House of Treasures

 

One morning at the end of June I was sitting at a desk in Canterbury Cathedral’s Archives reading room. This was my first time in the Library/Archives, despite having lived and worked within a few miles of the place since 1985; it had taken the kind invitation of historian and retired academic Dr David Shaw – mentioned in my previous post – to bring about a much overdue visit. In front of me were all three volumes of Isaac Newton’s seminal work on the mathematics that govern so much of the observable universe; a work which, quite literally, redefined the way we understand our the world. Rarely have I touched such valuable documents. However, this is a digression and I shall relegate it to a postscript below*. This post is primarily about glass: specifically, glassmaking in England at the time of the Tudors and Stuarts ...

David has participated in several of my u3a science sessions over recent years, including the extended series I lead on the science, technology and art of glass; he had evidently fully discerned the extent to which I am fascinated with glass as a material. In his role as a volunteer at the Archives and Library he had come across a Royal Proclamation which began life in the reign of Elizabeth I and was then re-issued by her successors, as and when required, at least through to Charles I, to whose reign this particular copy can be dated (1615). The order, printed on two sheets of paper, forbad the use of wood as a fuel in the manufacture of glass. Evidently, so much high quality timber was being used in glassmaking that ship-building was suffering, either directly because of a dearth of supply or by virtue of the price having been driven up; this was, in its turn, seen as a threat to national security. Moreover, it was forbidden to commission from any source glassware made or formed using wood as a fuel; the document goes on to forbid the import of glass or glassware and to even to outlaw the trade in glass drinking vessels. The delegated enforcement of such a proclamation fell to the local authorities across the country, there being no police force at the time remember. Thus, multiple copies of the proclamation would be printed for distribution across England and Wales.

This is the ‘Proclamation touching Glasses’ (reference CCA CC/A/P/P/1/PR/48) at the heart for my visit to the Cathedral Archives. Unusually, but rather wonderfully in my opinion, Canterbury Cathedral Archives also holds and manages the city archives of Canterbury: were that not the case I may never have had this rare opportunity. (Sadly, a set of records relating to the county, being the archive of the Diocese of Canterbury, was removed from the collection some ten years ago and is now held by Kent County Council in the County Town of Maidstone.) The images shown above were created for me by the Cathedral Archives and are used with the kind permission of the Chapter of Canterbury.

The Tudor rose and the thistles in this illustrated opening letter ‘I’ tie the origin of the proclamation firmly to its period.

You’ll notice in passing, even without even reading the proclamation, that it takes a lot of words to convey what is a relatively straightforward message: it will come as no surprise to you that the people who drafted such legal documents were, I understand, paid by the word. There was however a useful nugget of information offered (see extracted image above): “… there has been discovered and perfected a way and means to make glass with sea coal [and] pit coal … in as good perfection for beauty and use, as formerly was made by wood”. I have used modern spelling but otherwise kept the contemporary use of English. By pit coal, I suspect we’re mostly talking of open-cast mining; where seams met the coast it was possible to gather lumps of coal on the shoreline, hence sea coal. To the modern mind it seems perfectly reasonable for them to have switched to coal given the shortage of timber, but it’s important to remember that the bulk transportation of fuel would have been far from trivial at the time (i.e. before the canal system, let alone the railways). One consequence of the prohibition against using wood was therefore that glass making necessarily declined in wooded regions of the country, like the Weald of Kent and Sussex, and gravitated towards areas having easy access to coal – perhaps like Sunderland, which developed a well-deserved reputation for glassmaking.

All in all, I had a wonderful few hours in the Archives. The welcome I received was second to none and the ‘atmosphere’ in there came pretty close to defining my dream library environment. To sit at a desk surrounded by old wood with light filtering in through handmade glass, and to hear at one point the cathedral’s bells drifting through high ceilings was bliss.


My warmest thanks go to David Shaw for his thoughtful invitation, to the two Archives reading room staff who registered me and settled me in, to their Digitisation Officer for creating digital images of the proclamation and to the Archives and Library Manager who approved my request to show the images in this post and offered some valuable comments on an earlier draft.

* Postscript: Turning the pages of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’, see here and here) was a very special treat for anyone with an interest in science, and particularly for a physicist like me. Isaac Newton laid the groundwork for so much of the physical sciences still taught in schools and colleges: an intellectual giant. The text of the Principia was written in Latin, which I cannot read, but Newton and I share a common second language: that of mathematics. I only had time on this visit to enjoy the first of the three-volume work, but that proved ideal in the sense that I could focus properly on the many pages Newton used to define his terms and establish key axioms and proofs. Thus, I could discern that he used ‘C’ for speed, ‘S’ for distance and ‘T’ for time and would write the classic relationship between them as C = S : T (c.f. the c = s/t form one would see today). Moving from there to acceleration, momentum etc. became possible on this basis. Noticeably, there is much space given to the use geometric proofs. There are other historic scientific documents held within the Archive and now that I have my reader’s photo-ID card I shall be able to book a slot for return visits.

P.p.s. One afternoon, back in 1985/6, together with a couple of colleagues who were similarly bored of the mandatory ‘induction course’ we’d been dispatched to by our employer, I got the chance to look through several historical documents in the library at Herstmonceux Castle – including a beautifully illustrated contemporary account of James Cook’s first expedition on the Endeavour. As a schoolboy I don’t believe I ever committed truancy – I loved learning, so why would I – but I have no regrets about skipping class on that occasion ;-)


Further reading
There are a great many books/articles on the history of glass. For those with an interest in the glassmaking of England during the period of history of most relevance to this blog post I can share a few of the online resources I have consulted:
On early-modern glass
For an extended article on the history of glassmaking in England – including the use of wood and switch to coal see here.
On the scientific analysis of medieval glass (a PhD thesis).
For Historic England’s archaeological guidelines see here and also here and here.

There are other, more generic, books sitting on my shelves such as:
‘5000 Years of Glass’ edited by H. Tait (The British Museum Press, 2012; ISBN 978-0-7141-5095-6)
‘A Short History of Glass’ by Cloe Zerwick (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1990; ISBN 0-87290-121-1)
‘The Glass Bathyscaphe’ by A. Macfarlane and G. Martin (Profile Books, 2003; ISBN 1-86197-394-2).