at the mercy of other countries, domestic supplies would at best have a decades-long lag, and may not have responded by expanding at all, unless people believed that the demand for timber would still be much higher in a few decades’ time. And so in 1543 Parliament began the first of many moves to create a strategic timber reserve, requiring that for every acre of coppice exploited for fuel, at least twelve trees were to be left standing to grow into timber, on pain of a fine.22

The Weald was exempted, perhaps because iron was just as important for national defence, but Parliament soon began to worry about how to balance the rival demands. In 1559 it forbade the felling for ironmaking of any oak, beech or ash tree that was already a square foot at the base (just under 930cm squared). Underwood could still of course be used, which ironmakers had every incentive to grow. And the restriction only applied to within fourteen miles of any major river or the coast, again exempting the Weald, so that any timber further inland — apart from that already protected by the 1543 statute — would still be fair game.23

By 1572, however, Parliament was again discussing whether it needed to introduce even more protections for timber — the first time we have some record of the actual debate. The proposal was to stop the iron industry from using any wood at all within twenty miles of London, but it was hotly opposed by members of Parliament with constituencies in the Weald. One pointed out that there were Wealden woods within that range that had never supplied wood to London at all. Another argued that there was no major scarcity of wood to justify such a major restriction on how the owners of woodland used their own property. And another noted that given the aim of the proposal was to preserve timber, which was already protected by the 1559 law, it was puzzling as to why they should restrict ironworks from felling underwood too.

Against them, however, the MPs for London and its surroundings explicitly noted that if more ironworks were allowed to increase the demand for fuel, then they would of course prevent trees from being allowed to grow into timber: “It has been said [the bill] is no help for preservation of timber, but experience shall show that if coppicewood be consumed, the timber trees must needs be cut down for provision of fuel for the City.” They even complained that London was beginning to lose some of its woodworking trades. The city had apparently, though rather improbably, already lost all its makers of wooden frames for saddles.24 Yet the need cannot have been all that pressing or convincing to their fellow MPs. The bill managed to become law only nine years later in 1581, when it restricted all ironworks from operating within 22 miles of London or the Thames. And again the Weald was exempted, save for a few miles around some nearby port towns.25 Only as late as 1585 was the Weald’s special exemption from the old 1559 regulations removed, and this only brought it in line with the rules being followed by every other iron-making region in the country.26

Iron was not, of course, the only threat to the strategic timber reserve. In 1559, Elizabeth I issued a proclamation to forbid the sale of any English-made ships to foreigners, effectively banning a major form of timber export.27 And in 1605 her successor James I was to issue a proclamation banning the building of any new houses in or around London, on the grounds that timber was in short supply for the navy, and because Londoners had resorted to using cheap beech instead of longer-lasting oak. The only exception he allowed was for buildings whose facades and walls were made entirely of stone or brick, which had the advantage of being less of a fire hazard too.28 By 1615, James — who was also James VI of Scotland, and having succeeded to the English throne liked to style himself the first ruler of a united Great Britain — was hopeful that much like it had been said of the first Roman emperor Augustus that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, so “the first king of Great Britain might be able to say in some proportion, that we had found our city and suburbs of London of sticks, and left them of brick.”29

Worrying about maintaining a large strategic timber reserve, however, is not the same as timber facing an actual shortage. Before James’s proclamation, London had already quadrupled in population over the course of 1550-1600, and was continuing to grow. Yet it still managed to find the timber for building, and even managed to rebuild vast swathes of the city all at once following the Great Fire of 1666 (though this rebuilding did, as you’d expect, cause timber prices to temporarily spike). Both England’s navy and its much larger merchant marine grew considerably at the same time too, with the merchant fleet doubling in tonnage between the 1560s and 1629, and more than doubling again by 1686.30 Yet even despite this extraordinary growth, by the nineteenth century more timber than had been used in the construction of the entire English merchant fleet afloat in 1629 could be consumed for shipbuilding in just some single years.31

A lot of England’s timber need was met by importing it from Scandinavia and the Baltic. But the country’s own timber reserves also seem to have held up. Massive ocean-going ships being built in the 1620s were able to source their timber from counties close to London like Essex and Kent, with little apparent effect on prices.32 And those same counties were still producing timber a hundred years on. The Suffolk town of Ipswich, not far up the coast from London, was said to have “plenty of timber and plank” for shipbuilding in the 1610s,33 and was said to have “an inexhaustible storehouse of timber” over a hundred years after that.34 By the 1720s much the same was said of the timber of the Weald, even though the region still produced iron, while the southern coastal county of Hampshire, which supplied the massive demands of the royal shipyards at Portsmouth, was growing timber in such plenty that many of its older oaks had been left to grow too long, past maturity, and could no longer be used.35 And that was not even to mention the timber grown up-river from London in the inland counties of Hertfordshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire. Buckinghamshire in the 1720s was said to be overgrown with beech, used in London for making the wheels of carts and all sorts of furniture.36 Just as with wood fuel, the story of English timber was not one of shortage, but of growing and unprecedented demands being generally met.

Yet despite the lack of any major shortage of either firewood or timber, after 1570 England did experience dramatic deforestation.

Fuel versus Food

Although firewood was needed to heat people’s homes, trees were also fiercely competing for space with crops and grass. Nobody ever destroyed woodland because of the demand for wood or timber, but they did grub up trees by their roots to convert the land beneath them into ploughable fields, vegetable gardens, or pasture. The original 1543 legislation, which preserved a certain amount of timber trees for every acre of coppice, also forbade those coppices from first being grubbed up for pasture or tillage. But it seems not to have had much effect. As one chronicler put it in 1577, “every small occasion in my time is enough to cut down a great wood”37, while in 1607 a forest surveyor judged that within the previous two decades the country’s woodlands had receded by two thirds. Wood was, he said, was now “rather held a hurtful weed than a profitable fruit, and therefore the wasting of it held providence, to the end that corn, a more profitable increase, might be brought in instead of it.”38 In other words, it was increasingly considered mere prudence to deforest an area and sow it with more profitable grain.

By the 1610s, woodland was said to be just a third the value of pasture.39 And by the 1680s, the apothecary John Houghton, a fellow of the Royal Society with a sophisticated understanding of both economics and agriculture, was even arguing that all woodland within twelve miles of any major river — the places where wood had been most essential — actually ought to be grubbed up. Because farmland yielded over three times as much annual income per acre, that added income that could be used to simply buy the timber and fuel from further inland or abroad. And farmland and its products provided a lot more employment than any woodland too.40

This is not to say that woodland wasn’t valued at all. A Swedish visitor in the 1740s was actually extremely impressed with the English for never wasting their wood. He noted how they carefully gathered up their sawdust, any shavings from carpentry, and even fallen leaves, all to be left to dry and then used as fuel. Even when he witnessed woodlands being destroyed, he admired how the stumps and roots were never left to waste but chopped up and used. “The people here know”, he admired, “how to place the right value on woodland and to take care of such a precious resource”.41

But the ancient balance between food and fuel was being drastically changed, and the thing that tipped the scales was the arrival of a much cheaper fuel for people’s homes. What changed was the arrival of coal.

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The Land that Coal Made

Wherever coal could go, Britain’s Fangorns gave way to the neat fields and hedgerows of The Shire. As one writer put it in the 1690s, “where wood fuel is … supplanted by that of coals, men are easily tempted to quit the preservation of their woods and convert their ground to tillage in hopes to find more advantage”.42 Wherever coal appeared, land that previously had to be devoted to fuel — mostly wood, but also peat-filled marshland and gorse-covered heath — was rapidly converted to agriculture instead.

In fact, Britain’s whole landscape seemed to invert, reversing the pattern that had held for centuries. Whereas coppices had always needed to be close to the major rivers and coasts, or within a few miles overland of London, from the 1570s many of these woods were among the first to go.

This was because coal invaded from the coasts. Because coal was so heavy, it was extremely expensive to transport over long distances by land, but relatively easy by river or sea. Carrying it overland for just 10 miles (or 16 kilometres), cost about the same as transporting it a whopping 250 miles (or 402 kilometres) by ship — twenty-five times as far.43 It even came to be most commonly called “sea coal”, mere “coal” usually meaning charcoal instead.44 Other than the places closest to the coal mines themselves, or where there was some other local fuel available like peat or furze, the first areas to experience deforestation were often those where coal could wend its way by water.

In the coal-rich Lowlands Scotland, which by 1500 was already almost devoid of trees,45 a foreign visitor in the 1710s wondered at how “Nature has provided coal in several places where it was so much the more necessary for want of wood”.46 Yet Nature was apparently generous everywhere else as well. The Isle of Man, off England’s northwestern coast, was by the 1570 described as being devoid of wood — it imported coal from the mines of Cumbria.47 On England’s northeastern coast in the 1570s, “great woods have been, but now utterly decayed and no wood at all remains” — this was just up the coast from where Newcastle’s coal was mined.48 The land all around Dublin in 1600 was full of rich pasture and farmland while “wanting wood” — it had some local turf, but also imported “coal brought out of England”.49 Western Cornwall at about the same time was said to lack trees too — as well as turf, its homes were largely heated “by stone coal, fetched out of Wales”.50 And meanwhile in southern Wales itself, one writer described how “those that dwell near the coal, or that may have it carried by water with ease, use most coal fires in their kitchens, and some in their halls”, while also noting — again without making the connection — that its “diverse great corn fields were in times past great forests and woods.”51 It was, of course, no providential coincidence at all.

The scars of coal’s seaborne invasion were even reflected in the very hedges dividing the fields. A Swedish botanist visiting England in the 1740s noted how closer to London and its river, the Thames, the fields were divided by mere earthen banks and ditches, often covered with grass to maximise pasturage, while smaller gardens were enclosed by brick walls. A little further inland, the banks were increasingly topped by short bushes that provided a little fuel, with the walls giving way to fences of sticks or recycled timber planks. And a few miles inland, where coal was most costly, both bank and fence gave way to thick hedge, often interspersed with taller timber trees.52

This pattern could not have occurred thanks to the demands of a growing population. Extra people needed both food and warmth to survive, and when population peaked before the Black Death, the woodlands near London had been relied upon more than ever rather than being grubbed up. Without coal, the pressure of a growing population would have created a landscape more akin to that described by an English visitor to northern Italy at the start of the seventeenth century, who reported how farmers were forced to “make use of the very furrows between the acres, for as in the acre he sows corn, so in the furrows he plants elm trees, the lopping whereof serve him to burn”.53 In over-populated Italy at the tail end of its Renaissance, the lack of an alternative fuel meant that crops and trees had to be crammed into the same space, which then had to compete with one another for sunshine and nutrients, usually to the detriment of both.

In Britain, by contrast, crops and trees did not have to share space, and so fewer trees were needed at all. The rise of coal was not caused by deforestation. Deforestation was caused by the arrival of cheap coal.

Axes as Allies: Guardians of the Grove

Throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, dozens of petitioners for patents emphasised how their inventions could save the kingdom’s firewood and timber, and help bring down its price. Usually they suggested doing this by replacing the use of charcoal with peat or coal. But, ironically, whenever their inventions were successful they had the opposite effect.

For it soon became obvious that industry’s huge hunger for wood was one of the only things that prevented deforestation in the lands that coal had invaded.54 Wood-less, coal-dependent western Cornwall in 1600 clearly could grow trees if it wanted to — it did actually have a few coppices, but only wherever charcoal was needed to smelt the region’s tin.55 And by the 1720s one of the few major woods to cling on just southeast of London was mainly supplying a kind of kindling largely used in the upstairs bedrooms of the city’s taverns, presumably because they had not yet all had fireplaces installed for burning coal.56

Many trees were also kept around by demand for timber — the woods of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire increasingly specialised away from producing fuel, to instead supply London’s woodworking trades — as well as by demand for fruit. Kent, for example, was famous for its many cherry orchards. And plenty of trees were planted for the gentry’s hunting grounds and parks, or for shade and decoration, much like those that line our city streets today — which we now don’t think about as sources of firewood at all. Perhaps most importantly of all, an untold quantity of oak bark was required for tannin, used to treat animal hides into leather. In the 1670s the inventor Charles Howard, younger brother of the fifth duke of Norfolk, even developed a way to extract tannin from all the other parts of an oak tree, and from other trees as well — a technique that he hoped would “greatly improve the value of under-woods”, providing the demand to help preserve them from agriculture’s advance.57

Even iron-making, having once been seen as the enemy of timber, was soon recognised as one of the only things keeping the more accessible woodlands standing. After imported iron from Sweden began putting many English ironworks out of business, by the 1670s commentators were worrying at how their closure was only accelerating deforestation: “for when ironworks were carried on, both wood and [char]coals would yield ready moneys, which encouraged the owners not only to preserve the coppices and woods from destruction, but also to plant and promote more”, whereas now, “for want of ironworks they are destroyed, both wood and timber, root and branch, and that more and more every year”.58

And so the same thing happened in industry after industry whenever coal could take wood’s place. Take those woods that had managed to cling on just southeast of London to provide wood for tavern bedrooms. Once the taverns started “to make coal fires in their upper rooms”, one writer observed, “what an alteration it makes in the value of those woods … and how many more of them than usual are yearly stubbed up, and the land made fit for the plough”.59

Much the same thing happened when glassmakers made the switch to using coal in the early 1610s. As members of Parliament later put it when investigating the patent for making glass with coal, one of the big problems was that “as it makes wood cheap it makes the coal dearer” — a sure-fire way to accelerate deforestation while raising the price of the only alternative fuel for people’s homes.60 Indeed, when the patent was first being applied for in 1610, the objection was raised that “gentlemen well wooded would be hindered in the sale of their woods” — to which the patentees responded by arguing that because they would have a monopoly on the technique, they would actually keep wood prices high by preventing other glassmakers from making the switch from wood to coal!61 (Considering that just a few years later the patentees then persuaded the king to ban the use of wood for making glass entirely, they were clearly willing to make whatever convoluted argument was necessary just to get their way.)

Indeed, worries about deforestation were seemingly at their loudest when the glass industry was making the switch. If we look more closely at the complaints at the time, they were actually written about problems with the supply of coal, not of wood — just like how in recent years many countries happily imported natural gas instead of investing in nuclear power, but then their politicians and pundits only lamented the lack of nuclear when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted the supply of gas. People cared most about wood only when something happened to the fuel that had replaced it. As the 1610s writer Arthur Standish put it, “it is apparent that coal mines do decay too fast in most countries”, especially inland, where having already grubbed up the trees, the sudden lack of coal meant that many of the poorest in those regions now had to resort to burning cow dung as fuel instead. Catastrophe loomed, he warned, if the coal sent by the coast were to run out as well.

Nobody, Standish pointed out, had back in the 1570s been worried about a lack of wood — it was then thought “a thing impossible”, when even “the poorest sort scorned to eat a piece of meat roasted with sea coals”, as many of the rich now did. But with the country having become dependent on coal, “with much more reason may it now be feared that in the like time coals may be more decayed”. Coals, he pointed out, could “never more grow or increase”, whereas wood was at least a sustainable source.62 As another author starkly put it, “if coal should fail (as it is too apparent it begins to grow dear and scarce, and in many places there is none to be had) how then should we do for … fuel?”63 Then, just as now, the lack of a particular fuel only became truly stark when the alternative everyone had come to depend on was suddenly in doubt. Even the king backed Standish’s book.64

But although the pundits and politicians of the 1610s worried that the coal supply was on the brink of actual exhaustion, the effects of new demand for coal from glass furnaces would have looked pretty similar from the perspective of ordinary people simply trying to buy the fuel to heat their own home. All they would have really seen was the increased price. Indeed, the last time there had been widespread complaints of a fuel shortage in London, in 1603, was not long after the imposition of a tax on all coal shipped by sea — one that was removed, after lots of complaints, only from Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, and western Scotland. Poor Londoners were stuck with having to simply make do, perhaps following the advice of the inventor Hugh Plat, who not only suggested the planting of fast-growing willow trees, but in the meantime had plenty of tips on how to purify the cheapest and stinkiest of coals.65

Now, some might wonder why increases to the price of coal, if wood was being simultaneously made cheaper, did not result in people flocking back to burning wood again. After all, growing trees did seem more sustainable, and it’s not like lots of people hadn’t also been sounding the alarm on coal dependence for many years. A forest surveyor in 1607, writing of a county since swallowed up by London’s expansion, cried “who sees not that the general extirpation and stocking up of coppice ground in Middlesex will not breed want to them that shall succeed?” He warned that land, “if all for corn and grass, it were like Midas his wish” — enriching in the short-term, but soon to be lamented as a curse.66 But the problem was that coal almost always responded much faster to increased prices than wood ever could.

Not only did the coal never run out — there’s still plenty in the ground, even though the UK closed its last coal-fuelled power plant earlier this week — but whenever one mine failed or demand for coal increased, there turned out to almost always be yet another seam that could be exploited by simply and quickly digging another pit nearby. Planting new trees, by contrast, was a slow and risky business, so that by the time a tree had grown enough to yield any fuel, prices might have fallen back down again. And to make matters worse, newly-sprouted trees had to be fenced off and defended from both wild animals and hungry cattle for years, so that vast tracts of land could not even, in the meantime, provide any income from pasture. Whereas the cost of digging a coal mine was simply the time and money spent on actually digging it, the cost of planting woodland also included the massive loss from no longer using that land for food.

So whenever fuel prices increased, coal pretty much always beat wood to the punch. And whenever fuel prices decreased, only woodland retreated because there was so much more that the land could be used for instead. Coal mines might occasionally cease to be worked from lack of demand, but being otherwise worthless they could be almost instantly re-opened when things recovered, in a way that woodland converted to agricultural land could not. Coal supply was immediately able to advance, whereas woodland at best resisted retreat. Once coal had arrived, it was almost impossible for wood to fight back.

It’s no wonder that people at the time complained of a wood shortage and frequently noted how wood’s prices were on the rise. After all, wherever coal replaced it first as a fuel for people’s homes, and then in blacksmithing, brewing, glass-making, iron-making, and more, what little woodland was left was only kept around for a dwindling number of well-paying industries and for the recreation of the rich. Such a diminished supply was going to be far too expensive for ordinary people with much smaller budgets for fuelling their homes. Yet although prices of wood rose, this was the inevitable consequence, not the cause, of coal’s rise.

The cause of coal’s rise was, instead, that from the 1570s it very suddenly became very cheap, making itself a lot more attractive as a fuel for people’s homes, and encouraging them to adopt it even when they lived hundreds of miles away from the source. And the reason for that sudden change, I’ve discovered, had a great deal to do with salt. More on that next time.

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It’s difficult to appreciate salt’s historical significance because it’s now so abundant. Societies used to worry about salt supplies — for preparing and preserving food — as a matter of basic survival. Now we use the vast majority of it for making chemicals or chucking on our roads to keep them from getting icy, while many salt-making plants don’t even operate at full capacity. Yet the story of how we came to achieve salt superabundance is a long and complicated one.

In Part I of this series we looked at salt as a kind of general-purpose technology for the improvement of food, as well as a major revenue-raiser for empires — especially when salt-producing coastal areas could dominate salt-less places inland. In Part II we then looked at a couple of places that were all the more interesting for being both coastal and remarkably salt-less: the coast of Bengal and the Baltic Sea. One was to be exploited by the English East India Company, which needlessly propped up a Bengalese salt industry at great human cost. The other, however, was to prove a more contested prize — and ultimately the place that catalysed the emergence of salt superabundance.

It’s worth a brief recap of where we left the Baltic. Whereas the ocean is on average 3.5% salt, along the Baltic coast it’s at just 0.3% or lower, which would require about twelve times as much time and fuel to produce a given quantity of salt. Although there are a few salt springs near the coast, they were nowhere near large enough to supply the whole region. So from the thirteenth century the Baltic’s salt largely came from the inland salt springs at Lüneburg, supplied via the cities of Lübeck and Hamburg downstream. These two cities had a common interest against the kingdom of Denmark, which controlled the straits between the North and Baltic seas, and created a coalition of trading cities that came to be known as the Hanseatic League. The League resoundingly defeated the Danes in the 1360s and 1430s so that their trade in salt — and the fish they preserved with it — could remain free.

But Lüneburg salt — and by extension the League itself — was soon to face competition.

Lüneburg could simply not keep up with the growth of Baltic demand, as the region’s population became larger and wealthier. And so more and more salt had to come from farther afield, from the Bay of Biscay off France’s western coast, as well as from Setúbal in Portugal and from southern Spain.1 This “bay salt” — originally referring to just the Bay of Bourgneuf, but then extended to the entire Bay of Biscay, and often to all Atlantic solar-evaporated salt — was made by the sun and the wind slowly evaporated the seawater from a series of shallow coastal pools, with the salt forming in coarse, large-grained pieces that were skimmed off the top. Bay salt, however, inevitably ended up mixed with some of the sand and dirt from the bottoms of the pools in which it was held, while the seawater was never filtered, meaning that the salt was often brown, green, grey or black depending on the skill of the person doing the skimming — only the most skilled could create a bay salt that was white. And it often still contained lots of other chemicals found in seawater, like magnesium chloride and sulphate, calcium carbonate and sulphate, potassium chloride and so on, known as bitterns.2

Bay or “black” salt, made with the heat of the sun, was thus of a lower quality than the white salt boiled and refined from inland salt springs or mined as rock. Its dirt discoloured and adulterated food. Its large grains meant it dissolved slowly and unevenly, slowing the rate at which it started to penetrate and preserve the meat and fish — an especially big problem in warmer climates where flesh spoiled quickly. And its bitterns gave it a bitter, gall taste, affecting the texture of the flesh too. Bay salt, thanks to the bitterns, would “draw forth oil and moisture, leading to dryness and hardness”, as well as consuming “the goodness or nutrimental part of the meat, as moisture, gravy, etc.”3 The resulting meat or fish was often left shrunken and tough, while bitterns also slowed the rate at which salt penetrated them too. Bay-salted meat or fish could often end up rotten inside.

But for all these downsides, bay salt required little labour and no fuel. Its main advantage was that it was extremely cheap — as little as half the price of white Lüneburg salt in the Baltic, despite having to be brought from so much farther away.4 Its taste and colour made it unsuitable for use in butter, cheese, or on the table, which was largely reserved for the more expensive white salts. But bay salt’s downsides in terms of preserving meat and fish could be partially offset by simply applying it in excessive quantities — every three barrels of herring, for example, required about a barrel of bay salt to be properly preserved.5

By 1400, Hanseatic merchants were importing bay salt to the Baltic in large and growing quantities, quickly outgrowing the traditional supplies. No other commodity was as necessary or popular: over 70% of the ships arriving to Reval (modern-day Tallinn in Estonia) in the late fifteenth century carried salt, most of it from France. But Hanseatic ships alone proved insufficient to meet the demand. The Danes, Swedes, and even the Hanseatic towns of the eastern Baltic, having so long been under the thumb of Lübeck’s monopoly over salt from Lüneburg, were increasingly happy to accept bay salt brought by ships from the Low Countries — modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. Indeed, when these interloping Dutch ships were attacked by Lübeck in 1438, most of the rest of the Hanseatic League refused Lübeck’s call to arms. When even the Hanseatic-installed king of Denmark sided with the Dutch as well, Lübeck decided to back down and save face. The 1441 peace treaty allowed the Dutch into the Baltic on equal terms.6 Hanseatic hegemony in the Baltic was officially over.

The Dutch, by the 1440s, had thus gained a share of the carrying trade, exchanging Atlantic bay salt for the Baltic’s grain, timber, and various naval stores like hemp for rope and pitch for caulking. But this was just the beginning.

The Dutch Salten Age

Situated on the wet and windy coast of the North Sea, the Dutch had weather that was hardly conducive to making salt. What they did have, however, were plentiful peat fens near the coast, which were frequently flooded by the sea. By digging, drying, and then burning this salt-laden peat, the resulting salty ashes could then be added to water to create a strong brine. This could then be boiled in shallow pans over a peat fire to create a fine, white, high-quality salt. Dutch fen salt, unlike French bay salt, was exceptionally good at preserving fish — especially herring, the staple of both the Baltic and the North Sea.7 But digging peat near the sea-shore had to be highly restricted to prevent damage to the dikes that kept a low, flat country being flooded by the sea, while the process of digging, drying and refining was labour-intensive. Fen salt was costly and impossible to scale.

Although digging the salt-laden peat near the coast was risky, however, digging ordinary peat from further inland was not. The supply of this peat, for all intents and purposes, proved inexhaustible. When the surface peat of the lower-lying bogs of Holland and western Utrecht began to be exhausted in the 1530s, the Dutch developed dredging hoops to cut peat from below the water level and haul it up, turning the bogs into lakes that could be drained to create new agricultural land, as well as building canals to the higher-lying bogs of the more northerly regions like Friesland and Groningen. Indeed, from the 1650s the supply of peat still far outstripped the demand for it, which continued well into the eighteenth century. Peat was so cheap and plentiful that many of the drainage and canal-digging projects to get more of it were cancelled, only to be looked into again over a century later.8

So with plentiful peat, and having inserted themselves into the Baltic trade, the Dutch from around the 1450s were able to transform some of the French bay salt they were carrying into a much better product. By dissolving the bay salt in some water and then boiling it over a peat fire, they could remove much of the dirt and treat it — usually by adding egg whites or a bit of ox blood — to remove the bitterns as well. The resulting refined salt, called “salt upon salt”, was pure and white, while plentiful peat meant that it produced cheaply and huge quantities, undercutting the price of white Lüneburg salt, allowing Dutch merchants to expand their share of the Baltic trade.9 Having in 1441 gained a mere foothold in the trade, by 1500 about 50% of all ships entering the Baltic were Dutch.10

The Baltic trade was especially carried out by the poor inhabitants of the coastal, northern Dutch provinces of Zeeland, Friesland and Holland. They exchanged salt in the Baltic for vast quantities of rye — grain that they brought to feed the extraordinary urbanisation of nearby Flanders and Brabant, the southern parts of the Low Countries, where cities like Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp became northern Europe’s most important centres of industry and commerce. Baltic grain was also in high demand in France, Spain, Portugal, and eventually even Italy. But this demand for grain soon far exceeded the Baltic’s demand for salt. By the 1550s, although a third of Dutch ships entering the Baltic brought salt, the remaining two thirds brought nothing at all, achieving their needed sailing weight by filling their holds with worthless ballast. The vast majority of Dutch traders had to pay for Baltic grain with cold, hard, silver cash.11

The huge profits from grain-carrying alone made the trip worthwhile: replacing the ballast with what salt could find a market was thus essentially costless. And as the fishermen of Holland, Friesland and Zeeland were relatively poor, the carrying trade proved a decent earner during the fishing off-seasons, when they would have struggled to find employment. Given the lack of other options, the Dutch could transport goods at a lower cost than that of the Hanseatic ships because the sailors could be paid much lower wages — a cost advantage that was later solidified by developing ways to employ fewer sailors per ship.12 The relatively warm climate of the Low Countries also meant that they could set out to France while most Hanseatic ports were still ice-bound, getting salt to the Baltic and returning home with grain again all in one season before the ice set back in.13 These factors all helped the Dutch to maintain their share of the trade against Hanseatic competition.

But to be able to pay for more than a fraction of Baltic grain, the Dutch needed a way to earn silver from elsewhere. The northern Dutch provinces like Holland, Zeeland and Friesland were to grow well and truly rich not from the mere carrying of grain and salt, but because of what they was able to do with them, creating higher-value exports that earned the silver to buy still more.

The Dutch very quickly carried far more grain than they needed merely to feed themselves, so it soon became abundant and cheap in their own lands. Their farms were able to safely shift to growing higher-value crops, including various dyestuffs for cloths, and especially fodder and pasture for cows. Huge herds walked 350 kilometres or so each year from Holstein, in southern Denmark (now in Germany), to grow fat on the pastures of Friesland.14 And with plenty of cows and refined white salt, the Dutch diet soon involved plenty of butter and cheese.15 Foreigners in 1600 referred to the northern Dutch as “butter-mouths” with one English visitor remarking that “butter is the first and last dish at the table, whereof they make all sauces”, adding that Dutch traders travelling between towns “carry with them cheese, and boxes of butter for their food, whereupon in like sort strangers [foreigners] call them ‘butter boxes’, and nothing is more ordinary than for citizens of good account and wealth to sit at their doors … holding in their hands and eating a great lump of bread and butter with a luncheon of cheese.”16 Salted butter and cheese became important Dutch exports to the south and west too, helping to pay for bay salt and earning some of the silver needed for more Baltic grain.

But above all, the northern Dutch were to build their wealth by adding their salt to fish.

As I mentioned last time, Lübeck’s and Hamburg’s access to salt supplies had given them unique advantages in the herring fishing industries of the North Sea and Baltic. Dutch salt-upon-salt, however, was just about as good as any other refined white salt for preserving fish, while also being much cheaper and more easily scaled. France, Spain and Portugal, with plenty of coast and infinite sunshine, could easily expand the production of bay salt to serve as the basic feedstock, while Dutch peat to fuel its refining was, as we’ve seen, for all intents and purposes inexhaustible. By contrast the traditional sources of the Baltic’s white salt, like the Lüneburg salt springs, were constrained by the supply of wood fuel for boiling the brine. To expand in the same way would have required the creation and maintenance of many more forests up-river into Germany, on land that was already spoken for, and thus expensive to convert. There was simply no contest: thanks to their uniquely expandable supply of white salt, the northern Dutch could catch and preserve far more herring to a high quality.

Which is exactly what they then did. Over the course of the fifteenth century the Dutch were able to expand their herring catch in a way that left other nations in awe.

Traditionally, small fishing boats, each with about six to ten men, would go out into coastal waters, catching as many as they could and then rushing back to shore. A little might be eaten that same day, fresh. Some more might be lightly salted, to make it last a couple of days longer. But for anything more, the herring had to be gutted and drained of its blood to remove the parts most likely to spoil, then packed into barrels of almost a thousand fish apiece among hefty layers of salt. The faster the gutting and packing could be begun and done — a skilled gutter could handle up to 2,000 herring per hour — the fresher and longer-lasting the fish, and the further it could be sent.17 In the North Sea, the major traditional fishing waters were off Norway and the coast of England. In the Baltic, they were off Scania, the southern tip of Sweden — waters so heaving with herring in August to November most years that the boats reputedly had trouble using their rudders, and were “scarce able with wind and oar to break through them”.18

But by the 1410s, the fishermen of Holland and Zeeland were, quite literally, taking things further. They ranged far to the north, beyond Scotland to the Shetlands and Orkneys, as well as farther out into the North Sea, where the herring could be found at a much earlier stage in their lifecycle and some 30-50% larger. Here they would put out a huge dragnet, the vleet, combining over forty smaller nets to form a weighted curtain 1.4 kilometres long, hanging from floats to a depth of 19 metres — about the length of a bowling lane.19 And to achieve all this, the Dutch were sending larger ships (built from salt-bought Baltic and Norwegian timber and naval stores), which carried the salt, barrels, and workers to immediately do all the gutting and packing of the herring while they were still out at sea. These floating factories, the herring busses, served by a fleet of smaller boats shuttling supplies from the coast, freed the Dutch from having to stay close to shore. The development of the herring buss allowed the Dutch to fish on the high seas, going wherever and whenever was best.20

By the 1460s, Dutch-caught North Sea herring had displaced Baltic herring — cured in Scania and carried by the Hanse — from the markets of the Low Countries, including the wealthier southern parts like Brabant and Flanders. And by 1500, the flow of herring into the North Sea was reversed, with the Dutch bringing about half of the herring sold each year in the main Baltic grain hub of Gdansk.21 Dutch-caught herring was soon being exported up the river Rhine into western Germany as far as Switzerland, as well as to England. And it especially went to France, Portugal, and Spain. Having bought grain, timber, and naval stores in the Baltic, and bay salt in France and Iberia, the northern Dutch now sold back salted butter, cheese, and especially herrings to all. These higher-value exports were the main way to the silver needed for the Baltic trade, especially from Antwerp — the main exit point into northern Europe for the silver mined in southern Germany. Holland’s port of Amsterdam was to become Europe’s greatest hub for all sort of provisions and raw materials despite the Dutch growing almost none of it themselves.

The Dutch recognised the importance of this “mother trade” in salt, grain and herring, as did their envious neighbours. For the English, Dutch brazenness in fishing right off England’s coast and then selling their own herring back to them was a sore bone of contention and a depressing reminder of wasted opportunity. Already noticed in the 1550s,22 it was still being complained of in the 1700s.23 As one English mariner lamented in the 1610s, “O slothfull England and careless countrymen, look but on these fellows that we call the plump Hollanders, behold their diligence in fishing, and our own careless negligence.” Despite repeated attempts to compete with it, for over a century the Dutch herring fishery proved unassailable. And it’s telling that the Dutch banned the export of their fishing tackle, drag-nets, and refined white salt. But the greatest and more immediate threat of all came not from their competitors, but from Spain.

Since 1433, almost the whole of the Low Countries had been united under the rule of the duke of Burgundy, who from the 1510s was also the Habsburg archduke of Austria, king of Naples and Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor, and king of Spain, including its vast possessions in the New World. The seventeen provinces of the Low Countries were thus part — indeed, the centre — of the vast Catholic Habsburg empire. The unifying emperor Charles V was born in Ghent, in wealthy Flanders, and both he and his successor to the Spanish empire, Philip II, based their court at Brussels, in nearby Brabant. In the early sixteenth century then, northern Dutch herring busses thrived under the protection of this mighty empire.

Yet when Philip decided to decamp to Spain in 1559, and to crack down on his increasingly Protestant subjects in the Low Countries, in 1566 they rose up in revolt. A vast Spanish army arrived the following year, and at first seemed to have pacified the region. But in the 1570s the rebels began to claw back control. In 1581, although Philip had in the meantime also added the entirety of the Portuguese empire to his domain, the remaining unconquered Dutch provinces formally declared their independence as a united entity, and in 1588 decided to become a republic. The tiny northern Dutch provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, and four others thus formed the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands — the famous Dutch Republic — having against all the odds fought the greatest empire on earth to a stalemate.

Faced with a hostile Spain and Portugal, the merchants of the Dutch Republic were often forced to find new markets. In the 1590s, for example, they ventured into the Arctic, selling salt and herring to Russia via the port of Arkhangelsk. And they especially needed to find new sources of solar salt. French bay salt alone often proved insufficient, and so they ventured down to the coast of Africa to the salt pans of the Cape Verde islands, as well as across the Atlantic to the Americas. There, for many years, they exploited the salt lagoon of Punta de Araya on the Venezuelan coast. The Spanish blocked access to it in 1622 by building a large fort, and so the Dutch went looking for new sources in the Caribbean, at Tortuga and Saint Martin, until the Spanish drove them away from both in 1633.24

Yet despite this game of New World whack-a-mole, the Dutch still just about managed to keep their commerce afloat. It was widely acknowledged that whereas the Spanish empire drew vast quantities of gold and silver from the New World, the Dutch seemed to have as great a “gold mine” of their own in the humble salted herrings of the North Sea.25

Peat had given the Dutch a special advantage in the refining of imported bay salt, allowing them to create higher-value exports with which to drive their trade. And it was seeking to prop up these imports that propelled them into new and unfamiliar seas. The “mother trade” formed a solid foundation for the Dutch to rapidly move into still more trades. But in the late seventeenth century, just as the Dutch Republic was coming to the height of its extraordinary commerce, a new competitor emerged to undermine its foundations. Peat, albeit plentiful, was about to contend with coal. More on that next time.

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In last month’s post I introduced the importance of salt. It was a major input to agriculture, and was widely used for preserving food, staving off the corruption of animal matter as though it had entered into corpses like a “second soul”. It was, in fact, a basic necessity of life, which made it an ideal revenue-raiser for kingdoms, empires and republics all over the world. The geography of salt sources, as we saw, may even have defined the contours of many states.

It’s difficult to appreciate salt’s historical significance, however, because it’s now so extraordinarily abundant.

People used to worry about salt supplies as a matter of survival, or at the very least of staving off economic catastrophe. Without salt, a population would become weaker, more prone to disease, and ultimately die. And even if enough salt made it directly onto people’s dinner tables, it would spell food shortages. Without enough salt, no fish, meat, butter or cheese might ever make it to market, while livestock would be thinner and yield less meat. Draught animals would weaken too, becoming less able to pull ploughs or transport things. All of the basic foundations of the economy, overwhelmingly reliant on agriculture, would be undermined. Any further use for salt was a nice-to-have, only made possible if it was especially abundant — even in major industries like agriculture. Francis Bacon in the 1620s remarked how salt could in some cases be useful as a fertiliser for grain, but had to admit that it was “too costly” to do so at scale.1

Today, however, the vast majority of salt is used as an input to produce chemicals for industry, with a mere 12% used for preparing or preserving food. Indeed, we produce so much salt today that the second most common use of it worldwide is to merely dump it onto the roads of some countries merely to keep them from getting icy for part of the year. Salt became so abundant over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the main problem increasingly became how to find a use for it all. British salt, for example, came to be exported all over the world in the nineteenth century, but by 1888 almost all the country’s salt producers had to merge into a single company, the Salt Union, closing down various saltworks to try to restrict production and restore the industry to profitability. This failed, however, and despite the rise of new demand for salt in the chemical industries, in water softeners, and for de-icing roads, the huge salt-making plants established in Britain in the 1970s and 80s have still never had a chance to operate at full capacity.2

To what do we owe this saline superabundance? To understand, we first need to look at the four major ways to get salt.

If you had access to the coast, you could evaporate it from seawater, though this is only about 3.5% salt. The process involved a lot of dry, sunny weather, or else required a lot of fuel to burn. Or, you could try a technique called sleeching: where there were especially flat coastlines, the sea at its highest, twice-monthly spring tide would have an especially long range, soaking plenty of coastal sand, silt or mud with its brine. In the two weeks until the spring tide returned, provided the weather was dry enough, the surface of this salt-encrusted sand, silt or mud could then be scraped away and have water poured through it to yield a much stronger brine ready for boiling. What sleeching might save in fuel, however, it more than made up for by requiring a lot more land and hugely more labour — as well as still leaving you at the mercy of the weather.

If you were too far from the coast, you had to rely on an inland source. If you were lucky, you might find a briny inland spring or lake that had been enriched by salt deposited millions of years ago underground. The brine of an inland salt spring could be much stronger than seawater, requiring a lot less fuel or sun to evaporate the water away. The salt springs at Northwich and Nantwich in Cheshire, in the northwest of England, were about 16% salt - over five times stronger than seawater. Those at Middlewich nearby, and at Upwich in Worcestershire, could be as high as 25% salt. Obtaining a given quantity of salt from such brine, when compared to ordinary seawater, could require just a ninth of the time and fuel.

Heavy rains, however, or flooding from nearby lakes and rivers, could threaten to dilute such sources. Control of the Sambhar salt lake in north-western India, for example, had allowed the allied Rajput kingdoms of Amber and Marwar, later known as Jaipur and Jodhpur, to throw off the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century, and with the spread of the railways in the late nineteenth century the lake would become the entire subcontinent’s chief source of salt. But although in a good year in the 1880s it could produce over 250,000 tons of the stuff, in a bad year, thanks to a floods or monsoons, this could plummet to just 14,000 or even just 3,000 tons — a drop in output of 94-98%.3

Finally, if you were especially lucky, you might find the underground deposits that enriched such springs, and mine the salt as a rock. Although this might require a bit of fuel and water to refine it, dissolving it and evaporating it again to remove dirt and impurities, salt rock was the most energy-efficient salt source of all.

If you were unlucky, however, you might find yourself in a place where salt could not be made at all. We looked at a few of these in Part I, when I noted how salt-producing coastal areas could often come to dominate the salt-less places further inland — I mentioned, for example, how control of the salt-producing coasts meant control of the kingdom of France. There were fully inland examples too: how the Habsburg archdukes of Austria, with their salt springs at Altaussee, Hall-in-Tirol, Hallstatt, and Ischl, exerted control over the salt-less kingdom of Bohemia (more or less modern-day Czechia) — especially after 1706, when thanks to the Spanish War of Succession, they managed to exclude competing salt from the duchy of Bavaria.4 And even when such salt-forsaken places did not come under the rule of an especially monopolistic neighbouring salt-producer, their populations tended to suffer under heavy taxes on salt consumption, because rulers could more easily control and tax the salt that had to be imported.

Yet the most interesting places of all — one of which was to become the original catalyst for our current salt superabundance — were the kinds of places that had plenty of coastline but still struggled for salt.

Bengal Blues

Take Bengal, the bay region now split between Bangladesh and the north-eastern Indian province of West Bengal, where the rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra, having collected many other rivers along the way, all dump their waters, splitting the land into a labyrinthine delta. It might, on the face of it, be surprising that Bengal lacked salt. After all, the region is both warm and coastal. But it is also extremely humid, making it almost impossible to evaporate the seawater using the sun because the air is already so saturated, while the sheer quantity of fresh river water flowing out into the bay — especially during the rainier seasons, when those rivers swelled — meant that the salt in the bay’s seawater became all the more diluted. I mentioned above that on average water of the seas is about 3.5% salt. On the coast of Bengal, however, the surface water towards the coastline is just 2% in winter, falling to about 1% in the rainy summer. Closer to the river delta, from whence the brine was often actually taken, it can fall to under 0.5%. So not only was it not dry enough to make salt cheaply using the sun; you would often have needed perhaps three to seven times as much time and fuel as on other coastlines to extract a given quantity of salt.

It was no wonder, then, that Bengal — an extremely densely-populated place, even back in the sixteenth and seventeenth century — needed to import vast quantities of salt. Visiting Europeans noted how salt from the Sambhar lake was amassed at the Mughal capital at Agra, where it was loaded every summer onto huge boats of some three, four, or even five hundred tons each, and sent 1,500 kilometres or so down the rain-swollen Ganges all the way to Bengal. Hauling the boats back up against the current, even in winter when it was less strong, took five times as long.5 And there was a large coastal trade too, with salt imported from the places further down the Bay of Bengal — a lot of sun-evaporated salt was produced at Peddapalli, for example, now the village of Nizampatnam6 — as well as from around India’s tip, on its drier western coast near Bombay. Bengal’s appetite for salt even stretched as far as the Middle East. Merchants from India’s western coast would sell their wares at the isle of Hormuz, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, and there load up on the island’s rock salt “as ballast, and carry it to Bengal, where scarcity gives it a value.”7 The region’s demand for salt thus tied together an ocean-wide commerce.

There was, however, a source of salt that was closer to home: the small island of Sandwip, where by 1600 over two hundred ships each year were reputed to load up on salt destined for mainland.8 But this, sadly, was to be its peak. Sandwip’s struggles were to be a microcosm of the whole of Bengal’s painful next few centuries.

As the closest source for Bengal’s insatiable demand, Sandwip’s salt was a major source of revenue to whoever ruled it. But this made it too attractive a prize. Local lords, the Mughals, the Portuguese, and the Arakan kingdom of Mrauk-U, in modern-day Burma, all vied for control of Sandwip, making it an opportunist’s dream. In 1607 the island was even briefly ruled by an Afghan mercenary, who was then ousted by a Portuguese salt merchant named Sebastião Gonçalves Tibao, who turned it into a pirate kingdom. This lasted c.1609-16 before the Arakanese dislodged him with the help of yet another player in the region, the newly-arrived Dutch East India Company — who, in turn, would in 1645 also try to take Sandwip for themselves.9

The depredations and disruptions soon took a toll on Bengal. The Arakanese, Portuguese, Dutch, and various assorted pirates, raided its coast for slaves, and Sandwip became depopulated and disappeared from notice. Commerce as a whole in the bay declined due to the constant struggles for power, with many parts of the coast becoming overgrown by jungle as the population retreated further inland, ceasing to cultivate it for rice. Those who remained were of the lowest castes of all, who braved the dangerous animals of the jungle to cut trees and make salt. On the Bengalese coast, after decades of decline, and despite all the factors that made it so costly, a domestic salt industry emerged.

It’s easy to see how. Before 1600, Bengal’s thriving industries and flourishing commerce seem to have allowed it to purchase imported salt. As that declined, however, its ability to pay for such imports diminished, while the overall need to feed its large population remained as pressing as ever. Bengal’s population had to get its salt from somewhere no matter what, even as its economy shrank. At the same time, Bengal’s coastline became a lot more plentiful in empty space and abundant wood fuel, while labour remained plentiful, and perhaps got cheaper as the decline in commerce meant that workers were left with fewer better-paying alternatives. So, despite all of the natural factors that made salt-making in Bengal such a difficult proposition, by the 1670s it was forced to resort to the highly land- and labour-intensive practice of sleeching.10

The echoes of this decline, and of Bengal’s former wealth, were still there in the 1760s, on the eve of its conquest by the English East India Company. Archibald Keir, a Scottish soldier-turned-merchant and salt producer there described how:

The places where the salt is now made in Bengal are called the jungles or woods. These cover a large tract of country, most of which was formerly cultivated, and paid a very great revenue to the government, and that was not two hundred years ago. They are now, however, from the ravages of pirates, and ill conduct of rulers perhaps, become the habitations solely of tigers and wild beasts, except only at the season when the saltmakers go there to cut wood and boil their salt.

Keir estimated that 1760s Bengal had about 130,000 people engaged in the various aspects of salt-making every year, producing some 120,000 tons of salt. These workers had to live in the jungle, where they dug the salt-laden sludge, felled trees for fuel, and did the salt-boiling over the course of December, January or February right up until the middle of June, before disassembling the whole saltworks ahead of the monsoon season, and reassembling it all again when the next season began. Keir’s own salt-works, which accounted for an estimated tenth of Bengal’s overall salt production, required so much space that it took over a fortnight to visit them all by boat. Bengal still imported some salt, but only really tiny amounts for more specialised or luxury purposes. Otherwise it supplied itself, and seems to have even exported some salt to the places further inland, like Assam and Nepal, which lacked access to salt sources of their own.11

What’s especially striking is how long sleeching in Bengal persisted — for a period of over three hundred years, from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. But then the economic and political upheavals also persisted, while the production and sale of salt became a lucrative source of revenue for its rulers — just as it had on Sandwip, and almost everywhere else in India and the wider world.12 In the 1670s the salt trade in Bengal seems to have been farmed out by the Mughals to an Indo-Portuguese merchant, one Nicolao de Parteca.13 By the 1760s it was under the control of one of Bengal’s richest and most influential men, the Armenian merchant prince Khoja Wajid.14 Once Bengal’s salt production became established, its rulers and chief magnates thus gained a vested interest in keeping it going, raising barriers to competition — a trend that continued, and even worsened, when it was taken over in the 1760s by the English East India Company.

In quite a few modern accounts of Bengal’s economic history, there are complaints that the EIC oversaw the decline and eventual disappearance of Bengal’s salt industry. It’s often framed as a case of purposeful de-industrialisation, as cheaper salt sources from elsewhere in India and from Britain itself drove the sector out of business.15 But while British involvement in salt production did have terrible consequences, the problem was the other way around. The very existence of Bengal’s salt-making industry was a symptom of its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century impoverishment, which was maintained and exacerbated by the perverse incentives faced by its rulers.

Imagine for a moment that a wealthy country today suffered a truly major, back-to-the-Dark-Ages kind of catastrophe — a zombie apocalypse, or a nuclear fallout or something — and people who had once been surgeons, engineers, restaurant chefs, management consultants and a whatnot, had to all resort to becoming farm labourers just to keep the population alive. This was the situation with Bengal and salt-making, though it did not require a catastrophe of such magnitude — a fall to subsistence back then was not so great or unfathomable a drop as it is today. So it makes little sense to frame the eventual decline of Bengalese salt-making due to the influx of cheap salt — largely thanks to railways, steamships, and so on — as a bad thing. It would be like complaining, when the world eventually recovered from its post-apocalyptic Dark Age, that back-breaking farm labour was disappearing because food could be produced more cheaply.

Making salt in Bengal was a downright horrible job, significantly worse than making it anywhere else in the world at the time, and possibly ever. This was back-breaking work for months away from home, chopping trees and gathering mud in swampy, malaria-infested jungle for next to no pay. The death-rate, from disease, drowning, and wild animals, was astonishingly high, at about 6% of workers per season. Tiger attacks alone seem to have been responsible for two thirds of the casualties, though employers suspected that some of these may actually have been disguised desertions. Yet even when concerted attempts were made in the 1790s to improve conditions, by paying bonuses to the foremen based on survival rates, and investing in better weapons, boats, and supplies, it was considered essentially impossible to ever reduce the death toll to even 2%.16 And that’s just per season, not per year. By comparison, the death rate among adult slaves working on a sugar plantation in Jamaica seems to have been about 0.3% per year.17 The most dangerous job in the United States today, which is logging, has a death rate of just 0.082% per year. There was a reason that salt-sleeching in Bengal was consigned to those of the very lowest castes, many of whom were coerced.

Indeed, the salt-workers were often trapped into a kind of hereditary debt slavery. Employers lent to the workers in advance of the salt-making season, so that they could start building their houses and sleeching works in the jungle, and begin cutting wood for fuel. But bad weather, flooding, or even wild animals often prevented the workers producing enough salt to ever pay them back. Failure one season left them bound to return to the jungle the next season, and the next, until the debt was made good. When salt-workers ran away from these obligations, or simply died, employers insisted that their families or even their neighbours were liable, with the debt passing on from generation to generation and throughout whole villages until it effectively became a kind of custom. Anyone who had ever worked at a saltworks was often liable to be conscripted again for the jungle, whether they were really indebted or not.18

The great fault of the British was not that they eventually let the Bengali salt-sleeching industry die away, but that they continued it, and even expanded it. The EIC’s conquest of Bengal effectively marked its transformation from a mere long-distance freight shipping company, albeit an often violent one, into a fully-fledged territorial state — one paid for by taking over its lucrative monopoly on salt. The very continuance of the monopoly very quickly created an unstoppable bureaucratic impulse to maximise revenue, and so over the following decades the salt prices paid by Bengalis inexorably rose.

Perhaps worst of all, the use of salt-sleeching was expanded. Many of the Company officials actually wanted to make things better for the salt-workers. The EIC Bengal Presidency’s Governor in the late 1780s, for example, the Earl Cornwallis, tried to ban the use of customary forced labour in the saltworks, saying he would even discontinue the manufacture should it prove impossible to do it without coercion. He boasted that the descendants of the salt-workers would “look back with gratitude to the period of their emancipation”. We’ve also seen the 1790s attempt to lower mortality rates, which was largely at the initiative of one particularly conscientious Company salt agent. And Colonel Robert Kyd, who established Calcutta’s botanical garden, in 1788 even experimented with setting up solar evaporation salt pans in Bengal (which inevitably failed).19

But all these good intentions were but feeble taps against the hard wall of state revenue-maximisation, which entailed keeping production costs low. Well into the nineteenth century, although some of the more conscientious officials did ensure that salt-workers ended up with more freedom and higher wages, coercion was in practice difficult to stamp out, and often admitted to be necessary if more salt was to be made in Bengal. Better-paying industries like indigo-making were suppressed, lest they enticed workers away from the salt-works.20

And when it came to suppressing competition from other parts of India, the Bengal Presidency went to truly extraordinary lengths. When the neighbouring inland province of Bihar was fully subjugated in 1781, its traditional supply of salt from the Sambhar lake was blocked and replaced by ramping up production in Bengal by about 32,000 tons per year.21 Indeed, salt production in Bengal rose from around 100,000 tons per year in the 1760s to a peak of some 230,000 tons by the early 1830s.22

When much cheaper solar-evaporated salt from the neighbouring province of Orissa kept on being smuggled into Bengal overland, the English in 1804 conquered it, placing it under the salt monopoly too. And when cheap solar salt still continued to be smuggled in from other parts of India, especially from the Sambhar lake, the EIC’s Bengal Presidency began establishing customs houses along its border so that any incoming salt could be taxed accordingly, to maintain the monopoly price. By the 1840s, these customs houses had developed into a fully-fledged Customs Line of bare, raised earth, which was heavily guarded and swept flat after each patrol, so that the footsteps of any smugglers they’d missed could be spotted. The Customs Line reached its final form, however, in the 1860s, when it became a vast, living barrier of thorny, impenetrable hedge, three to four metres high and two to four metres thick, interspersed where necessary with stone walls, and punctuated by over 1,700 crossing points staffed by some 12,000 customs officials, stretching over 3,700 kilometres down northern India’s middle.23 (See map, above.)

Such measures were necessary if the Bengal Presidency wished to maintain its revenues, however, when we consider just how cheaply and easily salt could be made elsewhere. By the 1820s, the vast quantities of salt made by cheap and easy solar evaporation on the western coast of India, near Bombay — an area that was also even ruled by the East India Company — was thought to be the cheapest salt in the entire world, and widely exported.24 The tragedy of the Bengal salt monopoly, right up until it was replaced by a much lower, India-wide excise tax on all salt in the 1870s, was that the suffering of the jungle-dwelling salt sleechers and the deprivation laid on the population were entirely needless — these were sufferings perpetrated by policy, continued and extended for the state and its servants alone.

Yet perhaps the biggest tragedy of all was the unseen one — of what a salt-deprived coastal region could have looked like in terms of how it and its neighbours might have developed. To appreciate this, and to start appreciating how our present superabundance of salt came about, we need to look north-west, to the Baltic.

Baltic Boost

What do the Bengal coast and the Baltic Sea have in common? They’re both remarkably lacking in salt. I mentioned before that on average the ocean is about 3.5% salt, while at the Bengal coast it can drop to below 2 or even 1%, depending on the season. But the Baltic is astonishingly fresh. Even out at sea it’s under 1% salt, while towards the coasts it’s more like 0.3% or lower. It’s so low in salt that in some places it can hardly be tasted,25 though I’d not recommend trying to drink it.

The Baltic is so fresh because it’s fed by a lot of strong rivers while being extremely shallow, with far more water exiting it than flowing in from the North Sea, and with the incoming saltwater dropping to well below the surface because it’s denser. Indeed, only about 9,000 years ago the Baltic was an entirely freshwater lake.

So although the Baltic has fairly decent weather conditions for making salt — it gets a decent bit of sunshine in the summer, and the weather is quite dry — there’s just hardly any salt to be extracted from its coastline in the first place. Compared to almost every other coastline in the world, it would have taken about twelve times as much time and fuel to produce a given quantity of salt.

As with Bengal then, there was a huge prize available to whoever could supply the Baltic countries — especially as it became increasingly populated over the course of the middle ages. There were a few small salt springs near the coast, such as at Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg) and Greifswald. But the Baltic’s main supply had to come from the salt springs of Lüneburg. By about 1200, about 50,000 tons of Lüneburg salt were being sent each year down the river Elbe to Hamburg, on the North Sea coast, from whence it could be shipped to the Baltic.26 One of its main customers there was the city of Lübeck, which was heavily involved in Baltic fishing, because it had access to a small salt spring at Oldesloe a little further upriver, giving it the advantage over any rivals in being able to preserve its catch.

Lübeck and Hamburg were, in many respects, natural rivals. Both had easy access to salt springs inland. Both had leveraged this advantage to dominate their region’s fishing — one in the Baltic, the other in the North Sea. Both were thus in competition for the markets for that fish. Yet they decided to choose cooperation instead, extending privileges to one another’s citizens in 1230, and signing a formal alliance in 1241 that was to last for hundreds of years, soon taking more and more trading cities into their coalition and creating the famous Hanseatic League.

One big reason for that alliance, and for its persistence, was that geography had given them a problem in common: the kingdom of Denmark, which entirely controlled the straits between the North and Baltic seas, particularly the shipping lane called Øresund, or the Sound. The Danish kings were thus able to choke off the trade between the seas at will, extorting toll fees whenever Hamburg hoped to sell fish into the Baltic, and whenever Lübeck hoped to buy salt from beyond it. The original Hamburg-Lübeck alliance thus focused on securing the overland route between the two cities, sharing the cost of keeping it free of brigands. By securing an alternative route, albeit still an extremely expensive one, they could at least somewhat mitigate the Danish stranglehold over the inter-sea trade.27

In the fourteenth century, however, the Danish problem became significantly more acute. At one point in the 1310s the extended Hanseatic League was in danger of falling apart, as Denmark tried to conquer some of its member-cities on the Pomeranian coast. Lübeck failed to heed the call to defend them, too afraid of Danish retaliation. The nascent League survived this test, but largely only because Denmark could not actually afford its expansionism and descended into anarchy, torn apart by its German creditors when the loans came due, with the League occasionally intervening to tip the scales in its favour. Nonetheless, by the 1360s Denmark had recovered and was again attempting to expand, harassing Hanseatic merchants who tried to cross the Sound.

This time, however, Lübeck was more ready. It had developed the overland route to Hamburg and Lüneburg much cheaper by making the Stecknitz River more navigable, allowing the salt to be transported by boat for some of the way — a strategic insurance policy, which significantly reducing the hit they’d take to trade by going to war with Denmark.28 And this time the League most certainly waged a war. It inflicted such a heavy defeat on the Danes that in the 1370 peace treaty the League was ceded control of the Sound’s fortifications for the next 15 years, along with two thirds of the toll revenues. In effect, it had wrested control of the inter-sea trade; the Hanseatic League had become a new great power in the region, and could throw its weight around in the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, and England too.

The Danish problem never quite went away, however. In the 1370s and 80s, thanks to the machinations of queen Margaret, Denmark became united with both Norway and Sweden, formally merging in 1397 into a pan-Scandinavian new force — the Kalmar Union — with a shared monarch and foreign policy, more able to resist Hanseatic influence.29 But Lübeck and Hamburg also made the effort to bolster the overland route that connected them: they each worked to acquire more direct control of the lands that it ran through, and in 1398 opened a canal to connect the Stecknitz to the Elbe, making the route fully navigable by boat — it seems to have been Europe’s first canal to connect two separate river valleys by going over a summit, making it the world’s second, after the 1280s upgrades to China’s Grand Canal. Thanks to this medieval engineering marvel, Lüneburg salt now had direct access to the Baltic Sea, without needing to go through the Sound.

The Stecknitz Canal would stand Lübeck and the Hanseatic League in good stead, allowing tens of thousands of tons of salt to enter the Baltic when the Sounds was blocked. When the Kalmar Union attempted to re-impose tolls on its merchants passing through the Sound in the 1420s, the League was again able to win the war — even after a series of early major setbacks.

But a looming, much larger threat to Hanseatic hegemony was emerging, as a new group hoped to make the most of the Baltic’s lack of salt. More on them, and the Golden Age they ushered in, next time, in Part III.

P.S.

If you or someone you know is aged 18-22 and is in the UK in late August, there’s a residential programme being run in Cambridge called the ‘Invisible College’ after the group who in the 1650s preceded the Royal Society. It’s being organised by my friends at Works in Progress magazine. I’ve designed the programme’s talks on economic history and the history of technology, but there will also be a lot by other experts on public policy and how science works too. If you know someone who might be interested, the details of how to apply are here.

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Here’s a riddle.

There was a product in the seventeenth century that was universally considered a necessity as important as grain and fuel. Controlling the source of this product was one of the first priorities for many a military campaign, and sometimes even a motivation for starting a war. Improvements to the preparation and uses of this product would have increased population size and would have had a general and noticeable impact on people’s living standards. And this product underwent dramatic changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming an obsession for many inventors and industrialists, while seemingly not featuring in many estimates of historical economic output or growth at all.

The product is salt.

Making salt does not seem, at first glance, all that interesting as an industry. Even ninety years ago, when salt was proportionately a much larger industry in terms of employment, consumption, and economic output, the author of a book on the history salt-making noted how a friend had advised keeping the word salt out of the title, “for people won’t believe it can ever have been important”.1 The bestselling Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, published over twenty years ago, actively leaned into the idea that salt was boring, becoming so popular because it created such a surprisingly compelling narrative around an article that most people consider commonplace. (Kurlansky, it turns out, is behind essentially all of those one-word titles on the seemingly prosaic: cod, milk, paper, and even oysters).

But salt used to be important in a way that’s almost impossible to fully appreciate today.

[Before we crack on: because this post is so long, and because of all the illustrations and references, there’s a high risk that this email may end up truncated for some people. If this happens, you can always read the post online by simply clicking here.]

Try to consider what life was like just a few hundred years ago, when food and drink alone accounted for 75-85% of the typical household’s spending — compared to just 10-15%, in much of the developed world today, and under 50% in all but a handful of even the very poorest countries. Anything that improved food and drink, even a little bit, was thus a very big deal. This might be said for all sorts of things — sugar, spices, herbs, new cooking methods — but salt was more like a general-purpose technology: something that enhances the natural flavours of all and any foods. Using salt, and using it well, is what makes all the difference to cooking, whether that’s judging the perfect amount for pasta water, or remembering to massage it into the turkey the night before Christmas. As chef Samin Nosrat puts it, “salt has a greater impact on flavour than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and food will taste good.” Or to quote the anonymous 1612 author of A Theological and Philosophical Treatise of the Nature and Goodness of Salt, salt is that which “gives all things their own true taste and perfect relish”. Salt is not just salty, like sugar is sweet or lemon is sour. Salt is the universal flavour enhancer, or as our 1612 author put it, “the seasoner of all things.”

Making food taste better was thus an especially big deal for people’s living standards, but I’ve never seen any attempt to chart salt’s historical effects on them. To put it in unsentimental economic terms, better access to salt effectively increased the productivity of agriculture — adding salt improved the eventual value of farmers’ and fishers’ produce — at a time when agriculture made up the vast majority of economic activity and employment. Before 1600, agriculture alone employed about two thirds of the English workforce, not to mention the millers, butchers, bakers, brewers and assorted others who transformed seeds into sustenance. Any improvements to the treatment or processing of food and drink would have been hugely significant — something difficult to fathom when agriculture accounts for barely 1% of economic activity in most developed economies today. (Where are all the innovative bakers in our history books?! They existed, but have been largely forgotten.)

And so far we’ve only mentioned salt’s direct effects on the tongue. It also increased the efficiency of agriculture by making food last longer. Properly salted flesh and fish could last for many months, sometimes even years. Salting reduced food waste — again consider just how much bigger a deal this used to be — and extended the range at which food could be transported, providing a whole host of other advantages. Salted provisions allowed sailors to cross oceans, cities to outlast sieges, and armies to go on longer campaigns. Salt’s preservative properties bordered on the necromantic: “it delivers dead bodies from corruption, and as a second soul enters into them and preserves them … from putrefaction, as the soul did when they were alive.”2

Because of salt’s preservative properties, many believed that salt had a crucial connection with life itself. The fluids associated with life — blood, sweat and tears — are all salty. And nowhere seemed to be more teeming with life as the open ocean. At a time when many believed in the spontaneous generation of many animals from inanimate matter, like mice from wheat or maggots from meat, this seemed a more convincing point. No house was said to generate as many rats as a ship passing over the salty sea, while no ship was said to have more rats than one whose cargo was salt.3 Salt seemed to have a kind of multiplying effect on life: something that could be applied not only to seasoning and preserving food, but to growing it.

Livestock, for example, were often fed salt: in Poland, thanks to the Wieliczka salt mines, great stones of salt lay all through the streets of Krakow and the surrounding villages so that “the cattle, passing to and fro, lick of those salt-stones”.4 Cheshire in north-west England, with salt springs at Nantwich, Middlewich and Northwich, has been known for at least half a millennium for its cheese: salt was an essential dietary supplement for the milch cows, also making it (less famously) one of the major production centres for England’s butter, too. In 1790s Bengal, where the East India Company monopolised salt and thereby suppressed its supply, one of the company’s own officials commented on the major effect this had on the region’s agricultural output: “I know nothing in which the rural economy of this country appears more defective than in the care and breed of cattle destined for tillage. Were the people able to give them a proper quantity of salt, they would … probably acquire greater strength and a larger size.”5 And to anyone keeping pigeons, great lumps of baked salt were placed in dovecotes to attract them and keep them coming back, while the dung of salt-eating pigeons, chickens, and other kept birds were considered excellent fertilisers.6

Indeed, salt had been used since ancient times as a fertiliser. Contrary to popular belief, when the Romans allegedly destroyed Carthage and salted the earth, such practices in the ancient world were not about rendering the land infertile by making it too saline for anything to grow. You’d need an impossibly large amount of salt to do that. There’s no evidence Carthage was sown with salt at all, but the chosen ancient method of ruining farmland — seemingly practised by Ashurbanipal in the subjugation of Elam, for example — was to sow salt with the seeds of particularly aggressive weeds. Salt was sown not because it sterilised, but the opposite — because it could be so remarkably fructifying.

(While we’re on myths about the Romans and salt: there is an oft-repeated notion that “salary”, from the Latin salarium, comes from Roman soldiers being occasionally paid in salt. This, too, appears to be completely made up — yet another zombie myth to add to the growing list.)

The use of salt for growing crops went back to ancient times — it was recommended in Mesopotamia for growing date palms, for example — and this continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Salt-rich sea sand was a widely-used fertiliser in the south-west of England, and the soil that had soaked up the runoff from the Cheshire brine springs was famous for its bounty.7 Where salty soils were less easy to get to, seeds could also be steeped in a brine made from common salt before they were sown, allegedly fortifying them against various pests and diseases.8 Exactly how effective and widespread was salt in agriculture, and were there periods where it was more in use? It’s unclear, because as far as I can tell nobody has tried to quantify it.

But regardless of whether it was used in agriculture, for preservation, or for cooking, salt was also essential. The human body is constantly losing salt through sweat, and to a certain extent urine, but it tries to keep the blood’s salt concentrations maintained at a certain level. So as the blood loses salt, the body also ejects water to adjust. Ironically, as you lose salt your body responds by drying you out. Without constantly replacing the salt in your body — which is only ever stored for a couple of days at a time — you will at first feel fatigued and a little breathless, but increasingly weak and debilitated, as though sapped of all energy. The slightest exertion would start to bring on cramps, then problems with your heart and lungs, as your body continually shed water. If these did not kill you — and they probably would — you would essentially die through desiccation. The process would be all the faster if you became ill, rendering even the slightest dehydrating fever or bout of diarrhoea utterly lethal.9

A population deprived of salt was thus one that was weaker and more prone to disease — and at a time when the vast majority of the economy’s energy supply came from the straining of muscle, both human and animal, that weakness in effect meant a severe energy shortage. Although the main fuels for muscle power were carb-heavy grains like wheat, rye, oats, and rice, the indispensable ingredient to getting the most out of these grains was salt — just as how nuclear power uses uranium as its fuel, but also requires a suitable neutron moderator. A population deprived of salt would quite literally be more lethargic and sluggish, making it less productive and poorer too.

Salt’s unique properties made it a serious tool of state. In 1633 king Charles I’s newly-appointed Lord Deputy for Ireland, Baron Wentworth, advised controlling its salt supply as a way to make the Irish utterly economically dependent on England. Given salt was “that which preserves and gives value to all their native staple commodities” — herrings, butter and beef — then “how can they depart from us without nakedness and beggary?” Salt would be a method of control, and a profitable one too, being “of so absolute necessity” that it could be sold to the Irish at inflated prices without much dampening demand: salt “must be had whether they will or no, and may at all times be raised in price”.10 Much like economists today, Wentworth saw revenue-raising potential in taxing goods with such unresponsive or ‘inelastic’ demand.

Wentworth’s scheme to control the Irish never came to be. But a great many other countries did choose to tax it. Given a minimum amount of salt had to be consumed by absolutely everyone, monopolising its sale — and levying what was effectively a tax by inflating the price well above the costs of importing or producing it — could function as kind of indirect poll tax, levied more or less per head of both people and livestock, but without any of the administrative hassle of taking and maintaining an accurate census in order to impose such a tax directly.

When compared to other necessities like grain, salt did not need to be traded in especially large quantities either, meaning that its supply could be monopolised with relative ease. And it could not be produced everywhere. Salt tended to be lacking the further you got from the sea coast, unless there happened to be some relatively rare inland sources like salt lakes, brine springs, or rock salt mines. And it could even be lacking on the sea coast where it was either too humid or too cold to get salt cheaply by evaporating seawater using the sun, or where there was insufficient fuel for boiling the brine. These places were thus prone to being charged inflated prices, while the states that controlled places where the costs of production were low — in warmer and drier climes where the salty water of coastal marshes could cheaply be evaporated using only the heat of the summer sun — could extract especially large monopoly profits from the difference. The revenue from controlling solar salt thus became the basis of many kingdoms, some unusually powerful republics, and even empires.

Empires of the Sun

The twelfth-century counts and viscounts of Toulouse and Provence, who ruled the salt marshes along the sunny French Mediterranean coast, discovered that a great many regions were dependent upon them for salt, including many of the lands up the river Rhône, towards Switzerland, and even down the coast towards the northern Italian cities of Genoa and Pisa. Alongside the customs duty these rulers charged on various other export goods — called gabelle, from the Arabic qabālah, meaning tax or tribute — the duties they charged on salt came to be the most important. It was, after all, something their customers could not live without. When much of Provence was unified in 1246 by Charles of Anjou, the youngest brother of king Louis IX of France, the region’s salt came to be more rigorously and systematically monopolised, with Charles taxing it within his own lands and demanding extortionate prices of many of his neighbours.

By the 1260s, Charles had so extensively exploited Provence’s production of salt that it alone accounted for almost as much revenue as all his other sources of income combined. Salt thus provided the war chest for him to project power into the Mediterranean: he conquered the kingdom of Sicily, including all of southern Italy; conquered much of Tuscany, which he effectively exchanged for the principality of Achaea in Greece; twice sent troops into central Italy to secure the elections of friendly Popes, John XXI and Martin IV; conquered Albania; purchased the sliver of what remained of the kingdom of Jerusalem; and joined his brother on crusades against Egypt and Tunis.11 Few have heard of it today, but Charles of Anjou created an empire based on salt.

On the other side of Italy the Republic of Venice — a city situated amidst a salty lagoon — used salt to exert its control over many of the territories further inland into north-eastern Italy. While Charles of Anjou was projecting his power into the Mediterranean, Venice continually went to war in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to force these territories, eventually including cities like Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Brescia, as well as much of modern-day Slovenia and Croatia, to buy their salt from it and it alone. At one point it even forced its salt on Milan.12 When Venice’s own salt lagoon eventually proved insufficient to meet the demand that it had enforced, the Republic then looked further afield for its salt supplies, offering high prices and substantial subsidies for ships importing it from across the Mediterranean — from North Africa, Ibiza, Sardinia, and especially the salt lakes of Cyprus, which became part of its empire — to make itself the region’s entrepôt for salt, while charging even higher prices to the populations it ruled.

The profits from Venice’s salt gabelle were fundamental to its military and financial might. By the end of the fifteenth century the proceeds accounted for about 15% of the Republic’s overall revenue. This does not sound like much, but the figure masks its true importance: the income from salt was more or less the only revenue that accrued directly to Venice itself, rather than being collected and immediately re-spent in the territories that the Republic ruled over. Sourcing and selling the salt, as well as enforcing the monopoly, was sub-contracted out to wealthy merchants — a process called tax farming — who in return for management of the monopoly paid the Republic a substantial but regular annual fee. Farming out the salt monopoly gave its revenue greater predictability, and for a few brief periods gave the Republic a kind of superpower that most other medieval states lacked: the ability to pay its debts. The revenues from Venice’s salt monopoly was often directed to paying the interest on loans, though fighting Genoa and Milan, followed by the rise of the Ottomans and France, eventually stretched it too far, costing the Republic its creditworthiness.13

The most infamous gabelle, however, was that of France. This seemingly owed its origins to a 1315 regulatory initiative in response to a salt shortage, to punish merchants who were allegedly hoarding the commodity. The king thus created a small bureaucracy of regulators with the powers to confiscate, stockpile, and then sell on the supposed hoarders’ salt. In the 1340s, however, the kingdom was plunged into crisis when Edward III of England invaded to claim the French crown as his own. Under intense pressure for cash, the salt regulation mutated, first with a 1342 gabelle levied on all salt exported, and in 1343 with the regulators’ powers of confiscation used to take the entire domestic salt supply into the crown’s hands as well. The salt was stockpiled into granaries by the officials and sold onto the French population at inflated prices. Following English victories and the need to stamp out marauding mercenaries and peasant revolts, the prices charged under the French gabelle became increasingly exorbitant.14 Yet salt was the thread by which the French king Charles V held onto his crown, helping him eventually claw some of his kingdom back from English occupation in the 1360s and 70s.

The French gabelle became exceptionally oppressive to the people who lived in the king’s core domains — a broad northern chunk of what is today France, centred on Paris, which came to be known as the pays de grande gabelle, or lands of the greater gabelle. Foreign visitors even remarked on the blandness of French bread there, devoid of salt.15 In this region the population were eventually made to purchase a minimum amount of salt for both themselves and their livestock from the granaries, making the gabelle’s resemblance to a poll tax all the more obvious. The major exception was a salt-producing region of Normandy, where a quarter of all the salt that was boiled was taxed at source rather than via the granaries — the quart-bouillon, which perhaps best translates as the quarter boilage.

Only as new regions came under direct control of the French king, clawed back from either English occupation or removed from the control of semi-independent nobles, was the gabelle extended to the rest of modern-day France. But this usually involved preferential treatment to ease the transition and keep them pacified. Much of southern France thus came to be the pays de petite gabelle, or lands of the lesser gabelle, being subjected to much lower salt taxes when they came under the French king’s rule. And some regions were exempted entirely, including some of the main salt-producing regions on the Bay of Biscay off France’s western coast. The duchy of Brittany, for example, didn’t have to pay the tax at all.

In the 1540s the king attempted to make the system fairer and more uniform by lowering the tax on salt in the lands of the greater gabelle, but raising it in the lesser-taxed salt-producing regions of southwestern France on the Bay of Biscay. Those regions, however, erupted into revolt, with Bordeaux even waving the English flag of St George as a symbol of its resistance.16 Eventually forced into submission, the regions agreed to pay the king huge one-off sums to free themselves of the gabelle forever, their representatives grovelling before the king with nooses symbolically worn around their necks.17 As a result of this buy-off, the regions came to be known as the pays rédimés, or redeemed lands. But salt seems to have become a lingering source of resentment and suspicion against royal centralisation, with some of these redeemed regions becoming hot-beds of French Protestantism.

When in the 1560s France descended into decades of periodic religious strife — its Wars of Religion — the contest was ultimately decided by fighting over control of the salt. Although the Catholic heartlands were those with the most onerous gabelle, where the consumption of salt was most heavily taxed, the Protestant rebels, called Huguenots, soon realised the value of controlling where that salt was being made. The two initial rounds of hostilities ended inconclusively, with both sides lacking the financial means for a protracted war. But when violence erupted for a third time in 1568, the Huguenots immediately rushed for control of the salt-producing western regions along the Bay of Biscay. Adopting the port of La Rochelle as their stronghold, they sold the next few months’ worth of the region’s salt production to the English for up-front cash and munitions.18

Using these salt-backed war loans turned out to be a winning strategy, with the Huguenots eventually forcing some concessions from the king despite a spate of battle losses — a strategy they repeated every time violence flared up again. Following the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Huguenots in Paris, when in 1573 La Rochelle was besieged by the king’s Catholic forces, the Huguenots again sold the Bay’s salt to English merchants, helping them to resist wave upon wave of assault from a force at least five times their size, with the king losing between a third and a half of his army before he gave up and sued for a truce.19

And the Huguenots did it again in 1575 when that truce broke down.20 This time around they also captured the salt marshes on the Mediterranean, particularly at Aigues-Mortes. The move gave them even more salt to sell, this time to the merchants of Genoa, and allowed them to hold the entirety of south-eastern France hostage for its salt supply as well, denying the king a major source of revenue from the gabelle.21 The cash the Huguenots raised from the Aigues-Mortes salt allowed them to hire a force of German mercenaries who would prove decisive in the war. The king was forced to terms that were extremely favourable to the Huguenots — so favourable, in fact, that many French Catholics were radicalised, resulting in a widespread Catholic uprising that yet again plunged the country into conflict.

But in 1577 the Huguenots were on the verge of disaster, largely because they had lost the salt: the defection of an important leader in the south lost them the Mediterranean salt at Aigues-Mortes, and then they lost the town of Brouage, not far from La Rochelle, where three years’ worth of Bay salt had been stockpiled for sale to the English and Italians. The surrender of Brouage, just days before the arrival of reinforcements, was unpardonable to the Huguenot cause. The surrendered garrison, upon reaching La Rochelle, was reportedly punished using the ancient Roman method of decimation: one in ten of them, chosen at random, were executed. But the punishment was in vain. Having lost the salt, this time it was the Huguenots who were forced to the negotiating table.22

When religious strife erupted yet again in the 1580s, it was the Huguenot commander whose western power base gave the best access to the Bay of Biscay’s salt production — Henri of Navarre — who was able to fight his way, despite being outnumbered by his enemies, to become king Henri IV of France. Control of the salt ultimately meant control of France.

France may have been somewhat unusual, however, because of its geography. It had salt-producing areas on each of its coasts, but had an extensive interior with hardly any inland salt sources at all. Only in the 1670s, with the conquest of many of the lands to France’s east — Lorraine, Alsace, and the Free County of Burgundy — did it acquire a number of significant inland salt sources, and even then these were far from the main waterways running through the interior. Those waterways were crucial because a product as bulky as salt was otherwise exorbitantly expensive to transport overland. Thus, much of the population of France, along with the revenues of its state, could essentially be held hostage by whoever could control its salt-producing coasts and block the mouths of its major rivers — a fact appreciated by both its leaders and even its enemies.

In the 1620s, the French chief minister Cardinal Richelieu dreamt up an elegant solution to France’s salt-given predicament: to build a powerful navy, permanently remove La Rochelle’s defences, and extend the gabelle to all of the exempted or redeemed lands. The navy would help conquer La Rochelle, the defeat of the town would quash opposition to the gabelle, and extending the gabelle would help pay for both the navy and capturing the town.23

In the event, however, the English intervened, seemingly sensing the looming threat of a rival naval power: in 1627 they pre-emptively attacked the island of Ré, just off the coast of La Rochelle, hoping also to take the nearby island of Oléron, just off Brouage — both islands, if taken, would be perfectly placed to strangle France’s salt supplies, diminish its gabelle revenue, and permanently embolden Huguenot rebels. If the salt could be seized, the English hoped, the expedition might even pay for itself.24

The English invasion was an abject failure; La Rochelle fell to Richelieu’s forces; and the French navy expanded. The scene was set for the long reign of Louis XIV a generation later, whose epithet the “Sun King” would be fitting, his absolutist rule quite literally secured by the evaporation of seawater by the sun. But Richelieu’s plan did not quite come together fully: he never managed to extend the gabelle.

France’s geography perhaps made it a kingdom uniquely prone to being controlled in this way.

Compare with Spain, which not only had an extensive sunny sea coast, but plenty of inland salt sources as well. Spanish rulers did try to control and tax the production of salt, but the sheer number of potential salt sources made it difficult to enforce. Salt accounted for only about 6% of the crown of Castile’s revenue in the 1290s, and this figure was its peak. Despite repeated attempts to extract more, by the 1490s this had fallen to only about 3% of revenue and continued to fall.25 In 1564 the crown even seized the salt sources not already under its control, compulsorily “purchasing” them from various nobles, religious orders and towns, many of which were never actually paid in full, and imposed a French-style system of salt granaries that most people had to buy from.26 But even this drastic measure served only to restore salt’s importance to about 3% of revenue. There were simply too many potential sources of salt to be able to extract more, not only from the other Iberian realms like Navarre, Aragon and Portugal, but even from within Castile itself because of regional exemptions for places like the Basque coastal provinces. Smuggling and evasion were simply too rife to be able to extract more.27

Much the same problems beset the kingdom of Naples, which encompassed the island of Sicily and the whole southern Italian peninsula. Although it had no major inland sources, the country was practically made of sunny coast, at about 38.5 metres of coast per square kilometre of landmass compared to about 10 or so for Iberia or France. When Naples was ruled by Charles of Anjou, the archetypal salt monopolist, salt’s percentage contribution to the kingdom’s revenue in 1278 was only in the single digits.28 And in the 1440s, when the king of Naples required every household in the country to pay a certain amount for its salt, the revenues seem to have been disappointing.29 The costs of policing such a long sunny coastline were simply too great to yield much profit for the crown. (Even into the twentieth century, the Italian coast was said to be “most rigidly guarded by tens of thousands of coastguards and police to prevent any person whatsoever taking a cupful of water out of the sea”.)

At the other extreme, however, states with little or no coastline at all found it very easy to raise revenue from salt. For the landlocked duchy of Lorraine, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exports from its inland salt springs typically accounted for between half and two thirds of the state’s revenue.30 This even applied to landlocked states that did not actually produce any salt themselves. The dukes of the largely mountainous, Alpine region of Piedmont-Savoy imported almost all their salt via a tiny foothold of coast at the port of Nice — imports that they could control with relative ease, while clamping down on competing sources. There were only so many rivers and mountain passes through which to smuggle. As a result, despite producing no salt of their own, the dukes of Piedmont-Savoy’s chief source of revenue was a gabelle levied on their own population’s salt consumption. In the 1560s a proposed increase in the salt price was even commuted into an actual poll tax.31

Indeed, there is something unusual about the landlocked areas of much central Europe, which may help explain why the Holy Roman Empire had so many tiny sovereign states: it had a great many inland salt sources. I’ve not had a chance to look into it carefully just yet, but it’s striking how almost all the major players in the region — Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, the Palatinate of the Rhine, Lüneburg, Lorraine, Burgundy, and Brandenburg — each controlled salt sources of their own during their periods of greatest influence. Many bizarrely small sovereign states, too, like the Provostry of Berchtesgaden, seem to have maintained themselves by exporting salt. And the unusually wide dispersion of salt supply in inland Germany may also have helped maintain the sovereignty of tiny countries that didn’t produce any salt of their own — the Swiss cantons, for example, taxed consumption of salt that had to be imported, much like Piedmont-Savoy did, but their position meant they could often play the salt-selling Bavarians, Austrians, and French off against one another.

The geography of salt was thus a big deal, and may even have defined the contours of many early modern states. But there were social factors too. Although the demand for salt was highly inelastic, there were limits to how much oppression people would tolerate. There was a point at which they resorted to violence. France saw this every time it attempted to extend the gabelle into exempted regions — with the southwestern revolts that needed redeeming in the 1540s, as we’ve seen, as well as with a revolt in Normandy in 1639, and in Roussillon in the 1660s. In Spain, a 1632 attempt to regularise and extend the gabelle had to be dropped after widespread opposition. And in Piedmont-Savoy, an attempt in 1680 to extend the gabelle to the region of Mondovì, which had been exempted when it originally joined the duchy, sparked a violent revolt that took almost twenty years to finally stamp out. Most dramatically of all, in Russia the salt gabelle was such a major source of discontentment that the government became too afraid to raise salt prices. From a peak of about 15% of revenue being raised by the gabelle in the 1750s, by the 1790s salt prices were being held so artificially low that the gabelle’s revenue had gone negative — rather than taxing salt, the government found itself effectively subsidising it.32

Rise of the Rest

You might be starting to get an appreciation now for just how many places taxed salt — I’ve mentioned France, Spain, Poland, Russia, and various states of Germany and Italy. It was also a big earner for states in the Middle East, India, and China, with many of the same geographical factors applying to the success of salt taxes in exactly the same way. But it was not the empires of the sun, or even the wood-fuelled brine springs of inland states, that would reap the biggest rewards from salt.

It was, strangely, instead in the chilly, damp north-west of Europe, that the greatest gains were to be had. More on that in Part II.

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So I have something of a series in mind for this year, with each post exploring the history of a particular industry. These posts will probably not be as frequent as I usually aim for — probably with more of a monthly than fortnightly cadence — because I’d like them to stand alone quite well as near-comprehensive, go-to pieces, and achieving that takes a lot more time to research and write.

I had hoped to get the first of these finished before the end of December, and then last week, and then this week, but I keep uncovering more and more complications to what at first I’d thought would be a straightforward story. I don’t want to give away what that first one is about just yet, as I start the piece with a riddle, though I can’t resist a hint or two: it was among the first industries to be dramatically transformed by the rise of coal, and was the original basis of Lowland Scotland’s wealth…

In the meantime, however, here are some of the other industries I’ll be looking into as part of the series:

• Iron. Check any half-decent overview of iron’s development, and it will probably focus on the medieval rise of the blast furnace followed by the eighteenth-century shift from smelting ore with baked coal (coke) rather than baked wood (charcoal). Abraham Darby always gets an obligatory mention. But there was a great deal of experimentation already happening long before Darby, and there were many more advances in the industry that are almost entirely unsung, including dramatic improvements to bellows as well as major change in all the ironmaking processes other than smelting.

• Stockings and Silk. Stockings were seemingly a very big deal in the seventeenth century, and yet I still don’t quite understand how William Lee’s stocking frame worked exactly. Or how it compared with other early forms of textile mechanisation, of which silk seems to have been the leader.

  This subject is especially replete with myths, which I’d like to get to the bottom of, and ideally address all in one place. It’s often said, for example, that Lombe’s silk mill at Derby in the 1710s was among the world’s first “modern factories” — a statement that should immediately set off alarm bells, not least because it explicitly copied Italian practice, but also because it’s incredibly vague, hiding all manner of sins by failing to define what a modern factory is. The reality is that there were already plenty of large industrial establishments the world over, not least in Britain, and we should really have a proper definition of “factory” if we’re going to throw such bold claims around.

  There’s also the legend that William Lee had his patent rejected by Elizabeth I on the basis that it would make too many people unemployed. This story gets repeated everywhere. It’s an ideal illustration of Luddite attitudes among politicians. But the story lacks any real evidence. The reality is that we know hardly anything for sure about Lee, with at least three Oxbridge colleges each claiming him as their own. His Wikipedia page, and various other encyclopaedia entries about him for that matter, are a complete disaster. But I’m pleased to report that I’ve recently (and accidentally) found some rather interesting new evidence…

• Saltpetre. From a political point of view, this was one of the most important industries in any country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was the essential ingredient to gunpowder, but was often a source of great controversy. The saltpetre patents were unusually long-lasting and were almost always exempted from any parliamentary attempts to regulate the granting of patents, even though they caused a lot of resentment. The patentees often had a right to break into people’s stables, barns, dovecotes, and apparently even their homes, to dig for saltpetre. But there was also a great deal of invention involved, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen comprehensively covered — in fact, I’ve hardly ever seen saltpetre mentioned at all in accounts of industrialisation. I’ve covered a few tiny snippets of Britain’s saltpetre story, such as the remarkably close relationship between Elizabethan England and the Saadi Empire of Morocco, but there’s so much more and I’ve barely even started researching it.

• Glass. This is one area I’ve been collecting notes on for a while, but I need to get to the bottom of it all and draw it all together in one place. It was one of the earlier industries to attempt the transition from wood to coal as a fuel, but the story of its patents are so intricate that it’s hard to figure out exactly what was going on.

• Brass. I think this may be an unsung hero of England’s early advantages in navigation, weaponry, and especially in precision instrument-making. And I’d like to do separate posts on clock- and watch-making (a chance for me to make something of my membership of the Antiquarian Horologist Society), as well as on precision engineering.

• Manure. Not long ago I sung the praises of lime, but also lamented the almost total lack of historical research into this important material. So if nobody else will do it, I suppose I ought to make a start on it… I suspect this investigation will lead me down a bunch of other rabbit holes to do with agricultural innovation, which really ought to get a lot more attention than it does.

Is there anything else I really ought to include?

And for my paying subscribers, here are some of the other and questions topics I’d like to address on the newsletter this year, which are towards the top of my to-do list:

Read more

I’ve cited these diaries a few times this year: for More’s vivid descriptions of iron foundries and early railways, for his romantic impressions of the Staffordshire Potteries, and for his first-hand account of the mountain of the Welsh copper king. It has informed many of my other pieces this year too. And having helped to publicise them, even just the snippets I’d shared started to generate some new knowledge among specialists: new technical details about some 1760s Cornish Newcomen engines, for example, and about 1770s railway construction. It’s especially rich in details about ironmaking, because More was best friends with John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson. But the only way to have gone and checked the source for yourself would have been to either visit the British Library to view the manuscript yourself, or write to me to ask for more extracts or photographs.

Until now, that is, because I have just made my full transcripts, summaries, and notes from the diaries — over 100,000 words of everything and anything in them relating to industry, manufactures, inventions, agriculture, economic conditions, and infrastructure, with a great deal more besides — available for all to freely view online. You can read it here. My Christmas present, if you will, to all researchers.

I’m aiming to publish one last piece this year, but in the meantime if you’re stuck for reading while digesting some festive treats, here are what I personally consider my best pieces this year:

• The interactive history of the steam engine

• On the risks and responsibilities of writing history for the public (with some reflections on a still-unresolved academic controversy)

• On the eighteenth-century mania for improving animals

• On the rise of London and its lost county feasts

• On how Boulton & Watt did not sell steam engines, but power

And as a Christmas bonus, here’s a piece from a few years ago that used to be behind a paywall, but which I was recently reminded of and I’ve now made free for all to read:

• On the most surprising would-be colonial powers

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I’m excited to announce something I’ve been quietly working on for a few months now behind the scenes. Some of you may be familiar with the explorable interactive articles of Bartosz Ciechanowski. They are so clearly written and so cleverly explorable, that they give an intuitive grasp of how many very complicated technologies work. My favourite is his article on mechanical watches. Be warned: if you’ve not seen these before, you’re about to lose a good few hours.

But his article on watches — which came out just as I was doing some research on the development of watches, and which proved an invaluable reference work — got me thinking about how great it would be to have something similar not just for how current technologies function, but to show how they changed over time. Wouldn’t it be great, I dreamed, to have a similarly intuitive way to explore and appreciate the process of improvement. And to correct lots of misapprehensions about the development of various technologies along the way.

As it turned out, my fellow inventions history fanatic Jason Crawford, who runs the non-profit The Roots of Progress, had been thinking along the same lines. (Drumroll starts softly.) So with the help of the Matt Brown we’ve been able to realise what is hopefully just the first small step of our vision. (Drumroll intensifies.) Based on my recent work re-writing the standard pre-history of the steam engine (drumroll crescendoes), allow me to present:

(Cue trumpets!)

The interactive, animated, **Origins of the Steam Engine**

Alongside contemporary illustrations of the many devices, you can play around with the animated models, dragging them to see them from different angles. It introduces what are so far the only interactive and animated models yet made of a great many devices — from Philo of Byzantium’s 3rd Century BC experiments, to Salomon de Caus’s 1610s solar-activated and self-replenishing fountains and musical instruments, and the 1606 steam engine of the Spanish engineer Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont:

It also contains the first depictions of the 1630s and 40s devices of Kaspar Kalthoff and William Petty. These are the experiments I discovered about a year ago, which I hope will now be given a place in the canon of the history of the steam engine. (You can read my discussion of the evidence I’d stumbled across about them here.)

And it contains what ended up becoming a brief obsession on my part: the first depiction of how Cornelis Drebbel’s “perpetual motion” device at Eltham Palace must have worked. Although there have been a few attempts with modern experiments to show how some parts functioned, this is the first attempt at showing it all together, including how the internal clockwork was driven and periodically rewound.

The strands of development culminate in the steam engine patented by Thomas Savery in 1698 — a device that had hardly ever been depicted accurately, and which has never before been shown interactively. The much more famous Newcomen engine, revealed to the world just a few years later in the 1710s had — until now — always stolen the limelight.

The plan is to continue to develop the interactive articles. No doubt there will be a few errors that need correcting. There will also be some devices to add — a few are alluded to in the text, but not yet illustrated. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future someone were to discover yet more forgotten devices like Kalthoff’s and Petty’s. But I’d also like to trace the development of the steam engine even further, with a follow-up instalment taking us from the devices of Denis Papin and Thomas Newcomen through to James Watt and the high-pressure engines of Richard Trevithick, tracing all the lesser-known improvements and devices inbetween. And to start creating these for other technologies too.

So long as Jason and I can continue to find funds for our animator’s time and talent, then this is just the beginning.

But enough of my hopes and dreams and behind-the-scenes commentary. Go and explore the interactive diagrams for yourselves!

Most people have no conception of what it might be like to reach a truly massive audience. A few years ago the self-help guru Tim Ferriss wrote an eye-opening piece on what it’s like to be even only somewhat famous. There are certainly upsides. You might make new friends, be able to substantially aid the causes you’re passionate about, and perhaps even make some money. 

But as Ferriss notes, it’s a Faustian bargain. Just through sheer numbers alone, if your work reaches an audience the size of a city, or perhaps even a small country, then it will inevitably reach a lot of people who are simply mad, bad or sad. Even if you’ve said nothing that could reasonably be construed as controversial, you might receive threats and have insults hurled at you. You’ll receive all the more if you have. And even the most anodyne or obscure things you have said will reach people who want it to be either completely false or unquestionably true. All just because it will allow them to score some cheap point over some other people they loathe. The wider the audience your work reaches, the more this will happen.

Along with those risks, however, if you try to reach a wide public audience then you also have a responsibility – because the things you put out there will be used in ways you may never have anticipated and which you simply cannot control. To give a personal example, a few years ago I wrote a couple of pieces on whether the Ottoman Empire really banned the printing press, in which I raised the speculative possibility that what had been called a “ban” by European observers may actually have been an excuse used by Ottoman officials to block specifically foreign, Christian propaganda. Now, I took great pains to show exactly what scanty evidence I was drawing on to infer that story and signalled throughout that it was really very speculative. But I occasionally see it shared on social media by Turkish nationalists as definitive proof of what happened, and serving as ammunition against people they feel are insulting their heritage by merely saying that the Ottoman Empire had restricted the printing press. And that’s despite even opening the piece by noting how the politicisation of the history of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire – on all sides, no matter how well-meaning – has got in the way of actually working out the truth. (Hate-mail incoming in 3.. 2..)

Given the unpredictable ways in which historical work gets used and abused as it reaches a wider audience, it does however demand caution. If you make a speculative case, it should be very clearly labelled as speculative. And if you present speculation as fact, then the wider the audience this reaches, the more you can expect this to be called out. Because we all like to know what’s true. Given the way information is used or abused, for better or for worse, the one thing that unites the good actors and the bad is that they like to be dealing with information they’re confident is sound. 

One thing I’ve noticed as my own audience has grown – to over 26,000 people now, far in excess of what I ever expected when I started this newsletter just over four years ago – is that there is no surer way to provoke a reaction, ranging from the painfully polite correction right down to hostile name-calling, than to make an actual mistake, even if it’s entirely innocent. There seems to be a fairly universal human urge to correct what is incorrect, each in our own way, and bring our own expertise to bear, whether we notice a thesis-shattering counterproof or even just a mere spelling mistake. 

This is downright terrifying. Long-time readers might have noticed that nowadays I tend to publish much longer but also less frequent posts than I did some years ago. This is because as my audience has grown from the hundreds to the thousands and then to the tens of thousands, I feel a greater and greater sense of responsibility to not accidentally get something wrong. It’s embarrassing enough to tell a story that turns out to be wrong to a group of friends – we’ve all been there. But it’s excruciating when you’ve accidentally misinformed a group the size of a medium-sized town.

And yet, it’s also exciting. When you reach a large audience you inevitably also reach people who are better-informed or more specialised than you on a dizzying and even unpredictable range of topics – a large audience is also a wide audience. Even if I think I know a lot about early steam engines – and I think it’d be fair to say I know more than even the average historian of technology – with a wider audience it gets more and more likely that the things I write will come to the attention of people who know far more. It’s a simple, mathematical inevitability. 

It’s not just inevitable. It’s to be actively sought, because it makes us better. One of my favourite things about what I do is that I have come to the attention of people who possess a vast and specialised expertise on a wide range of topics – and who will not hesitate to correct me when I’m wrong. I can’t help but experience a little trepidation when I see certain names pop up in my inbox or on social media – like John Kanefsky when I happen to mention steam engines, John Styles when I write about textiles, or Judy Stephenson when I mention labour practices, to name just a few. When such names pop up, even if I haven’t actually got anything wrong, I know I’m still about to be schooled. And that my work is about to be improved as a result. Reaching a wider audience and actively seeking correction disciplines me to check the information I put out into the world, or at the very least to express my uncertainty where it’s appropriate, and it makes it more likely that any misinformation I’ve already inadvertently put out there gets cleaned up. 

The other day I got to meet another substack newsletter writer with an audience of a similar size to mine – the wonderfully curious Mike Sowden. One thing he did recently is ask his audience to leave a comment calling him an idiot, ideally explaining why – both a call for correction and a kind of icebreaking exercise so that, having already called him an idiot once, people will get in touch with him more often with their corrections in future. From what he tells me, it sounds like it’s been a roaring success, exposing him to the privilege, quite frankly, of his audience’s expertise. I’ll remind you again later, but when you’ve finished reading this to the end I’d like you to leave a comment: it may or may not be to correct something I’ve said here or elsewhere, but at the very least just call me an idiot. 

Principles of Proportionality

Now, Mike and I are clearly gluttons for punishment. And in general calling people idiots is unlikely to result in misinformation getting corrected by the people responsible for it. Even if it’s thoroughly deserved. It certainly is in Mike’s case. But the way we try to correct misinformation, intentional or otherwise, has to be proportional.

This brings me to a case I first wrote about in July, and which I returned to in August, when new evidence had come to light. You’ll have to forgive me for bringing it up for a third time, and I’d even resolved after the second time that that would be that. In the months that followed I’d avoided any further mention of the matter on social media, and I’d scrupulously avoided even “liking” any posts about it, as I knew that might propel it into people’s timelines again. I felt I had already acted proportionately in trying to correct some misinformation, and that taking it any further would be pushing it. So I’m hoping this will be the very last time I ever have to mention it in public ever again. You’ll see why.

The case involves a paper by Jenny Bulstrode published in June in the journal History & Technology. As a quick recap, it claimed the following: that the inventor Henry Cort had stolen his famous 1783 iron-rolling process from an ironworks called Reeder’s Pen in Jamaica, where it had been developed by 76 black metallurgists by passing bundled scrap iron through grooved sugar rollers. The paper then claimed that Henry Cort heard of the process via a cousin named John Cort who had been in Jamaica, and that Reeder’s mill was destroyed and its machines dismantled and taken to Portsmouth where Henry Cort could use them. It insinuated, though without saying so directly, that Cort may have used his connections in the Admiralty to achieve this destruction and theft (something that the author then claimed explicitly in the media, specifically on a podcast called The Context of White Supremacy).

It was very widely reported in the press – in The Guardian, Mirror, New Scientist, on NPR, and in heaps of local newspapers and more niche sites. On social media it went viral, with thousands of people reading and praising it. And I think it’s fair to assume that this attention was actively courted. Someone made the decision for the paper to be made open-access, and thus free for all to read rather than behind the usual academic journal paywall, and the paper was heavily promoted by the journal’s publisher Taylor & Francis as well as by the writer’s department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL. Within days there were local politicians calling for Cort’s name to be expunged from the names of streets and public buildings, and the Wikipedia entries associated with Cort and his innovations were heavily updated in light of its conclusions. After all, History & Technology, as a double-blind peer-reviewed journal, has all the hallmarks of a trustworthy source.

But as I said before, pursuing a larger and wider audience for one’s work is a double-edged sword, coming with significant risks and responsibilities. 

You can be sure that it’s going to reach a lot of people who will attempt to use your work for their own ends. There will be a great many people who will want it to be right, because it is a compelling illustration of the neglected historical achievements of black people and of the injustices of colonialism and slavery. Indeed the author herself indulged in this, portraying it in the media as important evidence of the need for reparations. But there will also be a great many people who want it to be wrong, perhaps because they wish to downplay historical injustices or the achievements of black people, or even just so that any criticism can show that the political activists they disagree with are more generally untrustworthy. “Woke gone mad”, etc.

Yet for these political arguments whether it’s actually true or not is really neither here nor there. It’s not as though we don’t already have countless cases of the injustices of colonialism and slavery or examples of the achievements of black people. It’s not as though showing someone was wrong about a single, hyper-specific case study does anything at all to invalidate much broader political arguments. It’d be enormously egotistical of historians to pretend otherwise, as though real justice can only be pursued or achieved because of their own research.

The philosopher Liam Kofi Bright skewered it all perfectly in a single tweet:

Huge debate going on among historians right now about whether some black metallurgists did something with rollers (?) that made steel more... steely... and then had that nicked by some Brit. The fate of equality rests on this, following matters closely.

Quite. And if you do think that the fate of equality hinges on whether a man who died 223 years ago copied and took credit for a very specific ironmaking technique that until a few months ago only a handful of nerds like me had ever even heard of, then I’d prescribe a complete political and current affairs detox. I’m qualified to prescribe this as a doctor with a real PhD, rather than a mere physician: throw away your smartphone, cancel your broadband, and keep yourself at least five miles distant from the nearest population centre for at least a year. The full works.

And apart from those who want you to be wrong or right, you’re also going to come to the attention of people who know a thing or two about the things you’ve discussed – those terrifying people with deep expertise, and even just the more generalist but informed idiots like me. I read the paper the day it was published, but I didn’t write anything about it until after a number of people began to either email me or ask me on social media about it. As I write regularly about inventors of the Industrial Revolution, some people naturally looked to me for my relatively informed opinion.

And I considered the narrative about Henry Cort to be wholly unsubstantiated, for the reasons I set out back then. I judged it to be misinformation, and misinformation that was spreading at a rapid rate. It was already well on its way to solidifying into a widely accepted fact. Now, calling it misinformation is not to say that it is disinformation, which is when an author purposefully misinforms – it is impossible for me to say, and I’m not even sure it really matters.

I left open the possibility that there was evidence the author had read but then simply failed to cite properly. I constantly used the phrase “no evidence presented”. That is not the same as “no evidence”. Misremembering a citation or even just accidentally deleting one in the process of editing and re-editing a piece is all too easy, and I’m not embarrassed to say that I’ve done it a few times myself. If I were shown that there was evidence after all, it would then have been on me to update and perhaps even withdraw my critique — it would have been embarrassing not to, and with the public so interested in the matter I’d have had nowhere to hide! They’d never have let me forget about it. But until shown otherwise, I judged it to be misinformation. 

And I think we should try to correct misinformation when we see it, regardless of its source or whether it was produced with the best or the worst of intentions. It behoves us when we have the expertise and have already done the work to verify – or in other words, when we have the means. And it especially behoves us to correct misinformation when it looks like it’s becoming widespread. If someone’s completely wrong paper is likely only going to be read by them and their Mum (that’s British for Mom), then it may not be worth going to the trouble of correcting it. If it’s been seen by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people, however, and is being taken seriously, then that’s another matter.

Which brings me back to proportionality, which I think is determined by two factors: 1) the size of the audience it has already reached, and 2) the ease with which the most influential source of the misinformation can be changed.

Had Bulstrode’s theory been contained in just a tweet or a blogpost, I’d probably have just written to her directly and privately. I might not even have bothered to do anything at all – tweets and blogposts are not generally the stuff of which widely accepted facts are made, even if they go viral. And they’re easily deleted or changed. I quietly inform people of errors all the time, and people do the same for me – it’s like telling someone they have spinach stuck in their teeth. It may feel awkward to do, but you’re really doing them a favour. 

This, however, was another matter entirely. Not only had the information already reached a vast number of people, but published journal articles – particularly in history – are almost never corrected or changed. If they are, it takes months if not years, by which time the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Under those circumstances I think it’s best to publish a critique pointing out the misinformation so that it can also reach as wide an audience as possible, though the nature of these things is always that the rebuttal will only reach a small fraction of those whom it had already misinformed. My blog will never be able to outdo the sheer reach of The Guardian, nor will it command the authority of a peer-reviewed journal. If anything, to be truly proportionate I perhaps ought to have done even more.

Just look at the vocal reaction of medieval and Tudor historians to the release of a book and Channel 4 documentary by Philippa Langley, the researcher who first came to prominence for her role in the discovery of the remains of Richard III under a car park in Leicester. This time, she’s back in the news to present the evidence that Richard III did not quietly murder his nephews in the Tower of London, but that the two figures we’re used to thinking of as mere pretenders, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, were in fact the real princes. The theory, often presented with a great deal of certainty, has achieved a huge level of publicity and is backed by a bemusingly active group of people who want it to be right – Richard III was Yorkshire-raised, and many English northerners bloody love the north and won’t hear a bad word against the only king who may plausibly be called one of their own. 

So other historians concerned about misinformation express their concerns publicly. They do not, and should not, merely write privately to Langley. Suppose she were to be convinced she’s wrong? What’s she supposed to do, somehow track down everyone who’s read her books and tell them to chuck it in the bin? Tell people to unwatch the documentary? No. The genie is out of the bottle. And so we instead have a lively and (largely) healthy debate played out in public – just as it should be. When misinformation is widespread, you counter it by spreading the information that is correct.

But the other reason I felt I had done enough is that I was not the only expert to have noticed the problems with Bulstrode’s paper. Back in August I shared a working paper by someone – Oliver Jelf, then completing his dissertation for a research masters from Buckingham University, and otherwise a graphic designer – who had got in touch with me after digging into it further. Jelf did not just read the paper and take everything at face value, but went to double-check some of the key sources it had used, which he also transcribed for anyone to read and judge for themselves. He showed that some of the claims in the paper were not supported by the sources that had been cited, and even that many could not be supported at all. And what he also did was submit his response to the journal that had published the original paper, asking if they would publish it as a response.

I also then learned of yet more critics, of whom I had been completely unaware. I mentioned the names of experts that I cannot help but regard with trepidation. Well, the one for iron is Peter King. There cannot be a single person alive today on the entire planet who knows as much about eighteenth-century ironmaking as him. He has meticulously researched and published on the history of ironmaking for decades, and just a few years ago finished compiling the monumental A Gazetteer of the British Iron Industry, 1490-1815. And there’s Richard Williams, a trained ferrous metallurgist – his doctorate was on the thermodynamics of iron-carbon interactions – who has over the past decade been correcting metallurgical misunderstandings that had crept into the history of eighteenth-century ironmaking.

Within days of the initial press attention for the paper, King and Williams were among a group of experts on the history of metallurgy who were starting to be asked questions about Bulstrode’s paper – including by various industrial heritage sites about whether they needed to update their displays to reflect the paper’s new narrative about Cort. And the information requests kept coming. But, like me, they noticed big gaps in the evidence – along with a great deal more errors, coming from their position of specialised expertise in the practice and history of iron metallurgy. These were the sort of errors that Jelf and I were far too inexpert to have noticed. 

King and Williams took the “proper” channels. Their group drew up a brief summary of the paper’s problems and contacted the various newspapers that had covered the matter to issue corrections. They were completely ignored, and don’t seem to have been mentioned even once in any of the press coverage that began to appear in The Telegraph or The Times. They also contacted Bulstrode’s department and the publishers asking them to take down their promotion of the paper, and were again seemingly brushed off. And, of course, they contacted the journal’s editors.

Academia’s natural process of self-correction now seemed to be grinding into gear. Rightly ignoring all the politicised huff and puff on social media or the press, with culture warriors on the one side crowing at how the criticisms Jelf and I had raised were some kind of victory over “woke gone mad”, and those on the other side impugning critics’ motives in questioning the paper at all, it seemed only a matter of time until the editors would decide whether to either publish Jelf’s rebuttal or more thoroughly examine the paper’s evidence and retract it. At most, there’d be a little more huff and puff before the culture warriors on both sides would forget all about their brief interest in 1780s grooved iron-rollers and move onto the next thing to fight over. That would be that. End of story. A barely visible unpicking of a single stitch in the ever-expanding and changing tapestry of what we know about our history. 

Bulstrode would probably be a little embarrassed, but it’s not like it automatically invalidates all her other work or the work that she may do in the future. It was only a single paper after all, even if it got a moment in the harsh and uncompromising glare of the public spotlight. Remember that it was more or less accidental that the paper ended up being subjected to so much detailed scrutiny, purely a product of how much attention it received. Yes, she actively pursued the public’s gaze, but I think it’s probably fair to say that like most people she might not have appreciated what that could mean. There’s plenty of absolute garbage that gets published in other papers, which is probably of significantly greater consequence. Some misinformation can quite literally cost lives; I somehow doubt that getting it wrong on the metallurgy of 1780s Jamaica is going to be quite so perilous. But the difference is that hardly anyone has even heard of most papers, let alone actually read them.

As for the journal editors who would decide whether to retract the article, it was they who read the initial draft and decided it was worth reviewing, who chose the peer-reviewers, who decided to publish based on the reviews, and who helped publicise it once it was published. In general, editors wield a stamp of considerable authority, conferring legitimacy on academic work. Because nobody has the time to follow-up on every single thing they read – life’s too short – we rely on editors and the peer-review process to tell us what we can trust, at least relatively. Editors thus bear an immense responsibility. Their overriding duty is to preserve the trustworthiness and integrity of the journal. This is not just a matter of publishing good work – shoddy stuff will always manage to slip through the net – but above all it’s about ensuring that any misinformation is addressed through corrections or even outright retraction. Even if it might take a while.

Given the weight of the responsibility that they must have felt, I fully trusted that the editors would find a way to correct or retract the paper that would save everyone as much face as possible and we’d all move on. That’s just the way the institutions of academia work, right? 

Apparently not.

A couple of weeks ago the editors of the journal, Amy Slaton and Tiago Saraiva, issued a public statement. It’s an extraordinary document, which you can read here. On the one hand, they do admit that there is “no direct reference in any source quoted by Bulstrode or in the archaeological record to grooved rollers used to work iron at John Reeder’s foundry”. They also issue a correction to show that, as Jelf had demonstrated, Cort’s cousin did not in fact go to Portsmouth and bring him the news of such an invention for him to then appropriate as his own. Fine. That’s something.

But they then proceed to systematically misrepresent or simply ignore the most important criticisms made by Jelf and me in public, and by King’s and Williams’s group more privately. Slaton and Saraiva instead come out in “unreserved support” for the article. Although Cort’s cousin never went to Portsmouth, their correction is to say that the news of the innovation must surely therefore have been brought to him by the other, completely random ship the author had originally mistaken it for!

Allow me to very briefly address just a single argument – by far the most crucial point that they left unaddressed. Although they openly admit there is no direct evidence, Slaton and Saraiva argue that Bulstrode made a reasonable inference that there was an innovation at Reeder’s Pen. Let’s set aside for a moment that they also say Bulstrode “demonstrates” it, and that the language of the paper has not been updated to show the extent to which this is speculative. The crux is whether she makes a reasonable inference when claiming that grooved rollers were used there to make bar iron from heated bundles of scrap.

If this inference is unreasonable, then the inferences on which the rest of the narrative rests are all completely irrelevant. If there’s no reason to suppose that grooved rollers were used to make bar iron from heated bundles of scrap at Reeder’s Pen, then it doesn’t matter why the ironworks were destroyed, or whether the machinery was taken on board naval ships to Portsmouth, or whether John Cort or some other random ship sailed to Portsmouth or not, or really any of the chain of events by which Henry Cort is supposed to have stolen the innovation. If there was no innovation there to begin with, then there was nothing for Henry Cort to even steal.

The editors, and Bulstrode herself, make the inference based on the following: that grooved sugar-cane rollers were being made at Reeder’s Pen, that the black workers there thought sugar and iron were in some sense related conceptually, that the ironworks was profitable, that it recycled scrap iron, and that the ironworks used rollers – a technology they admit had been used in ironmaking for centuries, though usually with flat rollers.

They seemingly consider this to be sufficient to “conclude” that the workers “who were so familiar with both sugar and iron production overlapped in their approaches to the two operations and passed bundles of scrap metal through grooved rollers”, thus inventing a grooved rolling technique for iron that Cort later patented in 1783.

This is already tenuous at best. But the editors were also made aware of a host of further problems: 

One is that there is actually no mention in the sources of any iron rollers, flat or grooved or otherwise, in use at Reeder’s Pen at all – as Jelf very clearly demonstrated. But Slaton and Saraiva just totally ignore this, repeatedly asserting that the sources show the foundry “used rollers to produce iron goods”. In doing so, they merely reproduce the misinformation we were trying to correct. It’s not like they even contest our reading of the sources or provide new evidence on this point. In fact, they seem to fully accept the accuracy of the source transcriptions that Jelf appended to his paper. After all, they corrected the factual error he’d pointed out about the ship and admit the lack of any mention of grooved iron rollers in use. So they’ve been extraordinarily careless.

Instead of any rollers, King and Williams noted that the evidence relating to Reeder’s Pen is perfectly consistent with it having consisted of a water-powered bellows, chafery and helve hammers, along with an air furnace – old and well-known technology which is all you’d require to process scrap iron.

The editors also ignore the countervailing circumstantial evidence Jelf raised, that at no point did Reeder, the owner of the ironworks, who later even had a patent related to sugar, make any mention whatsoever of any innovations when he was begging the government for restitution for his demolished works. Considering he had every incentive to over-claim for what he had lost, why is there no record of any novelty? If Cort had copied a technology invented by Reeder’s slaves or other workers, you’d think he’d have made a very big deal of this. Again, Slaton and Saraiva simply ignore this point.

So the circumstantial evidence we’re left with is this: there was an ironworks, it was profitable, it probably just used old, well-known iron technology – and we have absolutely no reason to believe otherwise. Oh, and there were sugar rollers.

This is where it gets even more tenuous, and where they misrepresent my arguments. Slaton and Saraiva note, as I had pointed out, that when you roll iron the rollers must be horizontal. They also note that sugar rollers were typically vertical, but that by the late eighteenth century they were sometimes horizontal – which from the way they write it, they make seem like a refutation of an argument, when it is actually explicitly what I said back in July. To very tediously quote myself: “Such [sugar] mills could have the rollers either vertical or horizontal (but they’re almost always shown vertically).” (One of the fun things about substack is that because this blog also gets sent out as an email, about 20,000 people can even go and see the original version, just in case you suspect that I made any edits after the fact. And yes, that exact quotation is there.)

But what they ignored is what is most important – and is precisely what I had said was most important. Sugar rollers and grooved iron rollers of the kind Cort made use of were just fundamentally different. Maybe the source of confusion is in the use of the word “roller”. Sugar rollers were really sugar-cane crushers – their grooves were cut along the length of the rolls, to grip and squeeze. Iron rolling, instead, involves running hot iron bars through the gaps in grooves that run around the circumference of the rolls. Rolling iron through these gaps does not crush, but sort of stretches and smooths the sides and edges of the heated metal – that is what made Cort’s rolling process useful at all, so that the bars it produced became welded without any cracks. 

So even supposing you did have specifically horizontal sugar rollers there – and there’s no evidence to suggest even that, other than wishing it were true – then it’s really a matter of simple physics. Pass a heated bundle of scrap iron through a rolling sugar-cane crusher, rather than something that will stretch and smooth the sides and edges of the heated metal, and you are almost certainly just going to break the machine. The idea that sugar crushers were used to invent anything even remotely similar to Cort’s rolling process is thus simply implausible – it doesn’t matter if the black workers at Reeder’s Pen conceived of sugar and iron as conceptually related in any way. It just wouldn’t get you to that technology.

Incredibly, even in misrepresenting my arguments Slaton and Saraiva manage to make a sloppy error, even if it’s not a significant one. In their pretended “gotcha” to point out that horizontal sugar-cane crushers had been in use in the Caribbean by the 1780s, their proof is that “the first patent for horizontally positioned grooved rollers for processing sugar cane was granted to George Smeaton in 1754”, for which they give three citations. Except that they can only have actually checked the first of these: had they bothered to double-check this information, which would have taken all but five minutes of googling, they’d have noticed that it’s actually the famous engineer John Smeaton, not a George, and that he had no patent of this kind. They’d have noticed that this was probably a garbled reference to when John Smeaton in 1754 made drawings for a Mr Grey of Jamaica of a breast-shot waterwheel to power a three-roll horizontal sugar-cane crusher. They’d have noticed that Smeaton never went to Jamaica, that these drawings are marked “not executed” – that is, not actually made – and that mills on this model began to be produced in numbers only after 1794, though a few had seemingly been in use in French-ruled Haiti.

Anyway. We so rarely get the privilege of finding a smoking gun. Usually, the best we have to deal with consists of the kinds of snippets here and there of circumstantial evidence, informed by our wider, contextual knowledge. Writing about history is a puzzle where we lack a great number of the pieces. But what we have here is not just the lack of a smoking gun. There isn’t a body, and there isn’t even any blood. There hasn’t been report of a loud bang, or really anything at all. There’s just a quiet, empty street to which someone has turned up before suddenly rushing to the other side of town and arresting a random person – Henry Cort.

To my amazement, in a true testament to the power of public history, a great many people had apparently carefully read Bulstrode’s paper, my critique, and even Jelf’s paper. Before I’d even had a chance to begin writing up any of this, the public actually noticed some of these glaring omissions and began to raise them in response to the editorial. (Here’s just one example, albeit behind a paywall, on a newsletter by a non-historian that is about seven times the size of mine.) When everything is conducted in the open, where the arguments can be read by everyone, the public becomes like the all-seeing eye of a deity – there is simply nowhere to hide, and they are not to be treated like fools. When I make mistakes, they do the same to me.

Now, many of the people who noticed the editorial’s omissions will, I’m sure, be among those who want the paper to be wrong. But even suppose you had ninety-nine people attacking you with pure, unhinged, loathsome bile, if there were even just a single reasonable person who came to you with a compelling, evidence-based critique, then you’d still have to take that one voice seriously. If I say something ludicrous like “steel and iron are always the same” and ninety-nine people merely call me an idiot without elaborating, I can’t just dismiss Richard Williams when he pops up terrifyingly in my inbox with dozens of carefully reasoned pages explaining how they’re actually rather different.

To add insult to injury, Slaton and Saraiva impugned the motives and credentials of all the paper’s critics, seemingly associating any criticism with the horrid online abuse that a paper so widely publicised inevitably attracted on social media. In the case of Jelf, they even say they were “unable to ascertain” his academic or institutional affiliations, despite the fact he had emailed them directly to submit his paper. So they actually corresponded with him but then simply never bothered to ask, deploying their position of authority to sow doubt. (To my disbelief, though to his great amusement, I’ve even seen it speculated online that I invented Oliver Jelf. I’m not entirely sure why I’d need to invent a pseudonym with such an implausible-sounding backstory, having already put my name to a critique of the paper. Why on earth would I myself actively reduce the authority of a critique that I believe to be sound?)

But what most outraged many members of the public was the way the editors concluded, despite having repeatedly admitted that there was no direct evidence for the article’s claims. I will quote the last paragraph in full: 

We by no means hold that ‘fiction’ is a meaningless category – dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.

Overall, there is not a single worse strategy that the editors could have chosen if they wanted to protect the paper from further, hostile criticism. Not only did the conclusion immediately lead to charges that they were putting politics above evidence, but it also provoked headlines and outraged reactions in the press. 

None of this was necessary. Even if the editors had not wanted to retract or make sweeping corrections – though I still can’t see why not – they could have found a way to condemn the personal attacks on the author while then publishing one of the carefully assembled critiques that had been sent to them and allowing the author to then reply. Or they could have even gone further, going through the evidence-based critiques point-by-point, offering new sources where they were lacking, and defending or correcting each point. But they simply chose not to.

And that choice meant that they leaned on their authority, deploying the trust that we all have that the process is still working. The author’s department immediately issued a press release saying that she had been “fully vindicated” and that all the fuss on social media and the press had been the result of “a hostile and organised response from a small number of people”. Much, much more seriously, last week the council of the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) – not just some informal gathering but an officially registered and rather venerable learned society aiming to speak for an entire sub-field – issued a statement flatly condemning Bulstrode’s critics for having “neglected both common courtesy and established academic standards, including principles of peer review … We strongly condemn unwarranted attacks on authoritative and innovative research of any kind”. 

Now, I realise that there was a lot of hatred on social media from those who wanted the article to be wrong. Possibly there were more serious threats and complaints made by the mad, bad and sad as well. But with these kinds of statements they have also impugned the motives and integrity of all critics, no matter the quality of their criticism.

And in so doing they have quite dramatically raised the stakes, and with an extraordinary feat of engineering turned a mere molehill – what should have been a “nothing-to-see-here”, mildly reassuring event of academic self-correction and basic accountability – into a mountain. And a mountain from which there is no easy way down. How can they possibly have expected the people who made detailed, still unanswered criticisms not to respond by merely pointing out what is already so obvious even non-expert members of the public? And if the paper remains demonstrably wrong, where do the editors of History & Technology and the council of the BSHS go from there? This is no longer about whether a paper with an eye-catching argument is wrong or right. They allowed themselves to get sucked into the culture warriors’ silly parlour game and totally lost sight of what really matters, because it’s now about whether the run-of-the-mill procedures for getting academic work corrected or retracted actually work at all. It’s about whether they deserve our trust.

I do not wish to get carried away here and claim that this is proof that the entirety of history is in crisis and we need some kind of radical overhaul. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. But we do need to be confident that the institutions that produce information and correct any resulting misinformation are working properly. If you care about the history of technology, or the history of the Caribbean, or of slavery, or colonialism, or the history of metallurgy, or even history in general – and they’re all big ifs, but personally I love all history and think it all matters – then much like the public the thing we all have in common is that we want our information to be sound. We will never have it all exactly right, and I’m not saying it will ever be perfect – but I think we all want to be moving in the right direction, stumbling our way towards accuracy and truth, not away from them.

Where do we go from here?

Let’s set aside the details of the particular case. Frankly, I hope I never have to publicly mention it ever again. Third time’s the charm, as they say.

But I hope that there are lessons to draw from this about how to conduct historical debate and truly engage with the public, recognising not just the risks and responsibilities of reaching a wider audience, but the major benefits too.

One thing I noticed a lot in the discussion on social media was the questioning of motives. As I keep mentioning, there are a lot of people out there who for whatever reason, even if you try so hard not to be in any way controversial, will fervently want you to be either right or wrong. So it’s very easy to be tempted into questioning people’s motives, because a lot of people’s motives will indeed stem from politics or ideology, whether that’s obvious or not. 

But the questioning of motives is, quite frankly, poisonous. It automatically closes off any chance of healthy or productive public debate. Thoughtful criticism is still thoughtful criticism, no matter its source. Forget this, and we end up in a situation where we assume that criticism cannot be merited, and hubristically close ourselves off to any challenge. 

Take Oliver Jelf. I’ve never met the guy. For all I know, he could be a raving rightwinger or a loonie lefty. But it doesn’t actually matter – in all the correspondence we’ve had, but especially in the work that he made public, his respect for the evidence has spoken for itself. Nor does it matter if his name is real or if he’s a former masters student or a grumpy old professor emeritus: it’s the arguments and evidence that count. 

We also, I think, need to find ways to make it less embarrassing to correct things. This is not just from a personal point of view, but also from an institutional one. We all know we’re fallible and that we make mistakes all the time. It needs to be easier to admit that, correct the record, and move on. It also needs to be much easier to correct records that have already been published and propagated. This applies to peer-reviewed articles, but potentially all the more so to books.  

And we need to brave the public. There’s a risk that this whole saga will put many historians off of actively publicising their work – that they will come to fear the mad, bad, and sad, and all the online abuse it might bring. But I hope it does not. A closed-off history, hidden away behind paywalls or protected by social barriers, is one that will stultify and decay. The public eye may be unforgiving in some senses, but it also exposes your work to new ideas, unfamiliar expertise, and above all creates discipline — if we let it. 

So I have a few, tentative commandments of good public history, to which there are perhaps more to add:

Thou shalt not impugn the motives of those who ask awkward questions.

Thou shalt make it easier to correct the mistakes you make.

Thou shalt go forth and publicise your work.

What might I have missed? What else could or should we do to improve public debate around history? If there’s one thing you do, please take a moment to call me an idiot using the comment button, and then tell me why. 

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I’m still working away on the blockbuster post I alluded to last time, but in the meantime would like to share a few interesting things that took my notice while researching.

One of these is a list from 1715 of inventions that had never been known to the ancient Greeks or Romans. It was appended to an English translation of a work by the Italian historian Guido Panciroli called The History of Many Memorable Things Lost, originally written in Italian but first published by one of his students in Latin in 1599 after Panciroli had died. Panciroli himself had already noted a few things they believed to have been unknown to the Ancients. From the vantage point of the 1590s these included the better-known achievements of the moderns like moveable-type printing, gunpowder, stirrups, spectacles, weight-driven clocks, the magnetic compass, and the discovery of the New World. But he also included (though not always accurately):

• The Chinese invention of porcelain — which he erroneously believed to be “a compound of gypsum, beaten eggs, and the shells of lobsters” all mashed up and then buried for at least eighty years

• The discovery of bezoar stones, used against venoms and poisons, which he said were mined in the Maghreb

• Refined sugar, including the art “arrived to such perfection” of candying nuts and spices

• Alchemical discoveries like gilding brass, the whitening of sapphires, improved alloys of tin, the use of cupels for assaying metals, and aqua fortis (nitric acid) with which to separate gold from either brass or silver.

• Distillation, especially of various oils and tinctures of herbs and spices for medicines, as well as aqua vitae or ‘waters of life’ like whisky

• Cryptographical methods, which he judged to have become more sophisticated since ancient times. The later translator agreed, noting how during the English Civil Wars anyone who was anyone used ciphers, many of which challenged even the master code-breaker Dr John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford.

• The seventh-century Byzantine invention of “Greek fire”.

• Silk-making, brought to Europe in the sixth century, along with silk-based variants like velvets and satins.

He also included jousting, falconry, watermills, saddles, and the eating of fish roe dishes like caviar and bottarga. And the use of mana as a medicine. The student who published Panciroli’s work, who added some of his own commentary, was a little sceptical of some of these.

The English translator’s choices in 1715, however, are perhaps even more interesting for telling us about what were considered the early fruits of the “new philosophy” or science — the kind propagated by the likes of England’s Royal Society and France’s Académie des Sciences. This translator thought that Panciroli had died right on the cusp of the great change, “when ignorance and darkness overwhelmed all nations”, but just at the point “when learning began to revive, and arts and sciences to be enquired after.” To the translator it was obvious that discovery and invention had begun to accelerate, placing a change “within the compass of less than a century last past” — presumably circa 1615-1715 — when “such wonderful improvements have been made in most of them, that the Ancients had been surpassed”.

Whereas Panciroli worried that the moderns were still lagging behind the Ancients, by 1715 it seemed obvious that the Ancients had been outdone.

But what is so interesting, and often surprising, is what the translator chose to highlight. Here are just a few of them:

• Logic, of the art of reasoning. “This art of thinking is the highest improvement of the human understanding, and is justly attributed to modern invention”. Not one I’ve heard much of before! Frustratingly, this isn’t much elaborated on. Similarly, the author rather betrays their biases somewhat by including theology.

• Arithmetic, which “can now teach us not only to sum up, divide, multiply, and abstract from the whole numbers, but collect together the minutest parts and fractions into one plain total.” I think this might be a reference to the development of modern decimal fractions by the Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin? [Update: Chris Hind in the comments suggests that the collecting of parts and fractions must surely refer to the development of integral calculus in the 1670s. I think this might be right!]

• Optical glasses, and particularly telescopes, which have led to improvements in astronomy and navigation — most notably the finding of one’s latitude even on the open ocean. (Our writer also believes the discovery of longitude to be near at hand. The famous prize offered by Britain for discovering longitude at sea is seen as evidence “that it was rather kept secret, than not known”. After all, to “discover” in those days did not just mean to find something out that was previously unknown, but was about public disclosure.)

• Natural Sciences. Whereas the Ancients had seemingly “looked only upon the surface of things”, the moderns had discovered much from the use of dissection and vivisection about the internal workings of animals, as well as from the use of microscopes, which had revealed a hidden “new world at home” of mites, ants, fleas and flies. Our writer must have had in mind Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, published in 1665.

• Surgery, or rather chirurgery. There are quite a few examples given:

  • Because of dissections, “the anatomy of Man’s body is fully discovered”, our author crowed, along with the nature of the nerves, tendons, glands, bones, and blood. Thanks to the work of various medieval Islamic investigators and the English physician William Harvey in the 1620s, the moderns knew that the blood circulated. The particular mention of glands is likely a reference to the 1640s or 50s discovery of the lymphatic system — one of those oh-so-common cases of near-simultaneous discovery, with claimants for the honour in England, Denmark, Sweden, and France. (My favourite case is that of the English claimant, George Jolliffe, who apparently during a dissection of testicles, which he had tied off with a ligature higher up, accidentally squeezed on one and caused the lymphatic vessels to swell up).

  • New methods to “cut the stone” — to remove excruciatingly painful kidney stones and bladder stones, “with little or no loss of blood, and a very small danger of life”. This sounds very specific, but I suspect bladder stones would have been a lot more common than they are today. In Paris in 1650 the diarist John Evelyn saw a boy of just eight or nine years old undergo the operation, and today bladder stones are one of the most common complaints among young children in especially rural and impoverished areas — which would describe pretty much the entire world in the seventeenth century.

  • “Breaking of distorted limbs and bones, and placing them in their right form”. I’m not sure about how new this was, but it provides an interesting avenue to investigate — I’ve certainly never seen it mentioned as a major breakthrough before.

  • The emergency treatment of quinseys — probably then a catch-all term for any dangerous swelling up of the throat, though nowadays specifically a complication of tonsillitis. The treatment was to puncture the wind-pipe, “that the patient may draw his breath that way, while his throat is cured, and so life may be preserved”. Again, it’s not something I’ve seen mentioned as a major breakthrough before.

• Pharmaceuticals, or materia medica, both from greater knowledge of and access to minerals and plants, and from improvements to chemistry — or as it was then known, chymistry. The rise of international trade had drastically extended the range of drugs available at apothecaries. And “the chymist, by his fires, has found out a way to extract medicines of extraordinary force and use, from bones, stones, horns, poisons, minerals, dead flesh, and a thousand other things”.

  Our author doesn’t go into specifics, but may have had in mind something like the pharmaceutical breakthrough singled out in an earlier, 1677 list of great discoveries by alumni of Oxford University: the pulvis cornachinus, or “Earl of Warwick’s powder”, invented in the 1610s by Sir Robert Dudley, the illegitimate son of the Elizabeth I’s favourite the Earl of Leicester, who as a bigamist Catholic in self-imposed exile in Europe had gone by the titles of his father and uncle, claiming to be the (never recognised) earl of Warwick and Leicester.

  Dudley’s famous powder was essentially an early kind of tartar emetic, based on antimony — an effective means of expelling various parasites, although it has since been superseded because of some serious potential side-effects. As with “the stone”, I suspect people in the seventeenth century were dealing with a whole load more parasites and other problems caused by consuming contaminated food or drink, which perhaps explains the vomit-inducing powder’s popularity. In 1657, a tartar emetic cured a 19-year-old Louis XIV of France of typhoid fever.1

• Agriculture: “how infinitely short [the Ancients] come of our modern improvements, will be easy to judge”. This includes the transplantation of various plants to new settings — like oranges from China to Portugal, and vines from Germany to the Canary Islands — as well as better knowledge of the right seeds and manures for all kinds of soils. Our author even singles out something I mentioned last time: the use of lime to protect seeds from diseases and pests.

• Metallurgy and mineralogy: this is a long and very interesting list, including various improvements to the extraction of tin, lead, mercury, and silver, as well as the hardening and softening of steel for various uses, as well as the “distilling of coal”, the refining of saltpetre, the treatment of various gemstones, and the preparation of the glowing “Bononian Stone”, or Bologna Stone — white phosphorous.2

• Pendulum clocks and balance-spring watches, invented by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s — both vast improvements over the old mechanical clocks, taking their inaccuracies from a matter of minutes to a matter of seconds.

• Glass, in the late seventeenth century improved in England to be “finer than that of Venice”, and then applied to the further improvement of microscopes and telescopes. From this

• A panoply of other instruments, including barometers, thermometers, hygroscopes, anemometers, hearing aids, and way-wisers. Not to mention “an instrument for making screws with great dispatch”, and “a way of preserving the most exact impression of any seal, medal, or sculpture, and that in metal harder than silver”.

• Ship-building: the ships of the Ancients are dismissed as “little better than large flat-bottomed boats, and their voyages little more than creeping the shores from one city to another, or to some islands adjoining.” The moderns, by contrast, had conquered the oceans, crossing the Atlantic, rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, and circumnavigating the Globe.

• Improved diving bells: quite a big deal in the late seventeenth century, not least because they allowed for the recovery of all sorts of sunken treasures.

I could go on… But it’s a huge list already, and even the author apologised for only being able to scratch the surface — they don’t even mention steam engines! But it reveals the a whole load of avenues for further investigation. Although the eighteenth century gets all the glory today, it was extremely obvious to contemporaries that the pace of improvement had already been speeding up. By 1700 they were already confident that the Ancients had been outdone.

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I’ve got a really big post coming up, which I’d hoped to share with you last week. It’s one that had started as “just a quick post” but soon became an obsession as I discovered more and more: much like my series uncovering the forgotten origins of the steam engine, on how we kept forgetting how to cure scurvy, or my personal favourite ever posts on whether or not the printing press was banned in the Ottoman Empire (Part I, Part II). I don’t want to give too much away — especially as the post will start with a riddle — but I hope you’ll forgive my relatively infrequent posting of late while I try to get it all researched and written up.

In the meantime, however, I’d like to share some work I did for the UK’s innovation agency, Nesta (originally the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts when it was set up in 1998, but the acronym has since eaten its host). To inform Nesta’s work on the transition to renewable energy and what it might be used as an opportunity to create energy abundance, they commissioned me to research previous energy transitions — specifically, the original transition to burning coal.

I don’t often take research commissions, mainly as I ought to concentrate on finally finishing my book, but I do when it gives me an excuse to pull on some dauntingly tangled-looking research threads that I really need to tie up, but hadn’t yet braved — a way of bumping things up my long to-do list of topics I know I need to cover and actually getting them crossed off.

Here are a few key things that I hadn’t really fully appreciated until undertaking this particular commission, though each has provided even more threads I still need to pull on:

ONE. The transition to coal was started by finding ways to exploit the lower-grade, cheaper and more sulphurous coals: initially by finding ways to burn it in people’s homes that would not leave everyone crying and coughing from the stinking fumes; and then with the expanded supply of even the lowest-grade coals making it cost-effective to do things like boil seawater in pans to make salt. The very lowest-grade coal was termed simply “pan coal”. While I’m pretty certain that these innovations were responsible for much of the rise of coal — coal-fuelled salt pans were even the foundation of the Scottish Lowlands economy going into the eighteenth century — the actual inventors involved are still a bit of a mystery. It’s something I need to return to, as “lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.

TWO. Nobody ever talks about lime! Lime was one of the few things burnt with coal since ancient times, but largely to produce mortar for building. The increased availability of cheaper coal in the sixteenth century, however, meant that lime also soon found much wider use as a soil acidity regulator, as well as to control some pests and improve the absorption of fertilisers. It was especially favoured for sandy soils, allowing the conversion of barren heaths to agricultural land by increasing the soil’s water retention.

Yet lime is a huge blind spot for economic historians, despite it increasing the productivity of what was still by far the largest portion of the economy: agriculture. I have a rough and ready test of whether economic historians are paying enough attention to an industry, which is to look up the word in Stephen Broadberry et al.’s British Economic Growth 1270-1870, most scholars’ go-to resource on how historical British output is estimated. Lime is mentioned only once, and only as an input to the construction industry, for mortar. We should know more about lime’s impact.

THREE. Coal, through its various effects on agriculture, also led to an increase in the availability of grain, in turn leading to an abundance of muscle power. Horses were the literal workhorses of industrial cities, 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. Horses fulled cloth, pounded rags into paper, flatted metal into sheets, and bored pipes, guns and even cannon. And of course they powered the transportation infrastructure, hauling the waggons and barges laden with goods.

A theme I keep coming across when I do my research is that there was a lot of effort put into what we might call the “improvement of animals”. I’ve touched on this briefly before, but I get a sense that there’s a whole lot of iceberg lying in wait under the surface for me to uncover. It likely extended to dogs, for example, who like horses were also often used for mechanical tasks. Just yesterday, for example, I read an account by a visitor to 1630s Bristol mentioning how the roasting spits at its inns were driven by dogs in treadwheels. At some point I need to go through all this evidence I’ve inadvertently collected.

FOUR. The Dutch Republic’s Golden Age did not fail because it lacked energy sources. I had already suspected this, as it never rang true, but had not quite appreciated the extent of the evidence: the fairly rapid collapse of so many Dutch industries in the 1650s-80s was, if anything, accompanied by a super-abundance of energy. Both peat and grain were in fact cheaper than ever, largely as a result of plummeting demand. Even the products made using wind —such as the timber sawn for ships along the windy banks of the Zaan river — failed to survive the general collapse in demand.

If energy had been lacking, we would have expected the prices of peat and grain to have been at all-time highs, not in a slump. Indeed, the lack of demand for peat and grain, by sapping demand for infrastructure projects like bog drainage and canal-building, is what led to the re-flooding of much of the Dutch countryside. The causes of the collapse are still something of a mystery to me, but I now feel very confident in ruling the energy theory out.

Those are my personal takeaways from the research, but there’s a whole lot more in the fuller piece, which you can read here. You can also read what Nesta’s Andrew Sissons has drawn from the piece in terms of lessons for energy policy today.

P.S. I managed to miss this newsletter’s fourth birthday, which was on the 5th October. I’m very grateful to you, dear readers, who have made it so worth researching and writing, and allowed me to continue it outside of a traditional university setting for so many years already. If you’re a new reader and would like to support my work, you can upgrade to a paid subscription here:

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I’ve lately been reading about one of history’s greatest spies — not a James Bond-like agent with licence to kill, but a master of industrial espionage, John Holker.1

Holker was originally from Manchester, in Lancashire, where he was a skilled cloth manufacturer in the early eighteenth century, his specialty being calendering — a finishing process to give cloth a kind of sheen or glazed effect. But Holker was also a Catholic and a Jacobite — a believer in the claim of the Catholic descendants of the deposed king James II to be the rightful rulers of Great Britain, instead of the Hanoverian George I and George II who had only succeeded to the throne because they were Protestants. In 1745 James II’s grandson Charles, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie — likely the “Bonnie” who lies over the ocean in the famous song — landed in the Scottish Highlands and raised the royal standard. Charles’s uprising defeated the British troops stationed in Scotland, captured Edinburgh, and then marched down the west coast of England, capturing Carlisle and entering Lancashire.

To Holker, who had been born in the same year as the last Jacobite rebellion in 1719, the arrival of Charles in Manchester must have seemed like a once-in-a-generation opportunity. He and his business partner instantly joined Charles’s troops and he was appointed a lieutenant. But Manchester was the last place to provide many eager volunteers for the uprising, and when Charles reached Derby he lost heart and turned around. Holker and his business partner ended up being left to garrison Carlisle as Charles and his force retreated into Scotland to hunker down, and they were soon captured by the British troops sent to quash the uprising. They were then, as officers, sent to Newgate prison in London to sit with their legs bound in irons and await trial and certain execution.

But they never made it to trial. In the first demonstration of Holker’s extraordinary talent for espionage, they escaped. Holker had been allowed visitors in prison, so had drawn on London’s crypto-Jacobite circle to smuggle in files, ropes, and information about the prison and its surroundings. They managed to file through the leg-irons and window bars, climbed up the gutters onto the prison roof, and then used planks from the cell’s tabletop to cross onto the roof of a nearby house. In the event, they disturbed a dog guarding the house, and so Holker hid in a water-butt and became separated from the others. He eventually found refuge at a crypto-Jacobite’s house, then escaped into the countryside before managing to make his way to France.

In France, Holker joined his fellow veterans of the failed uprising of ‘45, becoming a lieutenant in a Jacobite regiment of the French army. He fought for the French in the Austrian Netherlands — present-day Belgium — against the Hapsburgs, the Hanoverians, the Dutch, and the British. Even more extraordinary, however, was that when Bonnie Prince Charlie wanted to go in secret to England in 1750, it was Holker who went with him as his sole companion and guide. Although Charles failed to persuade his supporters in England to rise up in rebellion on their own, Holker managed to get the prince secretly and safely to London and back.

By the time Holker reached his early thirties he had been an industrialist, rebel, prisoner, fugitive, soldier, undercover agent, and even spy-catcher: he successfully identified a spy for the British in Charles’s circle, even if Charles failed to heed his warning. But in 1751 Holker’s career took yet another turn when he was recruited by the French government as an industrial spymaster.

Holker’s chief task was to steal British textile technologies.

Now, this may seem surprising to some readers. After all, most people have a rough notion that Britain’s Industrial Revolution began in the 1760s with Watt’s improvements to the steam engine, the proliferation of coke-smelted iron, and especially the invention of various textile-related machines. The textbook examples are Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Arkwright’s spinning frame, and Crompton’s combination of their two principles in the spinning “mule” (being a cross of a male donkey with a female horse).

But the reality is that long before 1760 Britain was, for a great many industries, already widely acknowledged to be at the forefront of European technological development. It had had this continent-wide reputation since at least the 1710s, if not even earlier, when the French, Spanish, and Russian governments systematically attempted to steal its technologies.

The list of British industries and inventions that were worth copying in the 1710s gives us an idea of its lead: iron founding, anchor-smithing, steel-making, file-making, brass lock-making and hinge-making; clock-making and various aspects of watchmaking, including spring-making and watch-wheel cutting; sailcloth-making, ship-building, and the steam-heated bending of timber for making barrels and ships; the newly-invented Savery- and Newcomen-type steam engines; and flint glass-making and tobacco processing too. It also, significantly, included various parts of the textiles industries including wool-combing, weaving, shearing, and finishing.

The French were still attempting to catch up with many of these industries many decades later in the 1750s when Holker appeared on the scene, by which time the list of British industries worth emulating had grown. Among textiles alone, the list had expanded to include dyeing and bleaching techniques, the use of flying shuttles in weaving, making of blankets and coverlets for beds, webbing with which to upholster chairs, and the finishing of leather. It also included the making in Lancashire of cotton-based velvets as a cheaper and sturdier alternative to silk in gentlemen’s waistcoats and breeches, as well as fustians — a kind of cloth made by weaving cotton with linen into a twill, encompassing jean, corduroy, and knock-off velvets like velverets and velveteen.2 The general British lead was not easily overcome, not least because its industries were themselves proliferating and each continuing to improve.

But John Holker was the man to help close the gap. As well as having a talent for espionage, his original profession had after all been in the Manchester-based textile industry that the French so hoped to acquire — especially cotton velvets. In 1751 he returned to England, travelling to Lancashire to make rudimentary models of some of the machinery, buy samples of yarn and cloth and bits of machinery to serve as patterns, identify some skilled workers who might be enticed over to France, and start to build up a network of agents in London and Lancashire who could then continue the work in his absence — cleverly, he aimed to have at least three or four agents so that competition would drive down their fees. (Incidentally, Holker’s espionage has turned out to be a goldmine for historians who want to know more about England’s textile industry. A facsimile and transcript of Holker’s manuscript album of cloth samples from his 1751 trip, along with specialist analysis, was published just a few months ago — it’s thanks to Holker that we have the oldest known surviving sample of jean!)

Setting up a network of agents in England was just the beginning, however. The real challenge was in adapting the stolen technology once it had been brought to France.

Holker’s network managed to entice a small colony of some thirty people over to France: over a dozen workers involved in the making of cotton velvets, including weavers, dyers, fustian cutters, loom- and calender-makers, and calenderers, along with their wives and children. Holker arranged for their travel, accommodation, and other expenses, as well as sourcing the right tools for them.

But he also needed to ensure that their skills were spread to French workers. This required a skilled interpreter — he recruited an English silk worker who spoke French, and was thus versed in the jargon of the textile trade in both languages — and most importantly it required the right incentives. The English workers feared that once their skills had been adopted by their French counterparts they would instantly be abandoned, left jobless in a strange land and despised as traitors back home. Some of them took the precaution of adopting pseudonyms, lest their acts of industrial treason be discovered back home — since 1719, after the first major wave of French industrial espionage, Britain had made the emigration of skilled workers illegal.

The English workers were therefore paid high salaries, awarded bonuses for their successes, and given generous welfare benefits — they were offered retirement pensions at half their salary, which would be continued to their widows, as well as pensions if they became unable to work through illness. They were also paid bonuses for every French worker they trained.

As for more general financing, the French government wanted the cotton velvet industry to become general throughout the country rather than being confined to a single monopolist protected by patent — the typical means by which cash-strapped states had tried to persuade private capital to take on the risks of technology transfer. So the French government paid for the wages and pensions of the English workers at private cotton velvet factories, as well as paying them bounties for reaching certain benchmarks over the course of ten years for reaching a certain number of cloths per year and putting a certain number of machines into operation. Instead of using monopoly, they subsidised access to skills and provided benchmark-related grants.

The introduction of the cotton velvet manufacture was on the whole a success, and Holker was in 1755 promoted to the post of Inspector-General of Manufactures. He thus progressed beyond industrial spymaster to become a sort of innovation inspector, touring France to give advice on how to catch-up with and then outcompete the English — not just in textiles, but in everything from watermills and hardware manufacture to rearing livestock. Where possible, Holker’s method was to procure equipment and find skilled people to actually demonstrate the techniques he recommended — by far the best way, in his experience, to overcome any scepticism by local workers and see that his advice was actually adopted. Seeing was believing.

Holker’s own son, John Holker junior, followed in his footsteps as an industrial spy, in the 1760s and 70s helping him introduce to France the British methods of manufacturing sulphuric acid. Holker thus established a dynasty, and indeed a noble one. In 1774 Holker was officially “recognised”, having somehow established a rather dubious aristocratic pedigree via the English College of Arms, as being French nobility — a fittingly implausible peak to an astonishingly effective career.

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I was quite overwhelmed by the response to my last piece, on whether history has a reproducibility crisis — all the more overwhelmed because I posted it just before moving house. But I’ve been sent so many interesting things as a result of it, that I’d like to share a few of them that stood out. And to make a public commitment.

The concern I expressed in the piece is that the field of history doesn’t self-correct quickly enough. Historical myths and false facts can persist for decades, and even when busted they have a habit of surviving. The response from some historians was that they thought I was exaggerating the problem, at least when it came to scholarly history. I wrote that I had not heard of papers being retracted in history, but was informed of a few such cases, including even a peer-reviewed book being dropped by its publisher.

In 2001/2, University of North Carolina Press decided to stop publishing the 1999 book Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822 when a paper was published showing hundreds of cases where its editor had either omitted or introduced words to the transcript of the trial. The critic also came to very different conclusions about the conspiracy. In this case, the editor did admit to “unrelenting carelessness”, but maintained that his interpretation of the evidence was still correct. Many other historians agreed, thinking the critique had gone too far and thrown “the baby out with the bath water.”

In another case, the 2000 book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture — not peer-reviewed, but which won an academic prize — had its prize revoked when found to contain major errors and potential fabrications. This is perhaps the most extreme case I’ve seen, in that the author ultimately resigned from his professorship at Emory University (that same author believes that if it had happened today, now that we’re more used to the dynamics of the internet, things would have gone differently).

It’s somewhat comforting to learn that retraction in history does occasionally happen. And although I complained that scholars today are rarely as delightfully acerbic as they had been in the 1960s and 70s in openly criticising one another, they can still be very forthright. Take James D. Perry in 2020 in the Journal of Strategy and Politics reviewing Nigel Hamilton’s acclaimed trilogy FDR at War. All three of Perry’s reviews are critical, but that of the second book especially forthright, including a test of the book’s reproducibility:

This work contains numerous examples of poor scholarship. Hamilton repeatedly misrepresents his sources. He fails to quote sources fully, leaving out words that entirely change the meaning of the quoted sentence. He quotes selectively, including sentences from his sources that support his case but ignoring other important sentences that contradict his case. He brackets his own conjectures between quotes from his sources, leaving the false impression that the source supports his conjectures. He invents conversations and emotional reactions for the historical figures in the book. Finally, he fails to provide any source at all for some of his major arguments

Blimey.

But I think there’s still a problem here of scale. It’s hard to tell if these cases are signs that history on the whole is successfully self-correcting quickly, or are stand-out exceptions. I was positively inundated with other messages — many from amateur historical investigators, but also a fair few academic historians — sharing their own examples of mistakes that had snuck past the careful scholars for decades, or of other zombies that refused to stay dead.

Take this charming story of Euler embarrassing Diderot at the court of Catherine the Great, by “proving” God existed with some algebra. Once the layers of accumulated error through repetition have all been peeled back by tracing the citations back, then even if the original story is to be taken at its word, it doesn’t seem as though Diderot was bamboozled, or even that Euler was involved at all! This particular story has been periodically debunked by scholars since at least the 1950s, but it continues to shamble on.

Or take this case, shared by the military historian Eamonn O’Keeffe, about the Duke of Wellington drinking “to the corpse of India” when he heard of the death of Tipu Sultan in 1799. When tracing the citation back, O’Keeffe discovered that it actually comes from the dialogue in a work of historical fiction! By being cited and re-cited through increasingly prestigious sources, and accruing even more errors along the way, a line in a novel had somehow achieved the status of historical fact — an astonishing case of citogenesis, as the comic writer Randall Mundroe (xkcd) calls it.

Many cases of persistent error may perhaps seem minor or pedantic, but some of the examples I was sent appear to have serious implications (and besides, if historians aren’t pedantic, what are we?) Among the serious cases, take the concern expressed by a group of scholars in New Zealand — Michael Stevens, Te Maire Tau, Atholl Anderson, Puamiria Parata-Goodall, and Tā Tipene O’Regan — about an article that claimed Polynesian explorers in the seventh century had sailed into Antarctic waters and “perhaps even the continent”, which was widely reported on at the time. They’re concerned that the publication of work that is not careful or systematic, and which then ends up being repeated and exaggerated uncritically by the media, ultimately threatens to discredit the integrity of Māori tradition as a historical source — and thus will undermine the diligent work of generations of scholars who have been trying to improve its credibility. You can read their fuller argument here.

Now, some historians contended to me that the scholarly world is functioning just fine, but did grant that there may be problems in so-called popular history — that is, history not done by professional historians, and for wider audiences. I’m not convinced by this distinction, quite frankly. The worst cases of all are when trust-conveying labels like “peer-reviewed publication” provide cover for major errors or worse. Such work instantly crosses into the popular realm when it gets picked up by the press. And even if the distinction is meaningful — and perhaps I’m a bit biased here, straddling the two worlds — then I still think it’s a problem worth trying to solve. We should still develop better incentives and institutions to combat historical inaccuracy, regardless of who commits it. The more tools at our disposal, the better.

And even if you still think I’ve over-exaggerated the problem, then there’s a case to be made for making history more open anyway. As the science writer Ananyo Bhattacharya — author of a fascinating book about John von Neumann — put it in a comment: “what you’re proposing here is an ‘Open History’ initiative, much like many funders and fields in science are now committed to ‘Open Science’ … Not only would this help correct the historical record, it would be a potential treasure trove for other historians and writers”.

Yes. Even if you think history is rooting out the bad work just fine, we should still be doing more to make our sources accessible. I have been a huge beneficiary of the work that’s already been done in this regard. For primary sources I use resources like Early English Books Online almost daily, as well as Google Books, the Internet Archive, and various digital genealogical and newspaper collections. Had it not been for the Digital Humanities Institute’s work in digitising and transcribing the letters by and related to the seventeenth-century intelligencer Samuel Hartlib, I would never have discovered forgotten links in the history of the steam engine. And when the Hartlib papers in one case contained a transcription of a letter I suspected had been misattributed — a letter I consider a smoking gun — the fact that the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library had high-quality images of it online meant that I could instantly examine the handwriting and confirm my suspicions. Research that would once have taken months, if not years, can be performed in mere minutes.

I was sent many more examples of initiatives that we might call Open History: an online repository of datasets to do with the history of early North America; a repository of transcripts of primary sources related to slavery in the British Empire and the newly independent United States; and a new peer-reviewed journal called The New American Antiquarian, which invites the publication of sources to do with the pre-1825 Americas: transcriptions from unpublished manuscripts, new translations of texts into English, and more.

And I’ve been inspired by what some scholars have been doing by themselves. You can, for example, view the photographs of various archival sources taken by Kurt Schuler for his book on a precursor to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. He has even assembled a repository of various other primary sources relating to the conference. And the military historian Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson has been publicly logging the errors that can be found in his published works.

Inspired, that is, to practise what I preach. From now on, I will start maintaining a public log of corrections I’ve made to previous works (poetically, the first on the list will be that I accidentally wrote “faster” rather than “slower” in the opening paragraph to the previous piece all about how there are too many errors!) And I will begin to upload to somewhere freely accessible the transcripts and notes that I use or cite in the work that I publish — initially for future works, and eventually going back over previous work — as well as maintaining a public inventory of what photographs of sources I have, so that people can get in touch to request them. And, of course (I always intended this), when I publish my book on inventors of the British Industrial Revolution, I will make the underlying database freely and easily accessible online too.

This is just a start. Suggestions of more Open History problems, best practices, and examples welcome.

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Back in 2011, the field of psychology went into crisis. Some of the most famous and widely-cited experimental results — like the finding that powerfully posing for a few minutes gives you a hormonal boost in confidence, or that priming people with words to do with ageing makes them walk slower — could not be replicated by others. These were findings published in the field’s most prestigious academic journals, and going back for decades. Many of them had made mistakes in the experiments, through negligence, unintended bias, or simple error. A few, quite simply, had been faked. Whole swathes of research and media coverage, including some globally best-selling books, turned out to be based on foundations of sand. And since then, more and more scientific fields have turned out to have been the victims of replication crises.

Nobody had bothered, for years and years, to go to the trouble of actually checking the more unusual and interesting findings. The Scottish psychologist-turned-science journalist Stuart Ritchie wrote an eye-opening book about the scandals in science called Science Fictions. He and another science journalist, Tom Chivers, have also lately started a podcast to sort the reliable findings from the media froth, diving into the details of what scientific studies actually show — it’s called The Studies Show (har har).

But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis. Replication is when you can repeat an experiment with new data or new materials and get the same result. Reproducibility is when you use exactly the same evidence as another person and still get the same result — so it has a much, much lower bar for success, which is what makes the lack of it in history all the more worrying.

Historical myths, often based on mere misunderstanding, but occasionally on bias or fraud, spread like wildfire. People just love to share unusual and interesting facts, and history is replete with things that are both unusual and true. So much that is surprising or shocking has happened, that it can take only years or decades of familiarity with a particular niche of history in order to smell a rat. Not only do myths spread rapidly, but they survive — far longer, I suspect, than in scientific fields.

Take the oft-repeated idea that more troops were sent to quash the Luddites in 1812 than to fight Napoleon in the Peninsular War in 1808. Utter nonsense, as I set out in 2017, though it has been cited again and again and again as fact ever since Eric Hobsbawm first misled everyone back in 1964. Before me, only a handful of niche military history experts seem to have noticed and were largely ignored. Despite being busted, it continues to spread. Terry Deary (of Horrible Histories fame), to give just one of many recent examples, repeated the myth in a 2020 book. Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.

Or take the case of the 12,000-franc prize instituted by Napoleon for an improved method of preserving food for the use of his armies, which prompted Nicolas Appert to invent canned food. It’s frequently cited to show the how prizes can have a significant impact. Except that, despite being repeated hundreds of times, it literally never happened. Appert was given money by the French government, but it was a mere reward in recognition of his achievement, given over a decade after he had invented the method. The myth of the food canning innovation prize is a truly ancient one, which I traced back to a mis-translation of a vaguely-worded French source all the way back in 1869. That’s over 150 years of repeated falsehood, and I see no signs of it slowing.

The persistence of historical falsehoods is easy to explain. Just as in science, there is simply no time to check absolutely every detail in the things you cite. And even if you do, you may have to follow a citation chain that is dozens or hundreds of links long. They will often end up with archival sources that would be too time-consuming to be worth going to the trouble of accessing. History, like any other field, very often relies on trust.

But it’s hard to trust when you are exposed to one of the most frightening of revelations: that hardly anyone ever bothers to check.

I don’t think this is just me being grumpy and pedantic. I come across examples of mistakes being made and then spreading almost daily. It is utterly pervasive. Last week when chatting to my friend Saloni Dattani, who has lately been writing a piece on the story of the malaria vaccine, I shared my mounting paranoia healthy scepticism of secondary sources and suggested she check up on a few of the references she’d cited just to see. A few days later and Saloni was horrified. When she actually looked closely, many of the neat little anecdotes she’d cited in her draft — like Louis Pasteur viewing some samples under a microscope and having his mind changed on the nature of malaria — turned out to have no actual underlying primary source from the time. It may as well have been fiction. And there was inaccuracy after inaccuracy, often inexplicable: one history of the World Health Organisation’s malaria eradication programme said it had been planned to take 5-7 years, but the sources actually said 10-15; a graph showed cholera pandemics as having killed a million people, with no citation, while the main sources on the topic actually suggest that in 1865-1947 it killed some 12 million people in British India alone.

Now, it’s shockingly easy to make these mistakes — something I still do embarrassingly often, despite being constantly worried about it. When you write a lot, you’re bound to make some errors. You have to pray they’re small ones and try to correct them as swiftly as you can. I’m extremely grateful to the handful of subject-matter experts who will go out of their way to point them out to me. But the sheer pervasiveness of errors also allows unintentionally biased narratives to get repeated and become embedded as certainty, and even perhaps gives cover to people who purposefully make stuff up.

If the lack of replication or reproducibility is a problem in science, in history nobody even thinks about it in such terms. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone systematically looking at the same sources as another historian and seeing if they’d reach the same conclusions. Nor can I think of a history paper ever being retracted or corrected, as they can be in science. At the most, a history journal might host a back-and-forth debate — sometimes delightfully acerbic — for the closely interested to follow. In the 1960s you could find an agricultural historian saying of another that he was “of course entitled to express his views, however bizarre.” But many journals will no longer print those kinds of exchanges, they’re hardly easy for the uninitiated to follow, and there is often a strong incentive to shut up and play nice (unless they happen to be a peer-reviewer, in which case some will feel empowered by the cover of anonymity to be extraordinarily rude).

This lack of effective institutions or incentives was really brought home to me recently by the publication of a paper in the prestigious journal History & Technology by Jenny Bulstrode of UCL, in which she claimed that the inventor Henry Cort had stolen his famous 1783 iron-rolling process from Reeder’s iron mill in Jamaica, where it had been developed by 76 black metallurgists by passing iron through grooved sugar rollers. It was a widely-publicised paper, receiving 22,756 views — eleven times as many views as the journal’s next most most read paper, and frankly unheard of for most academic papers — along with a huge amount of press coverage.

Bulstrode argued that Cort had heard of the invention via a relative, the master of the ship Abby, who had been in Jamaica and in November 1781 visited him in Portsmouth; that in March-May 1782 Reeder’s mill was destroyed by the British army on the pretext that it might be used for weapons in a slave revolt during wartime, but that this was really at the behest of Cort to destroy the competition; and that the grooved rolling machines at Reeder’s mill were dismantled and sent to Portsmouth where Cort could use them.

When I wrote about Bulstrode’s paper last month, I noted that she had not actually presented evidence for the claims that received so much press attention — something that ought to have been picked up by the journal’s peer reviewers. She presented no evidence that there was any invention at Reeder’s mill, nor that an invention was derived there in the way she claimed. I pointed out that the grooves on sugar rollers were entirely different to those used in Cort’s iron process. This could be seen from carefully reading Bulstrode’s paper itself, and taking her citations (if not her claims) at face value.

But things go from worrying to worse. After writing it, I was contacted by Oliver Jelf, currently completing a Masters thesis, who had actually bothered to go and check the main sources that Bulstrode cites, and has not only examined her interpretation of the sources in detail, but has transcribed those same sources for anyone to read and judge for themselves. Jelf notes that significant parts of Bulstrode’s story do not follow from the evidence she cites:

The sources instead suggest that ordinary and widespread ironmaking processes were in use at Reeder’s foundry; that no innovation occurred there; that the chain of events by which Cort is supposed to have heard of the foundry’s activities certainly did not occur; that Reeder’s foundry was destroyed because of the threat of a Franco-Spanish invasion force; and that no part of the foundry was removed from the immediate vicinity of the island, let alone taken to Portsmouth

In science terms, if you were to read those same sources before reading Bulstrode’s arguments, there is absolutely no way that you would derive the same conclusions as her . If you simply read the same primary sources that Bulstrode did and tried to create a narrative from them, I can’t see how you’d simply get anything more interesting than the following: “Reeder was the well-connected owner of a very ordinary iron foundry in Jamaica, which was profitable because it used slave labour and had very little competition on the island. In 1782, at the behest of panicked islanders, the military governor of Jamaica reluctantly razed the mill to the ground because of a rumoured imminent Franco-Spanish invasion, with some of the foundry’s weapons and ammunition temporarily brought onto British warships until the threat had passed. Oh, and in 1781 a distant relative of Henry Cort once sailed from Jamaica to Lancaster, which is nowhere near to where Cort was based in Portsmouth.” What I simply cannot fathom, now that I’ve read her sources thanks to Jelf’s transcriptions, is how Bulstrode arrived at her narrative at all.

What Jelf’s initiative reveals, I think, is a potential solution to at least some of the problems that history faces. Just as in the sciences it is considered good practice to make one’s data available, in history it should perhaps be a requirement to upload to some public repository the photographs or transcriptions of any cited archival sources that are not otherwise freely accessible online. This would not only help peer-reviewers assess a historian’s narrative — something that they frankly cannot do without going and reviewing those same sources for themselves — but would also hugely accelerate the rate at which historical work is digitised and made more available. You would not believe the sheer volume of photographs and transcriptions that thousands of historians have already made of various archival sources, which circulate only privately at best, but are usually never shared at all. We’ve already digitised so much, but have nowhere to put it — nor really much incentive to make it public.

Some of the more specialised journals still publish full transcriptions of newly-recognised archival sources, often with expert commentary and interpretation. You occasionally see it in some PhD theses still. It used to be very common in the late nineteenth century. But it really ought to be a matter of course, treated in the same way as a scientist’s data, and perhaps even revered. We need to change the incentives that historians face, so that making new sources available becomes one of the most lauded and rewarded things that they can do.

In the wake of the infamous 2011 replication crisis, a growing number of people have become actively concerned with how to shape the incentives and institutions that scientists face, to reduce the space for fraud, error, bias, and hype, as well as to improve the quality of science more generally — as much a movement as a field of study, allied under the label of “metascience”. I hope that history will see a similar movement. If we’re to maintain trust in historians, it could certainly do with it.

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