Phew! The technology of and market for cast iron grates firebacks and other aspects of making hearths suitable for burning high CV coal is a subject worthy of further work in the archives.
Once the secretary hand gets a bit more familiar, it’s no sooo bad…! But having started out doing eighteenth-century stuff, it’s been quite the journey. I’m hoping others will take up some of the threads I’ve been unable to tie up using the more obvious archives.
Thanks very much! One thing I ought to do is work out by how much this invention - both directly, and indirectly through freeing up land for grain, which is actually the main cost for brewers - increased the overall efficiency of brewing.
Another superb article! I'm truly in awe of the amount of digging through the archives you must have done to thread together this story, also very impressed you can read secretary hand at all.
Congratulations on learning secretary hand. I should, it would help my searches enormously.
Interesting to report that I burn coke in a multifuel stove because I cannot see it from my desk. So wood would always be going out while I'm working, but a coke fire will stay in all afternoon.
The answer to this is probably 'no', but I'll ask anyway. Could the Anglo-Scottish accord have had anything to do with the expansion in coal production? My understanding is that up until the late 16th century, as a result of centuries of Anglo-Scottish conflict, the far north of England was a pretty dangerous place, and presumably not very attractive for making the substantial investments in physical capital that would be required to extract and transport coal. Then came the Protestantism-driven Treaty of Edinburgh of 1560 that replaced hostility with alliance, and over the next few decades the gradual suppression of the nasty border reivers. The coal country of Northumbria and Cumbria would presumably have become rather more secure and attractive.
I'd be surprised if there were no effects at all of it, but I've not yet seen a detailed investigation. It's a great point, thanks - one I may end up researching for the book once I reach the 1560s (I'm a third of the way in, mainly to set the scene, and just up to 1550!)
I've got a final part on salt planned - it involves a lot of the same characters as in this piece, which is why I had to do this one first. And I'm still not 100% sure how they fit, but I know there's *something* going on.
There will also be some updates to this post, as some extra information has now come through!
Fascinating read! Something I wondered about while reading.
The timeline you presented (and correct me if I'm wrong) seems to go:
holzersparungs kunst arrive in London -> coal becomes much more viable to many new industries and coal imports soar -> ??? -> coal is the main fuel source in heating homes
What is the missing step here? Was the holzersparungs kunst oven also used to heat homes? With the introduction of the holzersparungs kunst ovens, London's coal consumption doubled, but it's not like there was no coal usage before. As you mention, 10,000 tons of coal were used by blacksmiths. Why was this the "spark" that ignited coal's victory? Is it that coal achieved a "critical mass", making a sufficient number of people used to it? You also mentioned the coal won "from below", first spreading to poorer people. That seems curious, I would expected that with so much wood for breweries displaced by coal, the price of wood would go down (I recall a previous article mentioning that the price of wood did go down around this period). With cheaper wood, the conversion to coal seems less plausible. Was coal yet again that much cheaper?
So the step there - which perhaps I should have spent a bit more time on, and mentioned only in a few sentences - is that by more or less doubling coal demand thanks to brewing, the coal mines were dug much deeper. And by digging deeper they struck more “great coals” - those that were larger and more rock-like, with less sulphur - which were much more easily burnt in people’s homes. Those great coals effectively become more economical to mine when demand for brewing helps cross-subsidise the costs of sinking those mines!
On the issue of wood prices, as my previous post argued I think that’s a later effect, with coal displacing woodland. You’d not necessarily expect wood prices to decrease for long, because as demand for wood is displaced, supply was reduced as well, that land being turned over instead to growing grain.
Ah interesting, so the timing came down to a quirk of the English coal veins. If the near surface veins were less sulphurous, coal might have been used earlier, and were they deeper, "coalification" of the home might have had to wait for the steam engine (which might have never come?).
Did the same pattern repeat elsewhere? More coal for industry->deeper mines->less sulphurous coal->coal home heating?
I'm new to all of this, but I worry about peer review issues. To pick an obvious example, will Robert Allen ever see this? It won't be indexed in Historical Abstracts, so how will future students and scholars see it?
Thanks Allan. I think about this sometimes, and to be honest I don’t have an answer. In terms of getting to the right readers, it’s in over 38,000 inboxes all over the world, and has been read by thousands more on the site, including by many very prominent academics in the fields I touch upon. So in those terms this platform is as or even more effective than that of a standard journal, where its content would likely be locked behind a paywall and hardly seen.
But I do sometimes worry about people not taking my research sufficiently seriously, so that it isn’t cited and ends up forgotten. The only thing stopping people from citing this is potentially a norm against citing anything other than books or journals, and I recognise that that won’t change overnight, other than by writing things that can’t *not* be cited, which I hope work like this is an example of! Otherwise, however, as a self-employed academic I have absolutely no incentive to publish in journals - it doesn’t pay any bills!
So my only potential solution so far is that perhaps some enterprising grad students or junior academic could submit some of them as a co-author, and take on all the hassle of dealing with journals.
And of course I’m writing a book, which will end up citing a lot of this stuff, and so draw attention to it!
Do feel traditional peer review is doomed. It's only been around for a century and has begun to discredit itself in various ways in recent decades anyway. Ultimately we just have to use our own judgement looking at the research and comparing it to the criticism it receives.
Brilliant work, thanks. You mention salt pans in Scotland - I've never understood why outside salt pans using coal, cheap and readily available close to the sea, couldn't even in the Middle Ages have made a bigger export industry for England and Scotland, which had chronic trade deficits esp with Italy?
This is one of *the* questions I’ve been grappling with. It’s still not clear to me either. But I suspect it has something to do with a new technique being introduced by many of the same players as in this post - I just can’t find the smoking gun of evidence to support it.
it's fascinating. Tim Parks' book on Medici Money suggests there was both a trade deficit in goods and payments to the Vatican (Peters Pence etc) which meant a huge silver problem which often caused difficulties for the London branches of Italian banks - and the implication is ships often went back half empty (not 100% sure of that). So it seemed that salt, slated fish, or bars of iron would be logical - even if just carried at cost price they'd help the deficit issue and serve as ballast
Excellent discussion and research. However I strongly suggest reading "Domestic Revolution" if you are interested in this subject. Cooking led the way and created the infrastructure that enabled the wholesale change--and English cooking (for worse).
I cite it! In both this post and the last. But I looked into all the primary sources it relies on for the 16thC change, and as I mention in the post, that led me to disagree with the initial causes of the change.
But Anton, how is you cooking! Mush, Mush I say. Yes you did a superb job and I believe you are correct in your analysis. Thank you for the paper. It still remains shocking that it took until the 16th C for Coal to become a significant energy source and triggered off our modern era.
The science and engineering involved in brewing/fermentation has been of interest to me for years. Your tenacity in finding source documents and bringing them to life supporting a detailed “rest of the story” had me thinking its time for us to consume our 1995 BV Cabernet. Did you end up in some old-fashioned libraries during your research?
Back during the early days of the internet our applied and basic research teams worked with the patent team to keep an eye on things. Your investigation into how the IP associated with moving to coal in brewing had me doing a search yesterday to see if some fermentation and gain of function IP the scientists identified ended up getting assigned to the firm I worked for back then.
It’s amazing how fast one can confirm suppositions using the internet these days!
Hi Anton.
Phew! The technology of and market for cast iron grates firebacks and other aspects of making hearths suitable for burning high CV coal is a subject worthy of further work in the archives.
I'm so glad I stuck to the eighteen century.
Once the secretary hand gets a bit more familiar, it’s no sooo bad…! But having started out doing eighteenth-century stuff, it’s been quite the journey. I’m hoping others will take up some of the threads I’ve been unable to tie up using the more obvious archives.
18th century handwriting is bad enough for me, even the clerical copying into ledgers, let alone cramped notebook scrawls.
Also "fteam" engines and "fteel" springs
I don't understand my own cursive. Secretary hand from the 1500's looks greek to me.
People underestimate how man's quest for beer has changed the world.
Amazing work.
Thanks very much! One thing I ought to do is work out by how much this invention - both directly, and indirectly through freeing up land for grain, which is actually the main cost for brewers - increased the overall efficiency of brewing.
A fascinating journey, thank you Anton, and I admire your tenacity for the truth.
Thanks! I'm hoping it sparks others to build on the work and fill in all the gaps.
This is such a fantastic series. Many thanks Anton. Fascinating.
Another superb article! I'm truly in awe of the amount of digging through the archives you must have done to thread together this story, also very impressed you can read secretary hand at all.
Cheers! Practice makes perfect. The main thing to get used to is the 'h' - it looks more like a squiggly 'g' sometimes!
Fantastic article! What an achievement.
A small footnote: the stobe in stobenofen refers to the living room, Stube in modern German.
May be useful to ask the archaeologists if they've found funny things in elizabethan breweries, so they at least look (and Newcastle chimneys).
Congratulations on learning secretary hand. I should, it would help my searches enormously.
Interesting to report that I burn coke in a multifuel stove because I cannot see it from my desk. So wood would always be going out while I'm working, but a coke fire will stay in all afternoon.
Ah nice - convenience just like those French dukes’ sons noticed in the 1780s!
Hi Anton,
The answer to this is probably 'no', but I'll ask anyway. Could the Anglo-Scottish accord have had anything to do with the expansion in coal production? My understanding is that up until the late 16th century, as a result of centuries of Anglo-Scottish conflict, the far north of England was a pretty dangerous place, and presumably not very attractive for making the substantial investments in physical capital that would be required to extract and transport coal. Then came the Protestantism-driven Treaty of Edinburgh of 1560 that replaced hostility with alliance, and over the next few decades the gradual suppression of the nasty border reivers. The coal country of Northumbria and Cumbria would presumably have become rather more secure and attractive.
Also, will there be a part III?
I'd be surprised if there were no effects at all of it, but I've not yet seen a detailed investigation. It's a great point, thanks - one I may end up researching for the book once I reach the 1560s (I'm a third of the way in, mainly to set the scene, and just up to 1550!)
I've got a final part on salt planned - it involves a lot of the same characters as in this piece, which is why I had to do this one first. And I'm still not 100% sure how they fit, but I know there's *something* going on.
There will also be some updates to this post, as some extra information has now come through!
Ehhh....cheers? Great stuff again.
[There's surely an interesting through line from Holzersparung to Siemens' regenerative furnace.]
Thanks! Ooh, there's a history of heat efficiency to be written by someone there!
I imagine there's probably a huge literature as regards steam power, but perhaps coming in from process heat might be an angle.
Also the Siemens family were brewers: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_(Unternehmerfamilie)
Fascinating read! Something I wondered about while reading.
The timeline you presented (and correct me if I'm wrong) seems to go:
holzersparungs kunst arrive in London -> coal becomes much more viable to many new industries and coal imports soar -> ??? -> coal is the main fuel source in heating homes
What is the missing step here? Was the holzersparungs kunst oven also used to heat homes? With the introduction of the holzersparungs kunst ovens, London's coal consumption doubled, but it's not like there was no coal usage before. As you mention, 10,000 tons of coal were used by blacksmiths. Why was this the "spark" that ignited coal's victory? Is it that coal achieved a "critical mass", making a sufficient number of people used to it? You also mentioned the coal won "from below", first spreading to poorer people. That seems curious, I would expected that with so much wood for breweries displaced by coal, the price of wood would go down (I recall a previous article mentioning that the price of wood did go down around this period). With cheaper wood, the conversion to coal seems less plausible. Was coal yet again that much cheaper?
So the step there - which perhaps I should have spent a bit more time on, and mentioned only in a few sentences - is that by more or less doubling coal demand thanks to brewing, the coal mines were dug much deeper. And by digging deeper they struck more “great coals” - those that were larger and more rock-like, with less sulphur - which were much more easily burnt in people’s homes. Those great coals effectively become more economical to mine when demand for brewing helps cross-subsidise the costs of sinking those mines!
On the issue of wood prices, as my previous post argued I think that’s a later effect, with coal displacing woodland. You’d not necessarily expect wood prices to decrease for long, because as demand for wood is displaced, supply was reduced as well, that land being turned over instead to growing grain.
Ah interesting, so the timing came down to a quirk of the English coal veins. If the near surface veins were less sulphurous, coal might have been used earlier, and were they deeper, "coalification" of the home might have had to wait for the steam engine (which might have never come?).
Did the same pattern repeat elsewhere? More coal for industry->deeper mines->less sulphurous coal->coal home heating?
I'm new to all of this, but I worry about peer review issues. To pick an obvious example, will Robert Allen ever see this? It won't be indexed in Historical Abstracts, so how will future students and scholars see it?
Thanks Allan. I think about this sometimes, and to be honest I don’t have an answer. In terms of getting to the right readers, it’s in over 38,000 inboxes all over the world, and has been read by thousands more on the site, including by many very prominent academics in the fields I touch upon. So in those terms this platform is as or even more effective than that of a standard journal, where its content would likely be locked behind a paywall and hardly seen.
But I do sometimes worry about people not taking my research sufficiently seriously, so that it isn’t cited and ends up forgotten. The only thing stopping people from citing this is potentially a norm against citing anything other than books or journals, and I recognise that that won’t change overnight, other than by writing things that can’t *not* be cited, which I hope work like this is an example of! Otherwise, however, as a self-employed academic I have absolutely no incentive to publish in journals - it doesn’t pay any bills!
So my only potential solution so far is that perhaps some enterprising grad students or junior academic could submit some of them as a co-author, and take on all the hassle of dealing with journals.
And of course I’m writing a book, which will end up citing a lot of this stuff, and so draw attention to it!
Do feel traditional peer review is doomed. It's only been around for a century and has begun to discredit itself in various ways in recent decades anyway. Ultimately we just have to use our own judgement looking at the research and comparing it to the criticism it receives.
Brilliant work, thanks. You mention salt pans in Scotland - I've never understood why outside salt pans using coal, cheap and readily available close to the sea, couldn't even in the Middle Ages have made a bigger export industry for England and Scotland, which had chronic trade deficits esp with Italy?
This is one of *the* questions I’ve been grappling with. It’s still not clear to me either. But I suspect it has something to do with a new technique being introduced by many of the same players as in this post - I just can’t find the smoking gun of evidence to support it.
it's fascinating. Tim Parks' book on Medici Money suggests there was both a trade deficit in goods and payments to the Vatican (Peters Pence etc) which meant a huge silver problem which often caused difficulties for the London branches of Italian banks - and the implication is ships often went back half empty (not 100% sure of that). So it seemed that salt, slated fish, or bars of iron would be logical - even if just carried at cost price they'd help the deficit issue and serve as ballast
looking forward to your book!
Excellent discussion and research. However I strongly suggest reading "Domestic Revolution" if you are interested in this subject. Cooking led the way and created the infrastructure that enabled the wholesale change--and English cooking (for worse).
I cite it! In both this post and the last. But I looked into all the primary sources it relies on for the 16thC change, and as I mention in the post, that led me to disagree with the initial causes of the change.
But Anton, how is you cooking! Mush, Mush I say. Yes you did a superb job and I believe you are correct in your analysis. Thank you for the paper. It still remains shocking that it took until the 16th C for Coal to become a significant energy source and triggered off our modern era.
Hah you’re right, I haven’t had my morning frumenty!
Fascinating. Thank you!
Thanks for reading!
The science and engineering involved in brewing/fermentation has been of interest to me for years. Your tenacity in finding source documents and bringing them to life supporting a detailed “rest of the story” had me thinking its time for us to consume our 1995 BV Cabernet. Did you end up in some old-fashioned libraries during your research?
Back during the early days of the internet our applied and basic research teams worked with the patent team to keep an eye on things. Your investigation into how the IP associated with moving to coal in brewing had me doing a search yesterday to see if some fermentation and gain of function IP the scientists identified ended up getting assigned to the firm I worked for back then.
It’s amazing how fast one can confirm suppositions using the internet these days!
https://patents.justia.com/inventor/koji-sode?page=6
Thanks very much Mark,
How was the 1995 BV Cabernet?
Funnily enough, I'd say about 90% of my research is done online, but I've got about a decade's experience of learning exactly where to look!