LIFE OF 



He early embarked in the iron trade, and worked a forge, the 

 remains of which are still to be seen at the lower end of Coal- 

 brooke Dale. This district was not at that period, as it is now, 

 the great field of the iron trade of Shropshire, and he soon 

 quitted it for a forge at Moreton, in the parish of Shawbury. 



The smelting of iron at this time was carried on almost uni- 

 versally by means of wood charcoal in small furnaces, the 

 ; bello>vst {XrtwJiich were worked by water-wheels, and were gene 

 j-ally situated one the banks of streams, in the vicinity of large 

 'tracts b'f coppice wood. The scale on which these works were 

 carried on, as compared with those of the present day, may best 

 be understood by the fact that, in 1740, a few years before 

 Mr. Richard Knight's death, there were only fifty-nine iron 

 furnaces in the whole of England and Wales *, and the average 

 quantity of metal produced by each was 5 tons 13 cwt. per 

 week ; while in Shropshire alone there were lately between fifty 

 and sixty furnaces at work, each producing above seventy tons 

 per week~f~ ! In 1740 there were only six furnaces in Shrop- 

 shire, which together made two thousand tons per annum : of 

 these Mr. Richard Knight had two, besides several forges ; he 

 had also one forge in Staffordshire, and shares in nearly the 

 whole of the iron works of Worcestershire, and a furnace and 

 forge at Bringewood near Ludlow, in Herefordshire. 



Long before this time the manufacture of iron had begun to 

 decline J, owing to the increasing difficulty of procuring an 

 adequate supply of fuel ; which is not surprising, when it is 

 known that a large furnace will consume in a year the produce 

 of one hundred and twenty acres of coppice wood ! The trade 



* See Art. on Iron making in Supp. to Encyclop. Brit. 



t Paper read at meeting of the Shropshire Nat. Hist. Soc. by Mr. T. Blunt. 



J Dudley, who wrote in the reign of James I. states that there were at that 

 time in England three hundred furnaces for the manufacture of pig-iron, making 

 the astonishing quantity annually of one hundred and eighty thousand tons, 

 though he says " the trade is falling into decaye." See Supp. to Encyclop. Brit. 

 A curious old pamphlet, without date, but written since 1714, " On the 

 Interest of Great Britain in supplying Herself with Iron," gives the whole 

 quantity then made as 12,190 tons, and states that it had been 19,485 tons. 



