The civil war between King and Parliament which broke out in 1642 and spread an untold amount of destruction and misery over England until 1649 can scarcely be compared with the previous civil struggle of the rival roses. The average commoner of the fifteenth century wearied of the seemingly interminable struggle between opposing nobles and few were strongly partisan. But in the war of the seventeenth century a whole people were involved, neighbour found himself opposed to neighbour and a position of impartial neutrality was difficult to sustain. One of the causes of the conflict which is often overlooked yet is of the greatest significance was the fact that both the first Stuart kings endeavoured to exercise control over commerce. This principle they inherited from the Tudors as part of the medieval legacy which the latter had wrested from the church. Although their efforts to apply this principle were not conspicuously successful, they provoked bitter resentment in the areas of recent trade expansion. What brought the constitutional struggle between king and parliament to a head was, in fact, the very same issue over which so many local skirmishes had already been fought between the old craft guilds of the medieval towns and the new free traders. The arguments on both sides were still the same and remained as irreconcilable as ever. So it came about that Parliament drew its staunchest supporters from the new industrial districts, while the king’s forces were recruited mainly from the landed gentry, from rural areas untouched by the new trades and from towns where the guild system still held sway. This explains why Winterstoke was sharply divided by the civil war. From Alfred Darley downwards, the ironworking community and its associated miners and wood colliers were solid for Parliament. The forges and furnaces of Darley’s Bank made a great contribution to the equipment of Cromwell’s forces which were aptly named ‘Ironsides’, so loyally did the men of iron support them. The sympathies of rural Winterstoke, on the other hand, lay with the king’s party and this sharp cleavage contributed greatly towards the breakdown of the ancient association of industry and agriculture which had hitherto prevailed. Henceforward the two worlds would drift ever further apart.
The war placed Charles Hanmer in a peculiarly difficult and invidious position, for he had a foot in both camps. As a great landowner and the head of a family who, since the time of Henry VII, had maintained close and cordial relations with the Court, he would feel himself under obligation to support the king. At the same time, the rents the Earl received from mining and ironworking already represented a substantial part of his estate revenue. He was also financially involved with his most influential tenant, Alfred Darley, than whom there was no more active and outspoken supporter of Parliament. But Charles inherited the astuteness which had carried his grandfather to power and he doubtless argued that to take active, and if necessary forceful, measures to prevent the ironworks from becoming a Parliamentary armoury would be straining his loyalty too far and that, in any case, such an effort would prove not only self-destructive but in all probability futile. In the event he seems to have emulated the celebrated vicar of Bray with considerable success. It was a difficult and dangerous role to play at this time, but thanks to his considerable power and wealth allied to his own statecraft he was able to carry it off. By making substantial contributions to the king’s hard-pressed exchequer he was able to retain the Royal favour and to secure freedom from molestation by the Royalist forces. At the same time his influential association with Alfred Darley seems to have won him a similar immunity from the Roundheads. It is true that on one occasion a contingent of Royalist troops, sent to break down an arch of St. John’s Bridge as a strategic move, continued up the Lob valley and inflicted some damage to the ironworks before they were beaten off by an undisciplined but formidable army of ironworkers armed with weapons as assorted as sledge hammers, pick-axes and scythes. But reprisals, when they came, were directed, not against Winterstoke Place, but at Emberley Hall which was pillaged with characteristic thoroughness by a small Parliamentarian force. Happily, before Sir Hugh Winter rode to join the King’s standard he had commended his wife and family to the care of a kinsman so that the only victims of this wanton encounter were his elderly steward and his wife who escaped with a beating and found asylum at the home farm. Emberley Hall remained an untenanted ruin until the Restoration, for Sir Hugh paid as dearly for his loyalty to the house of Stuart as his ancestors had done in the cause of Plantagenet. Escaping to France after the final wreck of the king’s fortunes, he returned with the young Prince only to meet his death at Worcester, one of the many victims of that slaughter which Cromwell called his Crowning Mercy. So it was not until the Restoration that a grateful king restored the small estate to his son Sir Stephen who rebuilt and reoccupied the Hall.
While Charles II was thus mindful of those who had remained steadfastly loyal to the house of Stuart, he could not afford to be too rigorous in condemning or penalizing the waverers especially when they were families of great wealth and power. So we find Henry Hanmer, the fourth earl, enjoying the royal favour no less than his poorer neighbour, and becoming an influential figure at the court of St. James. This was not so unnatural as it may sound. Like many other revolutionaries before and after them, the Parliamentary Party, by their extremism, had forfeited the sympathies of their more liberal-minded supporters. Charles Hanmer was one of the many who had felt the need for reform but who was deeply shocked by the action of the Regicides which he regarded as murder. Profoundly mistrusting the rule of the Lord Protector he had devoted the remainder of his days to urging that restoration of the monarchy which he did not live to see, and to instilling his heir with a devotion to the king over the water.
The return of the king was an occasion of great rejoicing and relief for a people who had grown heartily sick of a despotic régime whose grey, humourless and repressive character had proved so foreign to their nature. To many ardent Royalists it must have seemed that life was beginning again where it had ended in 1649 and that the years of civil war and Commonwealth would soon be seen to possess little historical significance. They were wrong. Not only did Charles II make no attempt to exercise the royal prerogative in the way that his father had done, but Government no longer concerned itself with commerce except in the role of arbitrator. The principle of laissez-faire had been accepted. The ironworkers of Winterstoke and the ‘people of the middle sort’ who supplied their material and marketed their finished goods had won a decisive victory. Although no victory in history was destined to have more momentous consequences, the actual protagonists remained unaware of its full significance. For it was no less than the triumph of a new philosophy and a new attitude to life. Although its revolutionary effects did not immediately become obvious, they proceeded, slowly at first, but with an increasing weight and momentum, to change the world and to invade every department of life.
Claiming to rule by divine authority, Charles I had attempted with small success to exercise those powers which Henry VIII had wrested from the church. He was the last frail and ineffectual instrument of that doctrine of a natural law based upon an eternal law which had built medieval Winterstoke out of an uninhabited wilderness. It had already lost its hold over the minds of men and it perished with him. It was extinguished by the belief that the unfettered exercise of self-interest was a natural human right. With a religion which no longer saw the temporal and the eternal worlds as parts of a single whole but drew a sharp distinction between them, such a belief was easily-reconciled. That this was so is evident from the fact that Josiah Leeds and his son, the second Josiah, who, more than any other men, were responsible for the immense changes which took place at Winterstoke during the eighteenth century, were both religious men. They were, after their lights, as deeply religious as the Norman, Hugh Fitzwinter, yet the difference in outlook between these men of the eleventh and eighteenth centuries was profound.
When, with his own hands, Hugh Fitzwinter had built his little oratory in the woodland glade beside the Winterstoke brook, he renounced the fallen world of men but accepted the natural world as the glass of e
ternity, an earnest of the paradise of God. It was because he did so that his action set in motion that train of events which transformed the valley of the Wendle from a wilderness to a fruitful garden. Josiah Leeds also believed in an eternal world, but it was a world remote and apart from the temporal world in which he had his being and in no way were the two interfused. The natural world and the world of men were one, a vale of tears and tribulation, a hard proving-ground through which Christian must fight his way in the hope of salvation hereafter. On earth men are free to create their own heaven or their own hell according to their thought. Josiah Leeds created the ironworks of the Darley Bank Company with the result that the garden of Cistercian Winterstoke became a wilderness once more. But it was to be a very different wilderness from that lonely, natural solitude of marsh and mere which the Saxon had known. It was to be a man-made desert of blackened bricks and mortar, of smouldering spoil and slag heaps, of flame and smoke and thick, polluted streams. Pious, honourable, infinitely conscientious, scorning alike the riches, the vanities and the beauties of the world, the Leeds family succeeded by a prodigious outpouring of energy, ingenuity and resource in building about them a world which was the exact embodiment of their desolate and sombre vision.
Chapter Three
JOSIAH LEEDS was a connection by marriage of the Darleys. The son of a Staffordshire maltster, he was brought up in his father’s trade but was soon attracted away from it by the iron industry in which Josiah saw much greater scope for his ability. That ability and energy was such that he became a valued associate of the Foley family in their ironworking enterprises with the result that he was already a man of substance with a considerable experience of the trade when he made his first recorded visit to Winterstoke in the year 1704. He came at the request of his sister-in-law, Hannah Darley. The death of her husband, Alfred Darley III had left her sadly in need of advice and help, for their children had died in infancy and she had been left to manage Alfred’s affairs as best she could. For three years the conscientious Josiah continued to guide his sister-in-law in the control of her late husband’s estate and to make periodical visits to Winterstoke. In the course of these visits he became so impressed by the possibilities of trade development at Darley Bank that he disposed of his Staffordshire interests, built a modest house for himself on the slopes of the Lob valley, and moved his family thither in the autumn of 1707. In the spring of the following year the Darley Bank Company was formed, the capital being held in equal shares by Hannah Darley, Josiah Leeds and the trustees of George, the young Fifth Earl of Winterstoke, who was still a minor.
For the first important development at Winterstoke in the eighteenth century this new company was not directly responsible although Josiah Leeds was actively concerned in it. This was the improvement of navigation on the river Wendle. During the previous century the steadily growing tonnage of coal and of raw and finished iron which was shipped downstream from St. John’s Wharf had made the defects of the river as a navigable waterway increasingly obvious. But the river had been the scene of perpetual conflict between opposing interests since medieval times and previous attempts to improve the navigation had been defeated. That Josiah Leeds succeeded where his predecessors had failed is an interesting illustration of the effect of the constitutional changes which the civil war had brought about.
At the time the Cistercians built their mill and wharf the Wendle was a tidal river between St. John’s and the sea. As such it was an open or free river so far as navigation was concerned, the watery equivalent, as it were, of unenclosed common land. But just as much of the land which was common in the eleventh century was subsequently cleared and enclosed, so the Wendle was enclosed during the Middle Ages by the construction of a number of fish weirs and mill weirs between Winterstoke and Westerport. Above these weirs the river was no longer held to be free but was considered to be the property of those who owned the land upon its banks. If the river formed a boundary between properties, then that boundary was not the river bank but the centre of its bed. St. John’s Wharf had remained the upper limit of navigation although the continuance of traffic thus far had not been maintained without conflict. The weirs below St. John’s were of two kinds. Those nearer the sea at Westerport, where the river was subject to most tidal influence, were half tidal, that is to say they were of such a height that vessels could float over them at high water. There was a constant fight to maintain a sufficient draught of water over the sills of these weirs. When, as frequently happened, a vessel struck a weir, often sustaining serious damage in the process, the bargemaster accused the weir owner of raising the weir in order to hold back more water for his mill. The weir owner would deny this and either blame the level of the river or accuse the bargemaster of damaging his weir through being too deeply laden.
On the higher reaches of the Wendle the weirs were constructed with a removable portion which consisted of a series of wooden sections called ‘paddles’ which were held by water pressure against stout posts or ‘rimers’. Both paddles and rimers could be withdrawn to make a narrow passage for boats through which the current flowed like a mill race. Downstream traffic had to ride this current, while craft proceeding upstream had to be hauled against the torrent either by a fixed winch mounted on the bank or by a forrard mounted deck winch. In either direction the passage was a hazardous proceeding. Here again there were endless disputes between bargemasters and weir owners especially in seasons of low water. A considerable loss of water to the mill was involved each time the weir paddles were drawn and weir owners either demanded an exorbitant toll before they would agree to draw or else flatly refused to do so. Often in summer droughts some luckless vessel, deep laden with coal or iron, would run fast aground in midstream upon some shoal and remain there for days or even weeks until the owner of the weir above could be prevailed upon to draw his paddles and so send down a welcome ‘flush’ or ‘flash’ to float off the stranded boat and send her on her way. It is not surprising that these ‘flash weirs’, as they were called, were often the scene of bloody free-for-alls between the millworkers and the navigators. When it came to brute force the navigators usually won the argument, for the single square sails of the barges were very seldom sufficient to propel them unaided, and they were therefore accompanied by gangs of bow-hauliers. Whereas the navigation of the Wendle became a highly skilled hereditary craft, son succeeding father as bargemaster for generations, bow hauling merely called for unwearying brute strength. The job attracted the roughest and toughest of men who were not only more than a match for any force a millowner could recruit to protect his weir, but became the terror of the whole riverside neighbourhood.
This protracted battle of the Wendle was not merely a simple issue of navigators versus weir owners. The landowners joined in the fray to make it a complicated three-sided contest in which the odd, man out would find his interests ranged now on this side, now on that. Landowners resented the passage of bow hauliers through their property and would attempt either to close the ‘haling way’ or to levy tolls for its use. At several points between Winterstoke and Westerport the Wendle haling way switched from bank to bank of the river to avoid the more recalcitrant of these landowners. This caused further delays to navigation, for where there was no bridge or flash weir, the hauliers must needs be ferried over or walk to and from the nearest crossing. In most cases ferries became established at the tow path crossings, but the ferry owners levied a toll for their use. In their resistance to the bow hauliers the land and weir owners were allied against the navigators, but upon another issue they were in conflict. This was the landowners’ contention that, by holding up the waters, the weirs increased the risk of flooding. In this particular dispute the position of the navigators was equivocal. They welcomed any attack upon an obstructive weir owner, and on a claim that a half-tide weir should be lowered or removed they might support the landowners. But a campaign for the removal of a flash weir did not have their support. However obstructive its owner might be, they knew full well that, by
holding up the water in the reach above, it enabled them to trade at times and seasons when navigation would otherwise be impossible.
In this chaos of conflicting interests the only controlling authority was the local Commissioners of Sewers headed by the Earls of Winterstoke, but as arbitrators they were singularly ineffective, certainly so far as the bargemasters were concerned. They were the local branch of a Royal Commission set up to improve land drainage and prevent flooding. To this end they could, and did, order the bed of the Wendle to be ‘scoured’, make drainage cuts or insist that a weir be altered or removed if it unduly restricted the river’s outfall. But they were not empowered to further the interests of navigation in any way, and the fact that the scouring of the channel assisted the bargemasters was purely coincidental. It was this impotence, combined with the increasing tonnage shipped from his estate which induced Charles Hanmer to apply to the king for powers to improve the navigation. These were granted by Charles I in the form of a Patent dated 1635 which authorized the Earl to make the river navigable for boats of convenient burthen by ‘casting down weirs and erecting or making fludgates, sluces or other engins or devises’. This Patent left to Charles Hanmer the task of reaching agreement with property-holders and other interested parties along the course of the river, although it made provision for a Commission to be set up to arbitrate in the event of dispute. Dispute there certainly was. Both weir and landowners held that the king could not grant any exclusive rights over a private river and that the Patent was an abuse of the Royal prerogative over the rights of the subject. So nothing was done and the age-old dispute dragged on until the greater matter of the civil war put a stop to it.
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