The Industrial Revolution 189 



and Surrey, and afforded what may, at one time, have ap- 

 peared to be a practically limitless supply of fuel. 



The three counties in question thus attained to a high 

 degree of industrial importance and prosperity at a time 

 when Lancashire and Yorkshire were still regarded by dwellers 

 in the south as inhabited by a scarcely civilised people. 

 Lord Seymour, who was made by Henry VIII. Lord High 

 Admiral of England, and ended his life on the scaffold in 

 J 549 was the owner of iron-works in Sussex. The cannon 

 and shot which Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher took with 

 them on their ships were supplied by these southern foundries. 

 Of the position of the industry in 1653, when there were 

 42 forges and 27 furnaces in the Weald of Sussex, the author 

 of " Glimpses of our Ancestors in Sussex " says : " Sussex 

 was then the Wales and the Warwickshire of England. 

 Foreign countries sought eagerly for its cannon, its culverines 

 and falconets. ... Its richly decorated fire-backs and 

 fantastic andirons were the pride of lordly mansions. London 

 sent here for the railings that went round its great cathedral ; 

 Sussex ploughshares, speeds and other agricultural imple- 

 ments and hardware were sent all over the kingdom." 



Fears, however, had already been excited in Henry VIII. 's 

 day that the continued destruction of forests, in order to 

 supply the iron-works with fuel, would lead to a timber 

 famine ; and in Queen Elizabeth's reign such a prospect, 

 foreshadowing a shortage of timber for shipbuilding purposes 

 at the very time when a conflict with Spain was regarded as 

 inevitable, was looked upon as involving a possible national 

 disaster. A subsidiary complaint against the industry was 

 that the traffic to and from the iron -works injured the roads. 

 Legislation was therefore passed prohibiting, under severe 

 penalties, any increase in the number of iron-works in the 

 three counties mentioned, except on land already occupied 

 or able to furnish of itself a sufficient supply of timber. 

 Exportation of iron was also prohibited, and it was even 

 considered good policy to import iron, rather than to make it, 

 and so preserve the still available timber for other purposes. 



By the early part of the eighteenth century the iron in- 

 dustry, after exhausting the timber supplies of Sussex, had 

 disappeared from that county ; but it flourished in Shrop- 

 shire, where it found both fuel and iron-stone in the Forest 



