INDUSTRIES 



an eye-witness's account of the making of cop- 

 peras at that date on Brownsea Island — 



The stones being found about the isle in the shore 

 in great quantities. There is only one house [she 

 writes] which is the Governor's, besides little fisher- 

 men's houses ; they being all taken up about the 

 copperas works ; they gather the stones and place 

 them on ground raised like the beds in gardens, 

 rows one above the other and are all shelving, so that 

 the rain dissolves the stones, and it drains down into 

 trenches and pipes made to receive and convey it to 

 the house which is fitted with pans four square and of 

 a pretty depth at least 1 2 yards over. They place 

 iron spikes in the pans full of branches, and so as the 

 liquor boils to a candy it hangs on these branches, I 

 saw some taken up. It looked like a vast branch of 

 grapes. The colour of the copperas not being much 

 differing it looks clear like sugar candy, so when the 

 water is boiled to a candy, they take it out, and re- 

 plenish the pans with more liquor. I do not remem- 



ber they added anything to it, only the stones of 

 copperas dissolved by rain into liquor as I mentioned 

 at first. There are great furnaces under it keeping 

 all the pans boiling. It was a large room or building 

 with several of these large pans. They do add old 

 iron and nails to the copperas stones.*' 



Sir R. Clayton had copperas works at Stud- 

 land, which were, however, in ruins in 1700. 

 The stones in this case were brought from the 

 Isle of Wight.82 



Hutchins records an attempt made in 1 571 by 

 Sir Thomas Smith to transmute iron into copper 

 on land which he leased from Lady Mountjoy 

 near Poole at a rental of ^^300 per annum, 

 hoping to find the means of making vitriol there ; 

 but the attempt, we are told, came to nothina;.^' 



The iron foundry which existed at Bridport in 

 1 812 was not supplied with native ore, though 

 a vein of ironstone is found near Abbotsbury. 



QUARRYING 



The best and most widely used stone quarried 

 in Dorset has been obtained from the Purbeck 

 and Portland formations.'^ Purbeck marble earliest 

 won an extended repute ; at the present day the 

 Isle of Portland furnishes the largest quantities of 

 excellent building stone. 



In barrows of a very ancient date slabs of the 

 local limestone were used for lining or covering 

 the sepulchral chamber, while the excavations at 

 Silchester^ and Verulamium ' have shown that 

 marble from the Upper Purbeck strata'^ wasduring 

 the period of Roman occupation employed for 

 decorative work. The Saxons had little need for 

 opening up fresh quarries, but for a few churches 

 they used the Purbeck limestone, which was also 

 early in request for fonts * and sepulchral slabs. 

 From the Roman period till the twelfth century 

 little if any demand existed for Purbeck marble ; 

 but with the passing of the massive Norman 

 fashion of building the marbler came into his 

 kingdom. Indeed, it has been well said ' that 



nearly every English church of any size that was built 

 from 1 1 70 to 1350 imported for its structure these 

 polished dressings which . . . were not only moulded 

 and chiselled with delicate foliage, but were carved too 

 into fine head corbels or into relief panels of figure 

 subjects. 



*' Fiennes, Through Engl, on a S'tde-saddle, 5-6. 



" Hutchins, Hist. Dorset, i, 219. 



^ Ibid, ii, no. 



' A. Strahan, Geology of Isle of Purbeck and Weymouth, 

 236. 



' Arch, liii, pt. I, 266. 



^ Teste the late Mr. Micklethwaite. 



•* The Purbeck marble is not crystalline, but really 

 a dark Paludina limestone, or shell conglomerate. 



* The font of Studland is rudely axed out of Pur- 

 beck ' burr ' ; Trans. Dors. Nat. Hist, and jintiq. Field 

 Club, xii, 176. 



Already in the twelfth century Purbeck marble 

 was being exported as far as Dublin for archi- 

 tectural use, whilst such effigies as that in the 

 south porch of Abbotsbury church, or those of 

 Bishop Iscanus at Exeter and Bishop Jocelyn at 

 Salisbury, furnish flat reliefs soon to develop into 

 the fully modelled figures of the knights at the 

 Temple Church, the Peterborough abbots, or that 

 unique royal effigy in Purbeck marble on the 

 tomb of King John at Worcester. But it is no 

 part of our task to trace the aesthetic develop- 

 ment of sculpture in marble ; ^ a few notes only 

 are offered in illustration of the quarrying industry 

 of Corfe and its neighbourhood. 



By the thirteenth century ' Corfe had become 



* Archit. Rev. xii, 5. 



* The reader is referred to the valuable series of 

 articles by Messrs. Prior and Gardner on ' Mediaeval 

 Figure Sculpture in England ' which appeared in the 

 Archit. Rev. d.Vinxig 1902 and the following years. 



' Several early records of conveyance of marble and 

 stone from Purbeck exist. Probably the marble 

 mentioned as sent to Clarendon in Pipe R. 23 Hen. II, 

 m. 10, was from Purbeck. Cf, as to marble sent to 

 Chichester, Close, 6 John, m. 2 ; 8 John, m. 4. 

 It was also liberally used in Sussex at Boxgrove. Later 

 we hear of ' lapides Regis qui sunt apud Suthampton 

 et venerunt de Purbec ad operationem castri nostri 

 Wintonie ' (Lib. R. 21 Hen. III). As regards export 

 beyond the bounds of England, Purbeck seems to have 

 been used in Dublin almost as early as the last ten or 

 fifteen years of the reign of Hen. II. Geoffrey of 

 Coldingham, in describing the work of Bishop Hugh 

 Pudsey at Durham, and the marble used in the 

 Galilee, uses the words ' A transmarinis partibus 

 deferebantur columpnae et bases marmoreae ' \Hist. 

 Dun. Script. Tres. (Surtees Soc. ix), ii], and Symeon 

 of Durham also refers to the marble as ' addito de 

 longinquo ' {Opera (Rolls Ser.), i, 168], but mentions 

 neither Purbeck nor Corfe. 



331 



