A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 





By this time the Orwell works had been 

 founded at Ipswich by Mr. Robert Ransome. 

 The son of a Norfolk schoolmaster and the 

 grandson of an early Quaker who suffered im- 

 prisonment for his opinions, Mr. Ransome was 

 apprenticed to an ironmonger, and commenced 

 business in Norwich with a small brass foundry 

 which grew to be also an iron foundry. After 

 taking out a patent for cast-iron roofing-plates in 

 1783, he turned his attention to the improve- 

 ment of the plough. 1 Hitherto the main body 

 of the plough had been made of wood, the 

 wheelwright and the blacksmith taking almost 

 equal parts in its construction. Apart from the 

 unsatisfactory results of professional jealousy and 

 divided control on the manufacture, the wooden 

 plough was liable to get out of order from ex- 

 posure to the soil and to the changes of the 

 weather. It did not work uniformly and was 

 continually requiring repairs. A Scotchman 

 named Small, who set up a manufactory of 

 ploughs at Berwick in 1763, was the first to 

 replace the wooden mould-board by a cast-iron 

 turn-furrow. In 1/85 Mr. Ransome obtained 

 a patent for making the share of cast-iron specially 

 tempered instead of wrought-iron. In this way 

 the first cost was so much reduced that the share 

 could be renewed at less expense than was in- 

 volved in keeping the wrought-iron share in 

 good condition. But the share still required 

 constant sharpening owing to its wearing away 

 too fast on the under side. The bluntness 

 added greatly to the draught, and the plough 

 passed over weeds without cutting them. Mr. 

 Robert Ransome hit upon the idea, which he 

 patented in 1803, of case-hardening the under- 

 side the thickness of one-sixteenth or one-eighth 

 of an inch. This part wore away very slowly, 

 while the upper part being of softer metal was 

 ground down by the friction of the earth so that 

 the edge on the under-side was kept constantly 

 sharp. This simple but ingenious device, which 

 has been universally adopted, effected what is 

 perhaps the most striking single improvement 

 ever made in the plough. A little later a 

 Suffolk farmer, Mr. Simpson of Cretingham, 

 invented for his own use a cast-iron plough- 

 ground or bottom which was generally adopted 

 in the eastern counties ; and as the art of found- 

 ing improved, cast-iron to a great extent super- 

 seded wood and wrought-iron. Plough-frames 

 were made so as to admit of handles, beams, 

 shares, mould-boards, soles, and other parts being 

 screwed to them. They also admitted of the 

 mould-board being set to wider and narrower 

 furrows and of changing the shapes of different 

 parts for different purposes. By keeping a stock 

 of these various interchangeable standardized 

 parts the farmer was enabled to save the great 

 amount of labour and time that had been formerly 

 lost in conveying the plough frequently to and 



1 Diet. Nat. Biog. art. Robert Ransome. 



282 



from the blacksmith's shop. A patent taken out 

 by Mr. Ransome in 1808 laid the foundation of 

 this method of construction, and further improve- 

 ments in the plough were patented by him or 

 his successors in 1816, 1820, and 1835.* 



The end of the eighteenth and the beginning 

 of the nineteenth century was a period of great 

 improvement in agricultural methods and imple- 

 ments. It is customary to think of the inventive 

 faculties of Great Britain as being at this time 

 wholly concentrated upon the achievement of 

 the industrial revolution. But the village Ark- 

 wrights and Stephensons were also busy to no 

 small purpose. Arthur Young mentions quite 

 a number of such inventors in Suffolk. ' A 

 very ingenious blacksmith of the name of Brand,' 

 says Young, 



who has been dead some years, improved the Suffolk 

 swing-plough, and made it of iron. I have been 

 informed that the corpse in its present state was an 

 improvement of his ; if so it is much to his credit, for 

 there is no other in the kingdom equal to it.' 



Later on he quotes a letter of a Rev. Mr. Lewes 

 of Thorndon, who writes : 



A Mr. Hayward of Stoke Ash in this neighbourhood, 

 has invented a machine for destroying weeds and 

 clearing ploughed land for seed, which, by the ex- 

 perience of four years is found more effectual than 

 any other instrument used for that purpose. ... A 

 farmer assured me that he could with three horses 

 work up sixty acres per week with it ; and that a 

 person having the extirpator, may, with only three 

 horses, farm as much land as would without it require 

 six horses. 



And again : 



Mr. Brettingham of St. John's, near Bungay, informs 

 me that a new drill plough ... is the invention or 

 improvement of Mr. Henry Baldwin of Mendham, 

 who has been bringing it to perfection by ten years' 

 application. . . . He had some thoughts of applying 

 for a patont for it, but was dissuaded from that by 

 Mr. Brettingham, as he thought that any monopoly 

 of useful machines must be of general disservice to 

 the community, and that it might possibly turn the 

 attention of a good farmer from a good farm. 1 



The drill is a sowing-machine. The desira- 

 bility of replacing the picturesque but uncertain 

 and wasteful methods of the broad-casting sower 

 by some form of mechanical regularity had 

 already led to experiments in the seventeenth 

 century ; but it was the drill plough invented 

 by Jethro Tull in 1733 for sowing wheat and 

 turnip seed in three rows at a time that first 

 set the mind of the inventive agriculturist in 

 England working on the subject. In 1782 

 Sir J. Anstruther presented a model of an im- 

 proved drill plough which he had had in use for 

 eight years to the Bath and West of England 

 society. 4 After this many patents were taken 



' J. A. Ransome, The Imp!, of Agric. (1843), 15-20 

 * Young, Gen. View Agric. Suffolk (1804), 32-5. 

 4 J. A. Ransome, The Itnpl. tf Agric. (1884), 99. 



