Ironwork ..

:

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM ART HANDBOOKS.
IRONWORK.

TO THE END OF THE MEDIAEVAL PERIOD.

IRONWORK.

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE END OF
THE MEDIAEVAL PERIOD.

BY

J. STARKIE GARDNER.

WITH FIFTY-SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS.

Published for the Committee of Council on Education,

BY

CHAPMAN AND HALL, LD., n, HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.

1893.

Art

Library

\r.\

PREFACE.

ALTHOUGH the literature of iron is extensive, its history, either
as a craft or a fine art, has not been written — a fact which, con-
trasted with the number of works devoted to gold and silver,
appears remarkable. Monsieur F. Liger, who has kindly lent many
illustrations from La Ferronnerie, made a serious effort to deal
exhaustively with it, but he only brought the history down to the
time of the collapse of the Western Empire ; and as no further
volume has been issued since 1875, it would appear either that he
has relinquished the task or that the difficulties in his path are
exceedingly great. Dr. Ludwig Beck published, in 1884, what
might almost be regarded as an abridged edition of Liger's
work, with a short addendum on the ironwork of the Middle
Ages. The Bibliotheque des Merveilles includes a small volume
on Le Fer, by M. Jules Gamier, 1878; and ten years later,
Professor Meyer, of Carlsruhe, published a handbook on Schmiede-
kunst. In England there is a text-book on Blacksmithing in
Weale's series; and Mr. Parker, of Oxford, to whom I am in-
debted for the loan of several illustrations, published, in 1858,
the Serrurerie du Moyen Age, by Raymond Bordeaux — a work con-
sisting of a series of interesting plates of mediaeval hinges in
England and France, with descriptive text. With these excep-
tions, the subject can only be studied in stray chapters and illus-
trations in periodicals, works on metallurgy and art, and the
portfolios of illustrations that have appeared on ironwork, espe-
cially in Germany, and in rece.it years. While this paucity of

332679

vi PREFACE.

literature has rendered the preparation of a handbook a matter
df some difficulty, the fact may not detract from its interest.

Though the collection in the Ironwork Gallery of the South
Kensington Museum is perhaps the most extensive and com-
prehensive extant, it has yet been necessary to take most of the
illustrations of mediaeval work from among the fixtures in ancient
ecclesiastical buildings, where many of the types can alone be
seen. Several of these illustrations have been lent by the Austrian
Government Printing Office, and Messrs. Murray have kindly
allowed the use of two of their woodcuts from Du Chaillu's
Viking Age. In addition to these, my sincere thanks are due
to many of the clergy, and to friends in the architectural pro-
fession, for the trouble they have taken in affording or procuring
information, which the condensed character of the book has
rendered it impossible to acknowledge individually.

The present volume breaks off at the end of the Mediaeval
period. A second, in course of preparation, will carry the subject
on through the Renaissance to the present day.

November, 1892.

CONTENTS.

>-AGB

INTRODUCTION— IRON AND ITS ORES i

I.
THE PRODUCTION OF IRON, AND ITS HISTORY 9

II.

THE WORKING OF IRON, AND ITS HISTORY DOWN TO THE

CHRISTIAN ERA ,

III.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH, COMPRISING THE HISTORY OF
IRONWORKING FROM THE NINTH TO THE FOURTEENTH
CENTURY 38

IV.

THE TRANSITION, DUE TO ORIENTAL INFLUENCE IN THE FOUR-
TEENTH CENTURY 93

V.

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH, FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH

CENTURIES 115

INDEX 147

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

FIG. PACK

I. — Roman window-frames from Epinay ... ... ... ... ... 39

2, 3. — Gallo-Roman window-guards 39

4. — Hasp from Landunum 40

5. — Gallic escutcheon 40

6. — Clamps, St. Germain Museum 40

7. — Gallo-Roman clamps, St. Germain Museum 41

8. — Roman escutcheon and hasp, Hartlip ... 41

9, 10. — Roman andirons, Hartlip and Colchester 42

II.— Candelabrum, Kirkstead Abbey.. 42

12. — Folding-chair, Ashdon 43

13. — Roman hinges, Laval ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 46

14. — „ Landunum ... ... ... ... ... ... 46

15, 16. — ,, from the Seine 47

17. — Hinges, Stillingfleet ... 49

18. — ,, Hormead 51

19. — ,, Willingale Spain, Essex 52

20. — ,, Eastwood ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 54

21. — ,, Haddiscoe 56

22. — ,, S". Albans 57

23. — ,, Vanga 58

24. — „ Faabergs 59

25.— ,, Pontigny 62

26. — ,, Montreal 63

27. — ,, Durham 65

28. — Grille, Winchester 68

29. — ,, Ourscamp 70

30. — ,, Lincoln 71

31. — Hinges, Semperingham ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 74

32. — ,, Market Deeping 76

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

33. — Hinges, Rouen ........................ 7$

34. — „ Notre Dame, Paris .................. 79

35.— „ Liege ........................ 82

36. — Eleanor Grille, Westminster Abbey ............... 85

37. — Part of grille, Siena ..................... 98

38. — Window grille, Bourges .................. 102

39. — Knocker, Stockbury ..................... 109

40. — Handle, Stogumber ..................... no

41. — ,, Westcott Barton .................. in

42. — ,, fourteenth-century .................. in

43. — ,, Rouen ........................ 117

44. — „ Evreux ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 118

45. — Lock, Windsor .................... . ... 129

46.— Guichet, Flemish, S.K.M ................... 130

47. — Tabernacle, from Ottoburg, S.K.M ................ 131

48. — Lock, Klagenfurt Museum .................. 133

49. — ,, Styria ........................ 136

50.— „ Augsburg ........................ 136

5!. — (J Amerling Collection .................. 137

52. — Handle, Styria ........................ 138

53. — Door-lining, Cracow ..................... 139

54. — ,, Bruck ..................... 140

55-— " Prague ........... , ......... 141

56. — ,, Krems ..................... 143

57. — Tabernacle door, Krems .................. 144

%* Of these illustrations, Nos. i to 16 are from M. Liger's La Ferronntrie ; 23 and 24, from
Du Chaillu's Viking Age (Murray); 25, 26, 33, 39 to 45, from Raymond Bordeaux's La
Serrurerie du Moyen Age (Parker, Oxford) ; and 48 to 57 from publications of the Govern-

ment Printing Office, Vienna. The others have been engraved for this work by Mr. J. D.
Cooper.

IRON.

INTRODUCTION.

No material subject is more worthy of study than iron, for no
substance on earth has more profoundly influenced the destinies
of the human race. In intrinsic value it ranks lowest among
metals, for copper is twenty times more costly, and even zinc and
lead are three to four times dearer by weight Yet, though it
is the cheapest and most ubiquitous of metals, lacking, moreover,
many of the intrinsic qualities of the precious metals, it never-
theless immeasurably surpasses the whole of them together in
interest and in its value and utility to us. It stands, indeed, as
regards its principal attributes, precisely among the metals as the
working magses stand in a civilised community, and has ever
proved a most mighty instrument for good or ill.

Clean iron is in colour a metallic steely grey, but it oxidises, or
rusts, on exposure to damp air so rapidly that its real colour is
seldom apparent in works of art, unless the surface has been pressed
or polished, when it presents a bright metallic lustre, glistening and
reflecting light. Of purely scientific interest are its well-known
peculiarities towards magnetism, its electrical conductivity, bio-
logical functions, and therapeutic uses ; whilst the pigments, stains,
and mordants produced from it do not concern us here.

Iron chemically pure can only at present be produced by electro-

2 IRON.

deposition, and is almost unknown in the arts, but so, practically,
are alloys of iron with other metals. Small quantities of alumi-
nium, manganese, nickel, chromium, wolfram, and even gold and
silver, have been experimentally added, or may be accidentally
present, some of which confer remarkable properties; but the
truly valuable alloy of iron is carbon, which converts it, under
certain conditions, into steel The presence of silicon, phosphorus,
and sulphur, also considerably affect its quality, the latter espe-
cially being usually injurious.

It may be that artists at the present day would seldom select
iron as the best material in which to execute any purely artistic
conception, and when we find great artistic skill lavished upon it
in the past, it usually proves to have been from necessity rather
than choice. The most exalted prince, like the humblest man-at-
arms, found it expedient to don steel in battle, but in ages of
luxury common steel would not be worn by the magnifico, unless
wrought by a Cellini until it rivalled gold in preciousness. We
certainly meet with iron crowns, iron crosses, and iron jewels ; but
the material is here intended to symbolise power and strength,
or grim earnest, and this symbolism is usually implied when the
metal is put to such inapposite uses. Occasionally we may find a
statue or a throne carved in iron, as a sculptor would sometimes
carve in porphyry, but the use of iron and cold steel has in all
ages been habitually associated with strength and with menace,
too often with suffering and death. Thus, when we find art
;,bestowed on iron, it is almost invariably where the strength of the
material serves an end, and, though the .sense of utility may be
sometimes obscured in the lavishness of the decoration, the most
admirable works in iron are precisely those which show most dis-
tinctly the purpose they are to serve.

But to form any really adequate conception of the capabilities
of iron, we must turn to works in which art, in the restricted
sense, has no place whatever. It is only in such that its true
power and strength at the present day are exhibited, and that it is

INTRODUCTION. 3

seen to stand out among metals as a Colossus among pigmies. In
the roaring furnace, the rushing train, and the leviathan steam-
ship we have manifestations of its destiny, for having lain as a
dormant seed in the Bronze Age, and a baby in the so-called Iron
Age, it has suddenly burst in the Victorian era into a manhood
absolutely astounding in its strength and vigour. For we build
our ships and engines of iron ; the skeletons of our houses, our
bridges, our weapons, and nearly everything we use or wear is
directly manipulated by its touch. The very ground and air of
our great manufacturing centres seem to pulsate with the masses
of iron and steel in motion, and in our great cities iron spreads its
wire meshes above our heads like a vast web, and the hidden
pipes ramify beneath our feet like the huge mycelia of a gigantic
fungus. More than sixty million tons of iron or steel must be
absorbed in railway lines, from which six hundred tons must be
ground off every day and dissipated as impalpable powder. We
are consuming iron at home at the rate of 299 Ibs. per head of
population, and exporting it to the value of twenty-four millions
sterling a year ; and with stupendous and ever-increasing
engineering works like the Forth Bridge, absorbing iron individu-
ally by the hundred thousand tons, it is well that, unlike coal, the
raw material is practically inexhaustible. Should attempts be
made hereafter to illustrate the uses of iron in England in the
nineteenth century, as adequately as the Naples Museum illus-
trates its use in the first, a large space indeed will be required, for
the Victorian era will be remembered for the extraordinary
development of the use of iron and steel, when all else concerning
it is, perhaps, forgotten.

No study abounds in the marvellous like that of metallurgy,
and no other branch of science presents us at every turn with
such totally unexpected, and in many cases inexplicable, results.
The old idea of the transmutation of metals was, no doubt,
induced by some of these, and is not merely an idle dream of the
alchemist The spectroscope has more than hinted that some of

4 IRON.

the metals may not be the elementary substances they seem, but
compounds, only to be disassociated by methods of an intensity
which it has not yet been possible to apply. Metals exist, without
any known change in composition, in widely different states.
Certain forms of lead and copper, pure though they be, oxidise
with great rapidity in air, while ordinary sheet lead or copper does
not Professor Roberts-Austen mentions that ingots of tin, ex-
posed to severe cold, have fallen to powder; and that many
metals, including iron, on being released from an amalgam of
mercury, are left in such an extraordinary state that they take
fire.

But the most remarkable changes in the properties of metals
are effected by the addition, sometimes, of even the faintest trace
of an alloy. A thousandth, or even a ten-thousandth, part of
antimony suffices to ruin copper for commercial purposes ; a
thousandth part of bismuth almost destroys its conductivity ; and
a five-hundredth part of bismuth in gold causes it to crumble
under pressure. No metal is more susceptible than iron to such
influences ; and one of these mysterious and striking changes,
induced by an apparently altogether inadequate amount of alloy,
is the condition of iron known as steel. The addition of but
three-fourths per cent, of carbon to pure iron will increase its weight-
carrying power, from nineteen tons per square inch, to twenty-eight
or thirty tons, and but an extra per cent doubles this capacity to
sixty tons per square inch. How and why such minute quantities
of carbon should confer such properties is even now but very imper-
fectly known, but science can at least apportion the exact amount
requisite to produce steel adapted to different purposes. Thus,
while two-tenths per cent will fit steel excellently for the Forth
Bridge, it requires eight-tenths to render it fit for cutlery. Nature,
moreover, indicates the quality for us by causing the surface to
assume a blue, straw, or mottled colour, according to the temper.
The value to us of this mere added pinch of charcoal may be
imagined from the fact that ,£120,000 has been estimated to be

INTRODUCTION. 5

saved by it every week in the replenishment of railway lines alone.
Additions of aluminium, chromium, manganese, and tungsten
also produce modifications of hardness, the value of which is
scarcely yet known. Cast iron is the crude metal derived from
the smelting furnace, and imperfectly freed from impurity ; and,
though it happens to be a nearly identical alloy of iron with
carbon, has almost opposite properties to those of steel. It
contains from two to five per cent, of carbon, the different pro-
portions conferring hardness, softness, and closeness of grain.
In art, great fluidity in the molten metal is of more consequence
than strength, and this can be obtained through a relatively high
percentage of phosphorus. Discoveries, such as that the twentieth
part of one per cent, of aluminium in molten wrought iron reduces
the fusing point, so that the most intricate castings can be pro-
duced with ease ; and the process of annealing castings in ovens,
by which the carbon is absorbed and the iron rendered malleable,
should greatly facilitate its artistic use in the future. Its proper use
in art is, like that of bronze, of which it is an inexpensive substitute,
most appropriate when on a grand scale.

Wrought iron, however, is the purest form of the metal, and is
that with which we are mainly concerned.

The presence of the vapour of iron shows that the metal is an
important constituent of the sun, and of most of the heavenly
bodies. It is no less common on earth — how common few
adequately realise. The vegetable mould, the clay, and the
gravel of our soils owe their colour mainly to it, and the vast
majority of rocks are impregnated with it ; for iron, unlike the
more precious metals, is rarely found in a native or pure state.
The ores are, as a rule, dull and earthy, and it is only when
crystalline that they present a brilliantly metallic or attractive
appearance. We derive our iron almost wholly from stratified
sedimentary rocks, instead of from crystalline rocks, which means
that it is not in its original condition, but has been extracted from
older rocks, and sorted and redeposited by the agency of water.

6 IRON.

Our supply is consequently not limited to rocks of any particular
geological period, and we can use the ores indifferently, whether
formed millions of years ago, or within the lives of living people.
The Iron Mountain of Missouri is formed of the oldest Archaean
rocks ; the rich ores of Lake Superior and of Canada belong to
the remote Huronian and Laurentian periods. In Sweden and
many other parts of Europe specular and magnetic iron are ex-
tensively worked from Palaeozoic gneiss, mica, and horneblende
slates. The spathose ores of Devonian age excavated in Germany
and elsewhere, and in our own Brendon Hills, and the Weardale
spathose ore of the Carboniferous, are all older than the coal ;
but the richest ores in England, like the famous ores of Essen in
Prussia, and most of the Belgian iron ore, occur in association
with the coal measures. Thus the iron of the Poorest of Dean in
Gloucestershire, the Ebbw Vale and Dowlais in Wales, the re-
nowned Low Moor and other ores of North Yorkshire, Derby-
shire, Staffordshire, and Scotland, are interbedded, if not actually
mixed, like the famous "Black Band," with the coal used to
smelt them. Among the ores belonging to the middle ages of
geology are the Cleveland, Northamptonshire, and many of the
ores of France and Germany. The Tealby, and the soft, rich,
purple Biscayan ores of Bilbao, are Cretaceous ; and the red ores
of Antrim, and most of those of Burmah and the Deccan, belong
to the newest, or Tertiary, period. Iron ores are indeed still form-
ing by land and sea, but most rapidly in still water. In the
shallow parts of Swedish lakes a stratum of four to six inches is
deposited in fifteen to thirty years, constituting one of the chief
supplies of the famous Swedish iron. That dissolved from soils,
on coming into contact with carbonic and other acids produced
by decaying vegetation, is extensively precipitated (as it was in
the time of the coal measures) in stagnant water as limonite or
bog iron the action being denoted by the occasional rise of
bubbles of carbonic acid and a thin iridescent film on the surface.
The iron pans or crusts so often found at the bottom of peats and

INTR OD UCTION. ^

gravels are produced in this way, and were extensively smelted
by the Romans, while in Canada ores of equally recent origin are
still largely used at the present day.

The ores vary as much in appearance and composition as in
age. We can choose for our manufacture iron in combination
with oxygen, such as haematites, limonites, and bog ores ; or with
carbon, such as clay-ironstone or spathic ore. The choice is
great, for all the resources of nature's laboratory — heat, pressure,
solution, precipitation — have been at work for countless ages,
resulting in endless combinations with the varied elements with
which the iron has been brought in contact, so that the existing
varieties of oxides, carbonates, silicates, phosphates, and^sulphides,
are almost innumerable.

The ores are thus mere rusts, so to speak, mechanically or
chemically precipitated in the outer crust or shell of our earth,
beneath which masses of pure metallic iron may exist

Nearly pure native iron has been brought to the surface in
the basalt lavas of those deeply seated bygone eruptions, which
far surpassed in magnitude any of those witnessed by man.
Lumps of native iron, up to fifty thousand pounds weight, were
found on the beach of Disko Island, which were unquestionably
derived from the adjacent basalt cliffs ; whilst the samples from
other bodies in space, which reach us in the form of meteorites,
sufficiently prove that the abundant iron in them has not under-
gone changes due, with us, to the presence of oxygen. The
known density of the earth, the composition of the sun, the
magnetite and titanic iron of our lavas, go far to indicate the
possibility of the existence of masses of perhaps native iron
at some depth towards the interior of the earth, if, indeed, its
solid nucleus, which possesses the rigidity of steel, is not largely
composed of the perhaps still incandescent metal. The lavas we
see erupted would, on this supposition, be the mere slags of a
metallic nucleus, like those from a smelting furnace, the analogy
being heightened by the occasional reproduction in the latter of

8 IRON.

quartz, compact silica, garnets, augite, and other natural products,
familiarly met with in erupted rocks.

Thus the iron, such as we find it, has been perhaps originally
brought to the surface in erupted rocks, dissolved out by rain and
organisms, and reprecipitated again and again, or accumulated
by the abrading and sorting action of the waves.

The quantity of ore mined annually in this country now stands
at between thirteen and fourteen million tons ; but the discovery of
immensely rich ores of iron in almost every part of the world, and
of fuel fit to reduce them, has already inaugurated a period of
de'cline ; and should lead us to prepare for the inevitable change,
from the raw-product mart to the art-product mart of the world,
which must ensue if we are to maintain our trading supremacy in
the future.

THE MANUFACTURE OF IRON.

THE ores of iron are dug at no great depths, unless associated
with coal, and are frequently obtained on the surface or in shallow
pits and tunnels. In former times the mine was abandoned and
the works removed whenever the increased difficulty in working
rendered this advisable. The impure ores or accumulated rusts
are brought back to the relatively pure metallic state by the
process of smelting, or application of artificial heat. The operation
in its simplest form, as it is still conducted by many of the savage
races of Africa, or semi-barbarous peoples of Asia, consists in
filling a closed or partly closed oven, or even an open hearth, with
the ore and charcoal. The combustion is aided by currents of
air produced by bellows of skin or wood, or force-pumps, whose
pistons are fashioned from bamboo or other hollow stems ; or by
simply fanning with palm leaves. In ancient days, in Britain and
Gaul, the air-currents seem to have been obtained by selecting
sufficiently exposed situations, and leaving holes in the furnaces
on the windward side. The remains of such mines and smelting
hearths are everywhere met with, especially in wild and isolated
districts, furthest from seats of civilisation and agriculture ; and in
such situations as the remote and densely wooded valleys of the
Jura they can be traced by the hundred. Down to late Roman
times the reduction of iron from the ore seems to have been every-
where given over to savage or half-savage denizens of caves and
woods, and to semi-barbarous races. Those familiar with our

io IRON.

own charcoal-burners can realise how — being of uncouth aspect,
dwelling far from beaten tracks, shunning intercourse with men,
working strangely with fire, appearing and disappearing into dark
holes of the earth — the presence of early iron-smelters everywhere
gave rise to legends of gnomes, and elves, and other mysterious
beings. The tools used in obtaining the ore, even from the
hardest rock, were originally of stone and wood : and for long
ages after iron was in use for weapons, the masons' and wood-
men's tools, and even the blacksmiths' anvils and hammers,
continued to be of stone. In Borneo timber is still felled with
adzes of stone, though the natives possess beautifully finished and
decorated steel weapons. It was only under the Romans that
iron became common enough to be used in mining operations,
and we cannot be sure until the beginning of the Christian era
that a near approach was made in the fashion of the smith's tools
to those of our own time. It is only at Pompeii that we find
the Roman smith lacking nothing of importance that we possess,
except the vice and the metal saw.

The iron itself reached civilised communities either in the
" bloom " direct from the furnace, or more commonly as rudely
shaped ingots small enough to be easy of transport ; and in this
state it formed, like gold and silver, a current article of barter.
The smiths who worked these up were, in Gaul, either important
citizens or formed separate and honoured communities. The dis-
coveries at Bibracte show an entire town given over to the craft,
the members of the guild being buried, like warriors, with their
implements around them.

One of the most primitive of the furnaces for the reduction of
the ore was still in use in India, when described by Dr. Percy. It
consists of a hearth two to four feet high, set up against a rock,
with three sides, fashioned of carefully dried clay, in which are
two holes for the earthen pipes or tuyers conveying the blast, and
another on the opposite side for the removal of cinder. It is
lighted with charcoal, and fed with layers of ore and baskets of

THE MANUFACTURE OF IRON. n

fuel until the full charge is reached. The bellows are worked the
whole time, and at the end of four to six hours a small mass of
malleable 'iron results, and, if sufficiently hot, is at once hammered
into a bloom. There is no division of labour, and the smelters
are itinerant, going from village to village, and setting up their
furnace wherever a demand exists and a supply of iron and
charcoal can be obtained. The heat is not sufficient in any of
the more primitive furnaces to actually liquefy the iron, but it is
brought into a pasty lump, sufficiently free from impurity to be at
once malleable. Of the many forms of furnace in which malleable
blooms were directly produced, one is still in use in remote spots
in Europe, and is distinguished as the Catalan. This is a rectan-
gular hearth in a permanent building, without a chimney, but with
a hole left in the roof, and employs about ten men. The furnace
is heated with a layer of charcoal about eighteen inches deep, and
almost reaching the tuyer, and the charge is made up and renewed
with alternate layers of sifted ore and fuel. The blast, produced
by manual labour until the seventeenth century, is now obtained
by the downward suction of air in a falling column of water ; and
is directed on to, instead of through, the incandescent mass. Six
hours after the blast is turned on, the iron is found separated,
and is manipulated until it coalesces into one lump at the bottom ;
which is then lifted over the edge of the furnace by levers, and
is ready for hammering into shape under the helve hammers close
at hand. Until these formed part of the plant of European iron-
works, the rude labour of fashioning the object direct from the
ingot or bloom, fell directly on the smith. The hammers weighed
from 1200 to 1500, and even 2500 Ibs., and were worked by a
rough cog-wheel driven by water power. Their use was to beat the
rough bloom into bars on a slightly tapering anvil, thus relieving
the smith of the most laborious part of his task. They were very
common in Surrey and Sussex, the name " hammer-pond " still
denoting, in many places, the artificial pond which supplied the
water. The furnace-masters who smelted, and the forge-master

12 IRON.

who beat the bars out by mechanical means, became distinct
callings in England, and had nothing to do with the smith who
produced the finished work. Little is actually known of the
process of manufacture until recent times, when an account of
the ironworks in the Forest of Dean was communicated by
Henry Poole to the Royal Society in 1676, in which, after
describing how the pig iron was taken from the high-blast furnace
to the open-hearth charcoal finery, and was softened and worked
into a lump : " this," he continues, " they take out, and giving
it a few strokes with their sledges, they carry it to a great
weighty hammer, raised likewise by the motion of a water-wheel,
where, applying it dexterously to the blows, they presently beat
it out into a thick short square. This they put into the finery
again, and, heating it red hot, they work it out under the same
hammer till it comes into the shape of a bar in the middle with
two square knobs at the ends. Last of all they give it other
heatings in the chafery, and more workings under the hammer,
till they have brought their bars into several shapes and sizes, in
which fashion they expose them to sale." The existence of
slitting and rolling mills at a later period is shown in the account
of the manufacture of iron in 1725, reprinted in the Journal of the
Iron and Steel Institute for 1885, from which we learn that the
bars were called "palasades." The finished bars were classified
as "merchant bars" and "mill bars," the latter being sub-
sequently passed through the slitting and rolling mills, where
they were reduced to nail rods or thin plates. These latter mills
were worked by water power to save the expense of charcoal and
human labour. The establishments in many cases only produced
forty tons of iron per annum, and the largest in England pro-
duced no more than six hundred and fifty tons. No doubt the
excellence of its quality in mediaeval times was chiefly due to the
subsequent manipulation it underwent in the smithy.

In estimating ancient work, we must remember that, down to
perhaps the fourteenth century, iron could not be bought by the

THE MANUFACTURE OF IRON: 13

smith in the bar; and that down to perhaps the seventeenth
century, the bars that came into his hands were probably at best
analogous to the " puddle bars " of to-day, that is, very elongated
ingots ready to be fashioned into finished bars, but not available
to be cut up and used without the bestowal of labour, like the
bars from the rolling-mills at the present day. The aversion to
straight bars seen in the oldest smiths' work, was probably due to
the fact that perhaps the most difficult task that could be set was
to handle and beat out a long and heavy ingot into a bar with
mathematically true angles.

The erection of a shaft over the Catalan forge, by increasing its
draught, converted it into a blast furnace, in which the iron could
be liquefied and run off into moulds. This liquefaction marks one
of the most momentous periods in the history of ironworking, for
" cast iron " produced in this manner differs in its properties as
much from " wrought iron " as if it were a distinct metal. Thus
"white" cast iron, which contains most carbon, is fine-grained and
brittle, and so hard that it sometimes cuts like a diamond ; the
"mottled" kind is coarse-grained and hard; and the "grey"
assimilates most to malleable iron, being softer and rather tough.
The step was so obvious that we can scarcely believe that it was not
taken until late mediaeval times. Dr. Percy, indeed, regarded it
as not improbable that cast iron was first intentionally produced
in China, perhaps at a very remote period ; and a passage in
Aristotle renders it likely that, in the fourth century B.C., the
Greeks knew that iron could be liquefied by heat. Theodorus, a
Samian, has been credited with being the discoverer of the art of
casting statues in iron, several of which are mentioned in Greek
and Latin writers. Lastly, M. Liger, in his remarkable work,
La Ferronnerie, has brought forward evidence to show that iron
was produced in blast furnaces all through the Roman, and even
the Greek, period, and that it was run into pigs at the pit's mouth
and sold in this state, to be worked up in the centres of iron
industry. He contends, indeed, that the same process was

i4 IRON.

employed in Gaul and even in Britain ; but the total absence of
any objects in cast iron of great antiquity is strong evidence
against its use. The cast-iron tombstone in Burwash Church proves,
however, that the art was known in Sussex in the fourteenth century,
long prior to the date given by Percy, who considered that blast
furnaces originated in the beginning of the fifteenth century at
Siegen, in Prussia. The Prussian stiickofen, described and
illustrated in the sixteenth century by Agricola, was a Catalan
forge extended upwards into a shaft ; capable of either liquefying
the iron or of producing malleable blooms, by varying the pro-
portion of ore to fuel in the charge. The blooms were divided
into four or five parts by hammer and chisel, and drawn out into
bars ready for use on an ordinary anvil. No great value seems
to have been attached to the discovery of casting in England, for
almost the only objects produced until nearly the close of the
seventeenth century, except cannon and shot, were rather heavy
andirons and fire-backs. The oldest really important work exist-
ing is the exterior railing of St. Paul's Cathedral, which was
contracted for at the high rate of sixpence per pound, and cost
;£i2,ooo. Cast iron only came into general use for such purposes
at the beginning of the present century. One of the best
specimens is the gate at Hyde Park Corner, produced in 1841 at
a cost of ^5712. Though works of utility, rather than of art, are
usually associated with the material, the most delicate filigree
jewellery imaginable has been produced for nearly a century at
Isemberg, in the Harz. The manufacture is kept secret, but the
bog ore, rich in silica and phosphorus, and the fine quality of the
loam used for the moulds, are exceptionally favourable elements.

There will be little further occasion to speak of cast iron in the
progress of our work. As long as charcoal was used, as it is even
yet in Sweden, malleable iron could be produced direct from the
ore, and in contact with the fuel by continuous working ; it being
unnecessary to separate the refining process from the smelting.
It is improbable that early fineries turned out more than from two

THE MANUFACTURE OF IRON. 15

to four tons of metal per week, and the production of iron in
England was never, in the days of charcoal, estimated at more than
seventeen thousand tons per annum, and, owing to the growing
scarcity of wood, fell in 1725 to a little over twelve thousand tons.

Though the first patent for smelting iron with coal was taken
out in 1611, very little seems to have been actually used till
Dudley succeeded in working the invention profitably in 1620.
The merit of completely solving the problem belongs, however, to
Darby, in 1720; though its use still continued to be restricted,
since a pamphlet, published in 1756, relates that charcoal alone
was used in all the processes of manufacture up to the finished
bar, but that all further work upon it to fashion it into implements
was performed with pit coal.

The use of coal as a fuel leaves the pig iron too full of carbon,
sulphur, and other impurities to be workable, and these have to
be burnt out by the action of oxygen at a high temperature.
Existing processes are therefore directed to this end, and are con-
siderably complicated.

The ore is, as a preliminary, roasted in heaps or in kilns to free
it from a part of its impurities. It is next melted in flask-shaped
furnaces, which may be eighty, or even a hundred feet in height.
These are fed from the top with calcined ore and coke, the
mixture falling on to a cone which distributes it so as to prevent
clogging. Blasts of air, seven times hotter than the boiling point of
water, are blown in from the base. The iron and the earthy im-
purities alike melt in presence of the intense heat, and trickle in a
ceaseless stream to the bottom, limestone or clay being often added
to combine with the impurities, so that the mixture may become
more rapidly fusible. The liquid iron, being the heaviest, forms
a substratum, and the slag floats upon it, so that they are drawn
off at different levels, the one being a glassy waste product, still
but imperfectly utilised; while the other is run out into open sand-
moulds, and left to consolidate into pigs, the gutters in the sand
bearing an imperfect resemblance to a sow with her pigs sucking.

16 IRON.

These pigs are rough bars of iron about three feet long and four
inches in diameter, and are in condition for use in the foundry.
The furnace is kept in continuous action until it needs repair, and
will contain from thirty to forty thousand cubic feet, so that the
operations are on a Cyclopean scale. To bring them to their
present perfection the brightest intellects have been ceaselessly
exercised, and reams of patents taken out, the result being that
where eight tons of coke were required to produce a ton of
iron in the lives of our fathers, one ton can be made to suffice
now ; while so simple a matter as heating the blast with waste gas
has saved a million tons of coal in the Cleveland district alone.

About twenty million tons of pig iron are being produced
annually, and for the production of cast iron the process stops
at this point ; but for wrought iron a purer quality is required.
For this it is puddled, an invention first patented in 1784, which
means that it is boiled and stirred upon a hearth, or in a chamber,
until all but mere traces of its impurities are burnt out by oxygen
from the air, or from rusty cinder added during the process. The
iron leaves the puddling furnace as a spongy, fiery, and dripping
mass, and is hurried to the squeezers, which are steam-hammers,
or other mechanical contrivances to press out the cinder and
squeeze the metal into blooms. This is the process formerly
called " shingling," for which the lever or tilt, and helve hammers
worked by water power, were used ; until the introduction of the
stamp-hammer with vertical action, and particularly of the
Nasmyth hammer in 1842. The blooms, being reheated, are put
under the rolling-mills, which draw them into puddle bars, and
these are again rolled until they acquire the merchantable form
of bar iron. In these processes about four hundred and fifty
tons of coal to the hundred tons of bar iron are consumed ; the
result being that the iron has become soft, fibrous, and tough,
instead of brittle and granular — the " wrought iron " of commerce,
of which some seven and a half million tons are now put annually
on the market.

THE MANUFACTURE OF IRON. 17

Steel, the third of the chief merchantable conditions of iron,
is in composition a connecting link between "cast" and
" wrought " iron. While resembling cast iron in containing
carbon, it differs from it in being a carefully purified, malleable
iron, to which a definite proportion of carbon has subsequently
been added, the amount varying from the fraction one-fifth to
one per cent., according to whether the result is required to be
mild or steely in quality.

It is difficult, or rather impossible, to trace its origin, for the
early references to it merely mean a steely quality of iron pro-
duced in the bloom, or iron hardened by rapid cooling, and per-
haps by tempering. The fact that hard rocks could be carved
has continually been adduced as proof that steel was known to
nations of antiquity, but no evidence of any value has ever been
brought forward to support this proposition. A manufacture of
something like steel is described by Leih-Tze, a Chinese writer
about B.C. 400, when Aristotle also described a method of con-
verting iron into steel by melting and refining. The most cele-
brated steel of antiquity was, however, the Indian wootz, which
had a world-wide reputation, and was made from iron mixed with
finely chopped wood and heated for three or four hours in small
closed crucibles. The Chinese method, which appears the one
practised in Greece and in mediaeval Europe, was to melt some
iron with a flux in a crucible, and to immerse and boil pieces
of wrought iron in it with charcoal, for several hours, until the
requisite amount of carbon had been absorbed. The process
was repeated twice or more, the iron being withdrawn and well
hammered each time, and plunged while hot into cold water.
English steel was, until quite recently, all made by the cementation
process, which consisted in packing pieces of bar iron with pow-
dered charcoal in little fire-clay or iron boxes, and keeping them
at a red heat for a week or two, during which the iron became
unequally impregnated with carbon vapour. Uniform quality was
obtained by breaking the bars into small pieces, judging and

c

1 8 IRON.

sorting them by the eye, and remelting the lots in crucibles.
The quality, which was uncertain, chiefly depended upon a
further process — that of heating the article to redness and quench-
ing it in cold water to harden it, and then tempering the hardness
by careful reheating until it became fitted to cut either metal or
wood, or elastic enough for springs. The highest degree of
tenacity was obtained by heating to a dull red and simply chilling
rapidly in oil, The manufacture was empirical, and it was not
known till 1781 that the properties of steel were dependent on
the percentage of carbon present. Its use was a luxury and
untrustworthy for large masses, until the introduction, twenty-six
years ago, of rapid steel-making processes by Bessemer and
Siemens. These entirely revolutionised the industry, increasing
the production to over seven and a half million tons annually, of
which one-third is contributed by this country.

The present process consists in melting the pig iron in a huge
flask, and blowing superheated air violently through it, until every
trace of impurity is burnt out. To the resultant almost pure iron
the precise amount of carbon and manganese required is added by
mixing " spiegeleisen," which is a carefully prepared iron con-
taining the requisite alloys. The introduced carbon sometimes
acts on the mass of iron oxide with almost explosive violence, and
an impressive pyrotechnic display results ; the peculiar roar of the
blast is lulled, lambent greenish flames play over the mouth of
the gigantic flask, which bends over as if its task were accom-
plished, and delivers its contents in a dazzling flow of silvery
whiteness.

The manufacture of steel is still probably in its infancy.
Already the rivalry of nations and their ceaseless armaments
necessitate the use of ingots of forty tons weight for armour
plating, and the 1 43-ton Krupp guns have for the moment
eclipsed our monster Armstrongs. But the Italians have sur-
passed all by producing, in their new works at Terni, an astound-
ing anvil of steel in a single casting, weighing a thousand tons.

THE MANUFACTURE OF IRON. 19

To witness the manufacture of iron and steel we must travel
to those hives of ceaseless human industry in the " black country,"
a scathed and almost treeless district, which, under a smoky pall
by day and lit up with a red glow like Hades by night, has con-
tributed more than its share to the greatness of our country :
though destined when its task is accomplished, perhaps within a
few years, to revert once more to green parks and meadows.

II.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK.

THE inquiry into the origin of the use of iron is a purely aca-
demic one. Iron rusts so rapidly that the delicate gold enrich-
ments of a sword or cap may be exhumed in perfect preservation,
whilst the blade or helm is only traceable in a trail of rust. But
though the great bulk of the objects in iron belonging to remote
antiquity have totally disappeared ; yet in no instance are we
justified in assuming that iron implements have been in use where
no traces of such exist. The evidence of the objects themselves,
as well as of tradition, leaves no doubt whatever that the know-
ledge of gold and of copper preceded, in a general way, that of
iron ; and we find that any extensive use of the latter implied, as
a rule, a high degree of civilisation. The fact that the use of
iron is nearly always found to be coeval with the most ancient
written history has been advanced as proof of the contrary, but
it can prove nothing more than that the art of working iron and
the art of writing language are two stages in the progress of civili-
sation which have often been reached concurrently. The use of
iron is indeed seldom found to antedate history or human tradi-
tion ; and we can nowhere regard iron weapons or tools, as we
can bronze or stone, as prehistoric, except in a restricted and
local sense. Whenever the superficial deposits of countries in
which the works of man are preserved have been scientifically
and at all exhaustively explored, we are at once aware of long
periods, about which history is wholly silent, in which the use of

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK. 21

iron was utterly unknown ; and even in the traditions of the great
civilisations of antiquity, we get unmistakable hints that the age
of bronze was too recent to have been wholly forgotten. The
first impulse of man would be to arm himself and make use of
implements and weapons of stone, wood, and bone ; and the Stone
Ages, when the use of metal was practically unknown, are shown
by the most unequivocal evidence to have been of enormous
duration. The proficiency attained by the prehistoric inhabitants
of Europe in the use of stone weapons, in which those of our own
island fully shared, must have been prodigious, for they fought and
slew the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, the bison and the
auroch. An infinitely shorter period in which use was made of
copper or its alloy, bronze, seems invariably to have preceded the
use of iron. Only those countries which are the home of the
advanced scientific culture of to-day have yet been regularly sur-
veyed and examined, and in these we find that the Stone, the
Bronze, and the Iron Ages preceded each other as inevitably as
the night and the dawn precede the day. Yet there could no more
have been a universal Bronze or Iron Age than a universal age of
infants or of grown men, for races have been in the past like
individuals, some in infancy, whilst others are in decay. Thus
the use of iron was known three thousand or even four thousand
years ago where civilisation existed ; whilst the races of Australia,
Polynesia, and the Oceanic isles were in their age of stone when
they first came in contact with Europeans ; and in the whole
American continent, the most powerful civilisations had alone
reached the age of bronze.

In tracing the history of iron we should be peculiarly cautious in
accepting remote traditions of a knowledge of its existence as proof
of a knowledge of its manufacture and use. Interesting bodies
called meteorites are continually falling on the earth from space,
and though the vast mass of those which enter our atmosphere
are entirely dissipated by friction, and only reach us imperceptibly
as cosmic dust, yet the fall of hundreds of solid masses has actually

22 IRON.

been witnessed. Those which have thus run the gauntlet reach
us as remnants, seared, scorched, and wasted, but priceless lumps,
which are occasionally composed of almost pure metallic iron.
Now, the fall of a heated mass, crashing apparently with terrific vio-
lence, whether as a bolt from the blue by day, or a hissing, blazing
meteor by night, is a startling event, even when witnessed in these
newspaper days ; and how much more awe-inspiring and miraculous
would it have appeared in the dark ages of superstition ! It was
inevitable that such falls should have attracted notice from the
very earliest periods of human history,1 and the stones, when
recovered, been deemed fit objects of idolatry; like one which
fell in India as recently as August^ 1884, which was decked with
flowers and daily anointed with much ceremonial.2 No metal
except iron ever reaches us in this way direct from the sky, and
this fact alone must have invested it with a singular and mystic
interest, before ever its utility to man was perceived. Thus we
find in an age of copper, ornaments and pieces of meteoric iron
placed on the altars of the Turner Mounds of Ohio. Now, some
of the meteorites of native iron — called siderites, to distinguish
them from the stony meteorites — are of such magnitude that they
could not have failed to excite attention, an exceptionally large
mass in the Argentine Republic being said to contain thirty thou-
sand pounds of solid malleable iron, whilst many others found in
America and Australia are several thousand pounds in weight.
The fact that none of any size have been discovered in countries
of ancient civilisation in the Old World is very like proof that
they were utilised, or not neglected; and if a doubt could be

1 No less than sixteen falls are recorded in Chinese literature prior to
A-D- 333- The earliest fall recorded in Europe happened in Crete, B.C. 1478 ;
a fall noted by Plutarch, B.C. 705; another by Livy, B.C. 654; another,
B.C. 466, is chronicled on the Parian marbles ; and so on.

2 A black conical stone which fell in Phrygia was worshipped as Cybele,
the mother of the gods, by the Phoenicians ; and the Diana of the Ephesians
and a Venus at Cyprus were, there is reason to believe, like the stone of Mecca,
of the same nature.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK. 23

entertained as to whether they existed as abundantly in our
hemisphere, it is disposed of by the fact that seven of the nine
siderites actually seen to fall, fell in the Old World. The most
ancient name for iron, the Egyptian, signifies, in fact, " stone of
heaven," or " stone of the sky," and the Greek name seems to
betoken a not dissimilar derivation. Though meteoric iron is
not readily malleable, owing to the presence of phosphorus, nickel,
and cobalt, the Mexicans, the Indians of La Plata, the Esquimaux,
and other semi-barbarous peoples contrived to use it when they
were totally unacquainted with any means of obtaining iron from
the ore. Some recent analyses of the iron of prehistoric weapons
have disclosed that many contain an appreciable percentage of
nickel, an alloy that is not obtainable by smelting any known
ores, but which is invariably present in siderites. It is, moreover,
actually recorded that sabres and poignards were made in Persia
from a siderite which fell in 1620. It is thus hardly conceivable
that peoples of remote antiquity should have been totally unac-
quainted with the existence of iron long before they had learned
to recognise its earthy-looking ores, or to extract the metal from
them.

Many nations share the tradition that the discovery of the
production of iron from the ore by smelting resulted from forest
fires. Immeasurably the most ancient of these, if we could trust
Chinese chronology, is found in the Book of Historical Documents,
in which Fuh-he, some 3200 years B.C., accidentally smelted iron
out of a brown earth when clearing away forests, and fashioned
spear-heads from it, with which he taught his people to hunt and
fish. The Chinese, however, so exaggerate the antiquity of their
industries, that their dates, previous to Confucius, are quite unre-
liable. We must thus take for what it may be worth the date —
equivalent to B.C. 2000 — of a tribute list, in which words occur
translated as " hard " and " soft iron," in company with " stone "
for making arrow-heads ; and also the story that soon after this
date iron swords superseded those of bronze. Hardly any further

24 IRON.

mention of iron is found in Chinese annals until Leih-Tze, B.C.
400, describes the methods in use for making both iron and steel.
There is, however, no reason to doubt that the industry is at least
as old in China as elsewhere, and that it was practised almost
universally in Asia in prehistoric times. That the Chinese ex-
celled in it may equally be believed, though scarcely any early
specimens of their ironwork are to be seen in Europe, for they
still practise an art unknown elsewhere — that of welding patches
into their thin cast-iron vessels.

The working of iron in India also dates back to a remote
antiquity, though preceded, as in Europe, by ages of stone and
bronze ; for the Aryan colonisation found the indigenous races
already acquainted with its production. The partial Aryan con-
quest of India commenced somewhere about B.C. 1500, and it is
clear from the Rig- Veda that they brought a well-developed iron
industry with them. The celebrated wootz, from which the Da-
mascus blades were probably made, is of unknown antiquity, but
the thirty pounds of iron presented by Porus to Alexander shows
that he possessed iron, or probably steel, which was regarded as
of no ordinary value. Steel, or. iron of a very steely quality,
appears to have been largely exported from the shores of the
Ganges by Western nations, and the sericum ferrum, said by Pliny
to have been the best imported into Rome, sometimes supposed
to be Chinese, was very possibly wootz from India. There are
some iron implements in the British Museum from tumuli at
Wurree Gaon, of unknown antiquity, which have been supposed
by their discoverer to be almost as old as the Aryan conquest.

Though it is abundantly evident that Egypt cannot be ranked
as a country making any extensive use of iron until the last
centuries of its autonomy, the fact that the Egyptians were able
to carve granite and syenite has been regarded as evidence of the
use of iron as far back as about B.C. 3000. The Mexican and
Peruvian civilisations, however, quarried and even carved por-
phyry, greenstone, diorite, basalt, and gabbro on a very exten-

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK. 25

sive scale, and we have the most positive statements that when
discovered they were ignorant of the use of iron. The precise
accounts of their weapons and implements of bronze, jade, and
obsidian, and their thick, quilted, defensive armour, leave no
doubt on this point. No word for " iron " is known to have been
in use, no iron has been discovered in their tombs, and neither
the remains nor the tradition of iromvorking among them. Like
several other peoples of America, they made use of what meteoric
iron they became possessed of, and highly prized it ; but their
quarrying and stoneworking is circumstantially described as
having been effected with wood and stone tools, which latter
were found to cut through even iron with ease. We should find
it difficult to kindle fire with two sticks, or to accomplish many
operations which uncivilised man can readily perform ; and there
is nothing inherently improbable in the account that stone was
carved with still harder stone, shaped for the purpose and wielded
by practised hands. If the Peruvians and Mexicans could carve
basalt and granite without the use of steel, it would be futile to
deny the same skill to the Egyptians; and Mr. Bauermann, a
practised observer, most distinctly states that the inscriptions in
the neighbourhood of the copper and turquoise mines at Wady
Meghara were, up to the last, dressed with flints. The single
plate of hoop iron found forty years since near the mouth of an
air-shaft of the Great Pyramid, and now in the British Museum,
has frequently been cited as evidence of the use of iron during its
building, but the find is so entirely exceptional, the shape of the
iron so useless for any building purpose, and it is so fresh-looking,
that, in spite of its discoverer having certified to its removal from
a position in which he believed it could only have been placed
contemporaneously with the building, we must wait further
evidence before regarding the use of iron in the fourth dynasty,
perhaps some three thousand years B.C., as an established fact
The pyramid has been stripped and ransacked for ages by people
with iron in their hands, and instances abound showing how easy

26 IRON.

it is for objects of metal, such as a broken sword-blade discarded
or lost, to find their way into what appear quite inaccessible posi-
tions. There is nothing else to lead us to believe that iron was in
use until fully a thousand years later ; and cutlery, weapons, and
carpenters' tools were of copper or bronze. Small objects of
iron are said to begin to appear in tombs and on mummies
supposed to date back to B.C. 2000 ; and it seems quite certain
that iron had come into at least partial use by the eighteenth
dynasty — perhaps about B.C. 1500. Weapons are then depicted,
sometimes in red and sometimes in green and in blue, while an
inscription records that thirteen basins of iron came into the
possession of Thothmes III. among the spoils of Ouan. Iron
cramps found in the walls of Heliopolis may be of later date, but
in the nineteenth dynasty the chariot of Rameses II. was of iron,
and his bronzes are found with iron core wires. This brings us
to about the date of the Exodus, and it is significant to find the
opinion expressed by such an authority as Sir John Evans that
the Israelites were then unacquainted with iron. The painting
representing a heap from which flames are issuing, of the date
of Thothmes, with a man on either side working bellows, often
supposed to be a forge, more probably depicts gold or copper
smelting. Bauermann found only hammers and tools of stone
and wood in the mines of Wady Meghara, which were the most
important held by the Egyptians, and representations of metal-
working show stone and copper anvils and hammers, but never
iron. Although Mr. Hartland has reported the existence of
remains of vast ironworks in this neighbourhood, situated on
some hills at a place called Surabit-el-Khadin, it is probable that
the undoubted evidences of great antiquity belonging to the copper
and turquoise mines have been unduly appropriated to these.
The bulk of the objects in iron recovered in Egypt date under
any circumstances from the Roman occupation. Under the
Ptolemies, statues were made of iron, and even its magnetic pro-
perties were understood, for Pliny relates that it was proposed

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK. 27

to make the roof of the burial-vault of Arsinoe of loadstone, so
that her effigy might remain suspended without support.

The use of iron was not confined to the Egyptians in Africa,
for their inscriptions tell that the Ethiopians, who were little
better than savages, possessed iron ; and their troops in the
army of Xerxes wore helmets of iron and bronze. In some
districts of Africa iron occurs in a condition which enables it
to be wrought by the most primitive methods, and its produc-
tion seems all but universal among the uncivilised tribes of the
interior. It is still frequently worked with stone hammers and
anvils, and numerous practices survive which would no doubt well
illustrate the working of iron in the remotest antiquity. As in
ancient Chaldea, iron rings and bracelets are much worn by
many of the native races.

Chaldea may have preceded Egypt in civilisation, and an
early use of iron has been inferred in both instances on analogous
grounds. It has been assumed that engraved seals, thought to
date back to B.C. 1600, were cut with iron or steel gravers. Other-
wise there is no evidence that iron was used even in Babylon,
where bronze was employed on the largest scale, until the time
of Nebuchadnezzar, B.C. 561, when bolts and hangings of gates
and the cramps of the stone bridge across the Euphrates were of
iron. The Chaldeans made the most limited use of the metal,
and little else than rings have been found, which appear to have
been symbolic. It was more extensively used by the Assyrians,
who were skilled metallurgists, and exported iron from Nineveh
to Egypt. We know nothing definite about it earlier than the
inscriptions discovered at Nineveh, which show that under Sarda-
napalus III., about B.C. 900, large quantities of iron were included
in the treasury of princes, as much as five thousand talents having
been captured at one time in Damascus. Though apparently
scarcer than bronze, both this king and Sennacherib covered
the framework of buildings and fortifications with it. The very
interesting discover)' in the palace of Khorsabad, built by Shalma-

28 IRON.

neser in the eighth century B.C., of a hundred and thirty thousand
pounds weight of iron in a room supposed to have been the trea-
sury, shows that iron was stored in rough wedge-shaped ingots,
with holes through them to facilitate transport. These may, like
many of the iron objects brought from Nineveh, belong to the Sas-
sanian period, but the great iron bolt in the British Museum, which
barred one of the bronze gates, must be genuine Assyrian. One
among the conical helmets there is but slightly different from the
form represented in the bas-reliefs of Sennacherib, and though in
the most advanced state of decay, shows that the lines so in-
variably present on them represent bronze fillets. It may be of the
time of the destruction of Nineveh, B.C. 606, and seems to have
been beaten out of one piece, like the morions of the Renais-
sance, and is thus of more difficult work than the Sassanian
helmets, of several pieces riveted together, found in the same
locality. Layard also states that he found innumerable plates
of iron, two or three inches long, shaped like those of the scale
armour in the bas-reh'efs, but the ring armour actually brought
away seems undoubtedly Sassanian. Iron was used, as in other
countries, for strengthening objects of bronze, such as the handles
of shields, the rings and feet of tripods, the legs of couches, etc.

The relative frequency of the use of iron and bronze among
the Hebrews may be gathered from the fact that "iron" occurs
only thirteen times in the Pentateuch, whilst " bronze " is men-
tioned forty-four. The Philistines are stated to have deprived the
Israelites of their smiths, and in the .time of David, B.C. 1000,
iron was in somewhat general use. The iron bedstead of Og
has been interpreted as a bier fashioned of black basalt rock ;
but Ezekiel speaks of an iron pot, in the sixth century B.C., when
such utensils were almost everywhere of bronze. The Chalybes
of Pontus, from whom the Greek and Latin words for "steel" were
derived, appear to have been a race of smiths, and produced
a metal so renowned for weapons, that it is conjectured to have
been steel ; this they exported as tribute to Nineveh. Their part

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK. 29

of Pontus has always been regarded by classic writers as the
mother country of the iron industry, which even now is every-
where carried on by the inhabitants in something like its old
form. Chalybon, a town of Syria, was also the centre of an iron
district, and iron vessels formed part of its tribute to Thothmes III.
The Phosnicians equally claimed the discovery of the art of
working in iron, paid tribute of iron vessels to Egypt, and traded
largely in it, especially with Carthage. They possessed, in
common with other peoples of Asia, wooden statues covered with
iron plates. In Homer we read that the Sidonians were incom-
parable chasers of iron, and a considerable trade in that metal
passed through Tyre down to the time of its destruction. Strabo
states that the town of Cibyra, in Asia Minor, was famous for
chiselled ironwork, and the Scythians appear to have used iron
from very remote times, and are credited with having introduced
it into Greece during the first Theban War. Yet, though the
district thus appears to be the very " black country " of antiquity,
the Massagetae just to the south, according to Herodotus, and
the Sarmatians to the north made no use whatever of iron.

We know nothing in this connection regarding the Medes,
except that they paid a tribute of iron to the Assyrians. The
Persians in the army of Xerxes, in the fifth century B.C., wore iron
as well as bronze scale armour, and the sword-smiths of Meshed
and the Korassan afterwards became world-renowned. The Tura-
nian peoples of Central Asia must also have been great ironworkers,
for we read that the King of Samarkand paid a tribute of iron
mail and locksmiths' work to China as early as B.C. 713.

As it is conceded that iron was in use in Asia in pre-Homeric
times, it is unnecessary to debate whether the evidence as to its
use by the Greeks before Homer's time is or is not conclusive ;
Hesiod, who was almost his contemporary, arms the gods
with iron, but writes as an eye-witness of the passage from the
Bronze to the Iron Age, lamenting the evils that the fatal dis-
covery is destined to inflict on the human race. The Parian

30 IRON.

Chronicle, among many legendary dates, records the first dis-
covery of iron, in Mount Ida, Crete, in the year B.C. 1432, in the
reign of Minos, after the date of Cadmus, Danaus, and the
Amphictyonic League. This shows that a rooted tradition
existed of a time when iron was unknown to Greek civilisation,
and that it was introduced within what may be considered their
historic period. This is confirmed by the important excavations
of Dr. Schliemann at Mycenae, the contemporary of Troy, and at
Hissarlik. Iron was only represented in the latter by decomposed
nodules which he called " sling-bullets," doubtless of iron ore, like
the plummets so commonly found among relics of the mound-
builders in America ; and by a small knife which he assigned to the
Alexandrian period : whilst the peculiar keys and knives found in
the former he considered not to be older than the fifth century B.C.
Excavations in Cyprus also confirm the existence of a copper or
bronze age, when iron was unknown. We glean from Homer
that its use was exceptional, the most remarkable of the objects
mentioned being the mace of Areithous and the arrow of Pan-
darus, both, significantly enough, presents from the gods; the
axletree of Juno's chariot, regarded as a unique object; the
twenty funeral axes of Patroclus ; and the large ingot of Achilles.
Iron seems to have been used, much as in Assyria, for the cores
of objects of bronze, such as tripods, the handles of bronze
shields, and inlays ; but since the Iliad, as handed down, probably
contains the work of various hands and ages, we may not unre-
servedly accept all its technical references. Bronze weapons
had not fallen wholly into disuse in Greece down to B.C. 400,
since Plato states that both bronze and iron were the metals of
war. From the fact that bronze continued to be everywhere in
use for swords and cutlery so long after iron was introduced, it
has been inferred that it could be hardened, and formed into
knife and razor edges of great keenness.1 Whilst others who
had used iron, merely regarded it for its strength, and often

1 Sharp knives from Travancore are in the Indian Museum.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK. 31

overlaid it with bronze and more precious metals, the Greeks
recognised the beauty of the material, so that it came under the
artistic influences already lavished by their sculptors on gold
and bronze. Though no work of Greek art in iron has come
down to us, passages in their literature indicate that they
practised the arts of casting, forging, welding, embossing, polishing,
inlaying, and tempering iron. The discovery of the art of casting
statues in iron is ascribed to Theodorus of Samos, who lived,
according to Aristotle, in the fifth century B.C. Pliny, writing
in the first century A.D., reports that the iron statues of Athamas
and Hercules were still extant in Thebes ; and Pausanias, in the
next century, saw the iron statue of Epaminos. He was also
greatly struck by the representation of the combat of Hercules
with the hydra in iron by Tisagoras, as well as with the heads
of a lion and a wild boar in iron, consecrated to Bacchus at
Pergamos. Numerous statues of cast iron at Athens and Corinth
are mentioned. The discovery of the art of welding, or perhaps
soldering iron, is attributed to Glaucus of Chios, B.C. 690, who is
said by Pausanias to have hardened and softened the metal at
will. One of his works was the openwork iron pedestal of a
large silver crater-shaped vase, given by the Lydian king,
Halyattes, to the temple of Minerva Pronsea at Delphi. This
pedestal was constructed, according to Herodotus, of small
plates of iron, beaten and joined together in so marvellous a
fashion as to be worthily ranked above all the gifts to the temple
at Delphi. It must have been a striking work of art, for
Pausanias again describes it as shaped like a tower, tapering from
the base, each side being formed of bands echeloned above each
other, the highest recurved outwards, and fastened together
neither by rivets nor joints, but by solder only. Hegesander,
again, speaks of it nine hundred years after its original production,
and seems to indicate that it comprised figures and foliage. The
art of polishing iron by the Greeks is referred to by Ezekiel,
B.C. 588, in his denunciation of Tyre; and the magnificent helmet

32 IRON.

executed by Theophilus for Alexander the Great was, according
to Plutarch, polished and shone like silver. The art of hardening
iron by plunging it in cold water while hot, is spoken of by
Homer, and Sophocles compares an obstinate man to iron that
has been so treated. This art was especially practised by the
Corinthians, and is redescribed in Pliny's Natural History.
Iron was extensively used by the Greeks in the construction of
ships, chariots, engines of war, agricultural implements, etc.,
though it never seems to have been used so largely as bronze.
In Sparta, however, especially, there was an iron currency, and
much iron jewellery was worn.

The Romans sooner or later assimilated the arts of the Greeks,
who seem to have left little further to be discovered in the manipu-
lation of iron for the purposes of art. In the reign of Tarquin,
weapons of iron were in partial use, but by a clause in the treaty
with Porsenna, iron was reserved exclusively for agriculture, and re-
remained so down to the second Punic War. In B.C. 530, during the
consulate of Flaminius, iron weapons were reintroduced, and Poly-
bius informs us that short two-edged Spanish swords of excellent
temper were adopted in the army. The rams of ships were fitted
with iron, and an immense use was made of iron chains for engines
of war, ships' cables, and securing prisoners. It is a singular fact,
however, that the Romans did not themselves manufacture iron
until a very late period, but procured it from Etruria, Norica,
Styria, and many other places.

Roman metalwork is probably but a continuation of that of
Greece, with something less of simplicity and refinement, and
more of elaboration ; though the brief appreciation of the intrinsic
beauty of iron by the Greeks is not traceable in Roman or even in
Etruscan art. The excavations at Pompeii have shown that the
uses of iron in A.D. 79 were nearly identical with our own, except
that little artistic use was made of it j but it must be remembered
that the town never had any importance, except that conferred
upon it by the beauty of its situation on the shore of the Gulf of

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK. 33

Naples. Though placed, as it seemed, in one of the most favoured
spots of the earth, it was severely shaken by an earthquake in
A.D. 63, and sixteen years later entirely buried under a layer eighteen
to twenty feet thick of ash. The crest of the sunny and cultivated
mount, under which it had safely nestled from its foundation, was
suddenly blown miles high into the air, descending in a rain of
mud and burning cinder, and barely allowing the inhabitants to
escape with the most portable of their valuables. Very little in
iron would have been removed, for already its position as a baser
metal was defined. Innumerable, however, as are the implements,
tools, etc., disinterred from Pompeii, we cannot fully gauge the
use of iron by the Romans, since the age of palatial buildings
and luxury had not yet reached its zenith. Thus from Pompeii
we might infer the total absence of constructive ironwork in
Roman architecture, yet Professor Aitchison claims that, in the
Baths of Caracalla, a large ceiling was supported on iron girders.

Of the objects actually recovered, those of chief interest to us
are the iron window-bars, exactly like those still used in London
basements ; the iron casement windows with glass panes retained
by movable buttons; and the iron grilles that separated the
arena from the auditorium in the amphitheatre. The entrances
to the forum appear to have been closed with iron gates, but the
spot was rifled in early days, and, with the marbles, they were
perhaps carried away. Grilles, called cancelli, though extensively
used in temples, courts of law, etc., were merely of trellised bars,
like the filling in of the space over the doors of the Pantheon, or
as represented on the Arch of Constantine. An illustration,
in Liger's La Ferronnerie, shows a combination of trellis with a
scale pattern in a door within the portcullis of one of the gates
of Wiesbaden.

The more highly decorated jewel and money chests, three of
which are illustrated by Liger from Pompeii, were combinations
of bronze, wood, and iron, the workmanship of the latter being
poor, as far as can be judged from the rusted remains. The best,

D

34 IRON.

supposed to be the, area in which the quaestor kept the public
money, is sheathed with iron fixed with brass-headed nails, like
those still in use for the purpose in Naples, and lined with copper,
and stood on a marble plinth. The largest measures about three
by two feet and a half, but in Rome they were more considerable,
since it is related that men could hide in them. In Pliny's list
of ironwork, two iron vases and a chiselled table occur among
the consecrated objects of Roman temples, perhaps spoils from
Greece ; though rings, tripods, lamps, and other partly decorative
iron objects are occasionally disinterred in Pompeii. The largest
and most difficult forgings were undoubtedly those required for
offensive engines of war, particularly the beaks of vessels, one of
which, in form of a ram, has been recovered while dredging Genoa
harbour. Iron and steel armour was extensively used, and may
have been richly embossed, though the embossing was more
probably confined to an overlay of bronze or gold.

We glean from Pliny, Strabo, Plutarch, Tacitus, Diodorus, and
Caesar, that the use of iron was general in Europe before ever its
barbarian peoples came in contact with Rome. Thus the Catti
possessed it in great abundance, the Germani threw iron axes
attached to cords, the Cimbri wore iron breastplates and used
large swords and javelins, the Gauls wore iron ring armour,
and the Britons used iron rings and bars as money ; but
history fails to throw any light on its origin or manufacture
among these peoples. It is only through the opening of graves,
and by means of other excavations and accidental discoveries,
that we know that, whether in Gaul, Spain, Germany, Britain, or
Italy itself, there were periods which, though prehistoric, cannot
be regarded as very remote, in which all traces of weapons or
implements of iron are absent. There is nothing to Justify the
assumption that its use anywhere in uncivilised Europe antedates
its use in more civilised Rome. Even Spain, the greatest metalli-
ferous country of antiquity, whose Celtiberian swords of iron were
adopted in the Roman army as early as the second Punic War,

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK. 35

presents the most distinct evidence of a native industry in copper
and silver, and the knowledge of bronze, before the discovery of iron.
The Phocian colony of Marseilles, founded about six hundred
years B.C., possessed iron-mines in Spain, and manufactured
weapons from them, and it was perhaps through this circumstance
that the Gauls became acquainted with its use at a very early
period. When first subjugated by Rome, they excelled in its
working, and the industry was held in such esteem that only free-
men, who formed an important corporate body, were permitted
to exercise it, and these were buried with their implements, as
warriors were buried with their arms. The excavations at
Bibracte revealed a town given over to the working of metal
where all the buildings round the oppidum, or centre, were smithies
or foundries ; in which gold, bronze, iron, and even steel were
manufactured, and the surface-decoration of metals carried to a
point that has hardly been surpassed. The magnitude of the
iron industry is shown in the extent of the mines, which excited
the attention of Caesar, and in the prodigious quantities of slag
used in the Roman roads. Tinned iron vessels, the incoctilia of
Pliny, were imported to Rome from Gaul, Alise being celebrated
for the industry, as well as for coating iron with gold and silver,
so that it was difficult to recognise the original metal. The
beautiful swords discovered at Alise differ remarkably in weight
and ornamentation in every specimen, and are masterpieces of the
smith's art, fashioned by the hammer and smoothed and polished
by grinding. The associated iron scabbards are smooth on one
side, and richly ornamented on the other with dotted and lined,
wavy, and trellised patterns, and even with animals like those
on Gaulish coins. It was on the trappings of their horses and
chariots, however, that the Gauls lavished their choicest metal-
work, and Pliny states that at Bourges, which rivalled Alise,
chariots, at first only plated with tin and silver, came to be entirely
gilt and decorated with beaten gold ornaments. A beautiful iron
mask is a fine example of embossing, but still more remarkable is

36 IRON.

the claim by Liger that he has detected traces of enamel on iron,
and that the Gauls and Britons, as well as the Romans them-
selves, were able to cast in iron. That so high a degree of technical
skill should have existed in a nation whose history is a blank, and
whose swords in the first half of the fifth century B.C. were so soft
and flexible as to lead to their discomfiture by Flaminius, is almost
incredible.

The skill of the Britons in metallurgy was probably little
inferior to that of the Gauls, and slag-heaps with Roman coins
have been found in such widely separated localities as the Forest
of Dean, Sussex, York, and Oxfordshire. Caesar narrates that iron
rings passed as currency in both Gaul and Britain. But the most
surprising, and most likely exaggerated, statement as to the use of
metal in Britain is by Pomponius Mela, who says that the army of
Cassivelaunus included four thousand chariots armed with scythes,
and a cavalry armed with shields, swords, and spears. It appears
that during the Roman occupation large ironworks and an arsenal
were established at Gloucester, and in other towns near to where
ores were smelted.

The metalworking of Gaul no doubt passed to the neighbour-
ing Franks and Goths, and from the similarity of the ornaments
on the swords and scabbards found at La Tene, Tiefenau, and
Hallstadt, its influence must have extended eastward as far as
Tyrol. The fragments of war-chariots and ring armour discovered
at Tiefenau, near Berne, seem actually of Gallic manufacture.

That the arts of Gaul were also carried by the Goths into
Denmark and Scandinavia, in the Iron Age, appears no less likely.
In that new home they were again subject to the influence of
Roman art, which penetrated by peaceful barter via Gotland,
where thousands of Roman and Byzantine silver coins have been
found. Reference to the Danish and Scandinavian handbooks
shows how rapidly classic emblems and forms became assimilated
and transfigured by an intensely superstitious race. The drapery,
laurel wreaths, and inscriptions, which seemed to them meaning-

THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRONWORK. 37

less, became snakes, birds, and quadrupeds, and other symbols of
deep import in pagan hieromancy : grafting on the ancient art a
set of forms and devices which, though constantly modified, were
not departed from until the adoption of Christianity in the
eleventh century.

In those inclement climates, in which it may be supposed man
did not take up his abode until driven to it by overcrowding in
more genial lands, all is so relatively recent that we get a perfect
conception of the development from the Stone into the Bronze and
the Iron Ages, the latter being supposed to hardly antedate the
conquest of Gaul. The custom of depositing the most valuable
possessions and the spoils of war as gifts to the gods, in lonely
bogs, where they became safely enveloped in the preserving folds of
peat, has made Scandinavia and Denmark one vast storehouse of
antiquities. Moreover, the warriors of the Iron period were buried
in great state, with horses and chariots, attendants, weapons,
supplies of utensils and food, and even of large wax candles ; and
we thus ascertain that they were picturesquely clothed and armed,
immensely rich in gold, and skilled in the arts. The damascened
and inlaid objects of iron have been admirably illustrated and
described by Worsaae and Hildebrand, in the handbooks on
Danish and Scandinavian Arts.1 They suffice to show that the
arts of ironworking, gilding, damascening, inlaying with gold,
silver, copper, and tin, chasing, forging chain-mail, practised by
the Gauls until lost in the fall of the Roman empire, were pre-
served and developed by the Goths of the north, who remained
hemmed in and isolated by the sea, while the rest of Europe was
one vast scene of battle and conflagration. Restless and tired of
inactivity, this fierce people, turning at first into mere pirates,
became intoxicated with the spirit of adventure, fanned by the sagas
of their bards, until their whole manhood poured out as the dreaded
Vikings, to devastate and ravage the coasts of Europe and Britain ;
but reintroducing, at the same time, forgotten arts which were des-
tined to influence the course of ironworking throughout Europe.
1 Danish Arts, Figs. 231, 232; Scandinavian Arts> Figs. 104, III.

III.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH.

THE jewellery and weapons of the Angles, Saxons, or Jutes, who
conquered Britain, show that they practised the arts of working
metals to the fullest extent then common to the barbarian peoples
of Western Europe. They were pagans, who beheld perhaps for
the first time such buildings, streets, and cities as they were busy
in ruining ; but scarcely were their conquests becoming consoli-
dated, than St. Augustine, followed by other missionaries from
Rome, appeared upon the scene, and began to re-establish a
Christian Church. The sacred buildings would no doubt be
erected on Roman lines, just as our own missionaries everywhere
build on English models ; even if none of the old Romano-
British churches and buildings could be utilised. The Romans
themselves appreciated ironwork but little, and only used it
when they needed its strength ; this, however, was not the case
further north, as in Gaul, where its artistic working was highly
developed ; nor in Britain. Though barbarian art faded in these
countries on contact with that of Rome, in ironworking the con-
quered excelled their rulers, and Gauls and Britons may well have
produced works under the Romans from which the earliest
mediaeval designs were taken. Unfortunately, though we are con-
versant with the weapons and utensils buried with their owners,
in which classic models were not altogether followed, the iron-
work associated with religion and architecture has perished. A
few examples, believed to be of the Roman period, are preserved
in provincial museums, and have been collected by M. Liger,

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH.

39

from whose work our illustrations are borrowed. Except in a few
instances, these show little Roman influence, while they bear an
unmistakable resemblance to later work, either because geneti-

FIG. c. — Parts of Roman window-frames found at Epinay.

cally connected, or simply that the craft of smithing produces
similar results when like conditions are given. This is con-

FIGS. 2, 3. — Examples of wrought-iron window-guards of the Gallo-Roman period. In the
Museum of Saint-Germain.

spicuously the case with the grilles illustrated above (Figs. 2 and 3),
which show hardly any trace of classic refinement.

The resemblance in the remains of hinges, fasteners, clamps,
etc., is again too close to be merely fortuitous, particularly in the

IRON.

case of the clamps from Saint-Germain (Fig. 7), which, though
of bronze, are evidently from an iron original All these are

FIG. 4. — Iron hasp from Landunum
(Cote-d'Or).

FIG. 5. — Gallic escutcheon of
iron. After M. Liger.

probably very similar to the contemporary British work, and are
of the greatest importance in tracing the development of mediseval

FIG. 6. — Iron clamps. From the Museum of Saint-Germain.

metal work. The destruction of Romano-British ironwork, perhaps
owing to our climate, has unfortunately been such that we are

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 41

unable to find more than a few examples boasting artistic merit
in our own country. Excavations, such as those at Cirencester

FIG. 7.— Gallo-Roman clamps of bronze. From the Museum of Saint-Germain.

and Silchester, have been fruitful. The lock-plate (Fig. 8) and
fire-dogs from Hartlip (Fig. 9) and Colchester (Fig. 10) are

FIG. 8.— Hasp and escutcheon from the Roman Villa at Hartlip.

42 IRON.

valuable, even though their date, like that of the iron candlestick
from the river Witham (Fig. n), is not definitely ascertained.

FIG. 9. — Roman andirons found at
Hartlip, Kent.

FIG. 10. — Roman andirons found at Colchester

The iron folding-chair with bronze ornaments, found with Roman
remains at Ashdon, Essex, is however, a more unquestionable
relic of Roman Britain.

FIG. ii.— Iron" candelabrum with pricket and sockets, found in the river Witham," near
Kirkstead Abbey.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH.

43

Celtic art had found a refuge in Ireland, where it had long been
maturing into the characteristic Irish art, with its refined and easy
yet intricate arabesques, derived from animal rather than from
vegetable forms. Almost coincident with a probable revival of art
under Roman bishops, this art, already established by St. Columba

FIG. 12. — Iron folding-chair with bronze enrichments, found at Ashdon, Essex.

in Scotland, was being introduced into England from the North.
Such busy prelates as the Northumbrian Aidan of Lindisfarne, 635,
and St. Chad, Diuma of Mercia, 656, Finan of Essex, and the
Irish monk Fursey, who greatly contributed to the conversion of
East Anglia, powerfully aided the dispersion of this Irish orna-
ment. Book, bell, and crozier were their weapons, and iron was

44 IRON.

in little request, but the objects of gold and bronze show that the
highest pitch of metallurgical skill had been attained. St Patrick's
bell, riveted and brazed together, presents an object of iron with
an unbroken record of fourteen hundred years. When, later, the
Roman and Irish priesthoods were in process of fusion, some of
the less trammelled richness of Irish art must have been grafted
on to the more formal Italian, and largely contributed to give
English work its special character.

In endeavouring to form an idea of the complex origin of
English art, we cannot leave out of account the fact that the
whole Christian Church was united in the closest bonds in its
early days of struggle. Thus Greek art no doubt reached us in
the form of sacred objects from Byzantium, and, moreover,
Greeks shared in the work of conversion, like Theodore of Tarsus,
Primate of England from 669 to 690, whose labours, undertaken
with a learned companion, gave England its intellectual eminence,
and actively encouraged literature and the formation of libraries.

A close connection with Frankish art must also have been main-
tained, Agilbert, afterwards Bishop of Paris, holding the see of
Dorchester, in Oxfordshire; while later the English Alcuin was
the favoured counsellor of Charlemagne ; and Erigena, an Irish
Scot, was at once the most intimate and familiar friend of Alfred
the Great and of Charles the Bald. England, indeed, at this
time, even gave bishops to remote parts of Christendom, as
Willibrod, Bishop of Utrecht, 693, and Winifred, the Apostle of
Germany and Archbishop of Friesland, 738.

Late in the ninth century a still more important influence
arrived to help to build up English art. The Danish Goths, who
seem to have treasured and developed the arts that had passed
from Gaul, began to settle on, instead of merely ravaging, the
English coasts, and to fuse with the Anglo-Saxons, even, in the
cases of Archbishops Odo and Wulfstan, giving primates to Eng-
land. This people, who built ironclad war-ships, must, according
to the sagas, have been the most expert blacksmiths the world

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 45

has ever seen, their royal princes not disdaining to work as
armourers and smiths. Their weapons were of great beauty, and
their swords, to which they gave names of affection that have been
handed down with their own, almost objects of worship. It is
unlikely that the Anglo-Saxon, who so quickly appropriated the
terrible Danish axe, would have neglected to avail himself of
the presence of such smiths as these, and, with the advent of the
Dane, the yeast of which English ironwork was an outcome, is
complete. Of the early stages of its development we know little,
and perhaps never can hope to know much, but we do know that
English metalwork generally stood in high repute. As the acci-
dent that Greece was the meeting-place of the arts of Assyria,
Egypt, and Asia Minor, in Homeric days, led to the magnificent
Greek development of art ; so the convergence of such dissimilar
styles into a single focus in the hands of the new and vigorous
English race, appears to have led to a departure which bore
important fruit. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts like the Caedmon,
abound in representations of ornament of the most exquisite
character, in which foliage of thirteenth-century type, derived from
Greece, commonly appears, and from . which it would seem that
many architectural details, like the capitals and mouldings of
pillars, were possibly of metal. Mr. Parker is of opinion that
metalwork at this time led the way in art, and was far in advance
of contemporary architecture. Indeed, in the crisply curling
leaves with dotted stems bound together with bands, the twined
and knotted ribbons, scales, and checkered patterns of English
ornament, we seem in presence of reminiscences of a metal
decoration of the richest character. In the time of St. Dunstan,
gables were decorated with finials of simple fleurs-de-lis-like outline,
or foliage, and turrets and cupolas bore weather-cocks of forms
which tradition has handed down intact.

Nothing, however, is more frequently represented than the
door-hinge, wherever any approach to architectural detail is
rendered. These are usually straps, with one, two, or three pairs

46 IRON.

of simple scrolls; but in the Csedmon MS. in the Bodleian, the
types, many of which are figured in Parker's Glossary^ are more
diverse and include leafage. Sometimes a door is represented
with ornamental strengthening pieces, and occasionally in English
manuscripts the entire door is covered with ironwork of great
richness.

No object in iron, moreover, is so frequently preserved as the
hinge, so many examples having probably escaped destruction
because they were closely affixed to wood, and were efficiently
protected from rust by gilding or tinning, and by paint. Their
removal was a tough job, presenting little temptation to the
iconoclast, whilst, being useful as well as ornamental, they were
rescued and applied to new doors when the old woodwork
decayed. The simplest form of metal hinge would be a strap
crooked at one end into a socket, which could work on a pivot
fixed to the door-jamb, but even in the Roman period much

FIG. 13. — Hinge from Roman ruins, Jublains. Now in the Museum at Laval.

more advanced forms were in use. In Fig. 13 we have a strap
of iron clasping the front of the door, then passing to the back

FIG. is,.— From Landunum, near Vertaud.

and bent at the angle to form a socket. This very primitive
arrangement, like the curious type in Fig. 14, in which the

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH.

47

pivot is central and let in the slightly hollowed door-jamb, did
not survive, but the strongly welded hinges with straps clasping
the door both back and front, and the socket fashioned out of
a lump of solid iron on one side known as the Flamand (Figs.
15, 1 6), is even now the best form of hinge in use. The

FIGS. 13, 16. -Found near the source of the Seine.

elaboration of these simple hinge-straps into scrollwork may
have originated in the effort to cramp them over as much of the
door as possible, like a bird's talon ; for Northern pirates were
recommencing their descents on the English coasts, and the church
door might at any moment be thundered at by hordes intent on
pillage and slaughter. One of the most resisting, and therefore
prevalent forms, appears to have been a triple strap, the centre
straight, and the lateral curved like the horns of a crescent. Its
triple form was perhaps regarded as symbolic, but the springing
of all three straps being behind the stonework when the door was
closed, made it particularly difficult to wrench off. The ends of
these straps are often beaten into scrolls and foliage, whose fashion
is an indication of age, which the form alone fails to convey.
Sometimes one or two additional crescents spring from the cen-
tral strap, or are butted on to it ; in fact, for two or three centuries
the ingenuity of the smith was exercised in inventing variations,
in which relative rudeness and plainness afford no guide to age.
A Saxon carving from Selsey, now in Chichester Cathedral, repre-
sents the crescent hinge with split and scrolled ends, but without
the centre strap, and dates back to very early in the eleventh cen-
tury. It does not appear to be derived from the horseshoe,
a form sometimes used in homage to St. Martin, the patron of
wayfarers.

48 IRON.

Two or three of these hinges were used to each door, and
further strength was generally gained by the use of bars and straps
between them. When space permitted, the central strap took an
elaborate form, often a richly scrolled cross. But it is obvious
that, however the planks of a door might be clutched by external
hinges, the woodwork could be burst in, unless bound together
from the inside. Doors must have been so strengthened from an
early date, and in the hands of accomplished smiths, this defensive
plating no doubt assumed an elaborately ornamental character.
When the wood required renewing in later times, this decorative
system of interior armour-plating has sometimes been transferred
to the outside as ornament.

The frequent occurrence of mystic figures, of ruder character
than the ornament with which they are associated, appears to
come from the Danes. An early and grim association in the
popular mind of the Danes with hingework began when their
skins were nailed to the church doors — a custom perpetuated by
stretching dressed skins of scarlet hue over the wood and under
the tinned or gilt ironwork, to enhance its decorative effect. The
Danes scarcely abandoned their superstitions when converted to
Christianity, so readily as the Anglo-Saxon; and church doors
are sometimes found, not only decorated with hingework, but
profusely covered with pagan emblems and signs, perhaps in-
tended, as when the Romans fixed nails on their doors, to dispel
evil. The two most interesting specimens extant are at Stilling-
fleet in Yorkshire (Fig. 17), and Staplehurst in Kent. The former
had two crescent hinges ending in serpents' heads, and an inter-
lacing rope-like strap, together with a Viking's ship, two human
figures, a swastika, and other signs, some of which, with the sails
of the ship, have now disappeared. The door is a rich specimen
of Norman work of about A.D. 1145. The Staplehurst example is
similar, but the arrangement is more confused, perhaps because
the work has been removed from a round and refixed on a
pointed doorway. The hinge is of the crescent type, with diapered

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH.

49

FIG. 17.— Hinges, etc., at Stillingfleet Church.

50 IRON.

surface, but with a disconnected centre strap and reversed crescent
at the end, terminating in the usual types of serpents' heads ; and
the ornaments still comprise a Viking's ship, fishes, a goose, sea-
dragon, snakes, crosses, and other objects of deep import, the
whole recalling the ornament on the golden horns figured by
Worsaae in his handbook on Danish Art. Though the existing
door is now but partially covered, the original door probably
resembled those peculiar to Denmark and Sweden of later date.

A door at Skipwith, not far from Stillingfleet, furnishes a rare
example of a defensive lining of geometric design formed of in-
tersecting circles, with crosses and knotted swastika-like orna-
ments in the interspaces. A still more remarkable geometric
treatment exists in a Romanesque doorway at Hormead, near
Buntingford, and consists of a rich border of small scrolls en-
closing two nearly square panels, filled with geometric ornament
made up of segments of intersecting circles (Fig. 18). The lower
ornament had four dragons and some scrolls in the interspaces,
which disappeared about forty years ago, and above the upper
one is the reminiscence of a Norse sea-dragon. The great north
doors of Durham Cathedral seem to have been entirely covered
with vertical bands of the same ornament produced by the inter-
secting parts of four circles, studded with nails, the marks of which
are distinctly visible through the paint. One of the most ancient
examples of the crescent form of hinge is at Willingale Spain,
near Ongar, in a plain and very early arched doorway, in which
Roman tiles have been used (Fig. 19). The hinges are sturdy, the
junction of the straps is far behind the door-jamb, as in all old
examples in England, and the crescents end in peculiar dog-like
heads, flat and in profile. Between them is a narrow strap,
bordered with a frill of scrolls welded to it, and swelling out
between the scrolls where the nails are driven. Above and below
both hinges were straps of the same kind, arranged in threes,
with the points converging, forming, when perfect, four great
figures like the Government broad arrow. The door is bound

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH.

FIG. 18. —Disused door to Hormead Church.

S2

IRON.

FIG. 19. — Church-door hinge at Willingale Spain, near Ongar, Essex.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 53

round the edges, and the handle encircled with the same frill-
like ornament, and wherever possible the surface of the iron is
enriched with a cross-hatch diaper. A much richer example of
the same type, and only a very little later, is preserved on the
double doors of the north entrance to St Magaret's, Leicester.
Its salient feature is, as at Willingale, the javelin-like straps, set
horizontally and obliquely between the hinges. Where not end-
ing in spear-points, the straps finish in serpents' heads either
beaten in flat profile or modelled on plan, and the whole has been
diapered as at Willingale. This work had been removed from an
older door and applied to the present one in the fourteenth
century, when some later work was added. The fact of so much
of the archaic ironwork having been preserved and utilised in the
fourteenth century shows, as we shall presently see, that the art
of working it into intricate forms had vanished. An aberrant
example exists at Edstaston, Shropshire, where crescents face each
other at both ends of the hinge-straps, with subordinate ornament
recalling other heavenly bodies. Another fine example in which
the binding and strengthening straps are perfect, is preserved at
Hartley, Kent. Here the central hinge-straps pass across three
crescents, the lower of which end in dragons' heads in relief and
on plan, and the rest in various scrolls and fleurs-de-lis. Some of
the diversity may be due to repairs, and the iron has been rear-
ranged. Other well-known examples of early date are at Erith,
Maxstoke, Westcott Barton, Margaret Roding, Compton, Norton,
etc., and later ones in Gloucester and Hereford Cathedrals, com-
prising strengthening pieces with singularly bold trident-shaped
ends, which seem peculiar to the West ; and in Peterborough and
Chichester Cathedrals, which betray slight indications of the
coming leaf-work. Two other interesting examples exist at the
village church of Eastwood, near Rochford, Essex (Fig. 20). In
one we have crescent hinges without a central strap, ending in
scrolls, and diapered in the manner of the earliest examples, faced
by corresponding detached crescents with fish-shaped straps be-

54

IRON.

FIG. 20. — Ironwork at Eastwood Church, near Rochford, Essex.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 55

tween them. These and other straps, as well as the binding to
the door, are frilled with scrolls as at Willingale. The second
door is similar, but the binding has no frilling. As in the case
of Leicester and St. Albans, there are fourteenth-century addi-
tions to the latter, this time in the form of a scroll design with
vine leaves cut out of sheet iron and nailed to the door. The
crescent hinges with detached straps, on the door in the north
aisle of Canterbury Cathedral, are very similar in fashion to those
at Eastwood, and were probably utilised from an older doorway.

Some singular modifications of the crescent hinge, which are
certainly not later than the twelfth century, occur in Norman
church doorways at Kingston Lisle, and its neighbour, Sparsholt.
In the former the reinforcing strap is like a t\vo-headed centipede,
recalling the Eastwood ones ; and in the latter the crescent ends
are continued into scrolls of a quite abnormal type, branching into
a form that we see in Germany at a much later period.

A more typical example is that in the Early Norman doorway
of Haddiscoe (Fig. 21), in which the crescent straps become
almost bent into right angles, and branch profusely into scrolls 'on
both sides. The door is almost completely covered with iron-
work : a large Greek cross, elaborately scrolled, and with the
characteristic open interlaced centre, occupies the middle, and
a similar and much smaller cross is above it. Kenilworth Church
possesses a similar example, but spoilt by restoration ; and there
are less perfect examples, of the same date, at Hales, Ravening-
ham, and several other places, specially in Norfolk and Suffolk.

Reference to ancient manuscripts shows that the crescent was
far from the only type of hinge in use. Another consisted essen-
tially of a stout central stem, branching into scrolls, often mingled
with foliage. Some remarkable examples of these (Fig. 22) were
till recently on the doors of St. Albans Abbey, two of which are
now in the Museum. They each consisted of six much-convoluted
scrolls, springing from a main stem, with zigzag lines over the
surface. In one design a very eccentric and stiff serrated leaf,

IRON.

FIG. 21.— Hinges, etc., to Haddiscoe Church.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH.

57

with incised venation, occurs on either side, and the scrolls end
in rudimentary leaves; and in the other they end in ordinary
dragons' heads in high relief, except two, which are in profile with
distended jaws. The doors on which they occur date, the one
from 1160 and the other about 1190, but their design looks very
ancient, and they may, like so many others, have been utilised
from older doors.

FIG. 22. — Hinge from St. Albans Abbey. Now in the South Kensington Museum.

With the Norman Conquest, the pressing need for defensive
armour-plating to church doors passed away, and the mystic,
almost hieroglyphic, treatment of the hingework did not long
survive in England. In remoter Denmark and Sweden it found
a congenial home, and there hingework is for the most part rude
and uncouth, though greatly elaborated. Several examples have
been figured in the Oeldre Nord Architectur, but it is difficult to
place them in any chronological order, unless dated. Styles and

IRON.

fashions penetrated so slowly in the past, that it is impossible,
without great local knowledge, to predicate the date of any work
from its style, where the style is not indigenous. Thus, until within

FIG. 23. — Ironwork on a door from Vanga Church.

the last fifty years, the embroidery and wood-carving of Iceland
scarcely differed in style from the Bayeux Tapestry ; and the iron-
work of Denmark, outside the capital, underwent little change

FIG. 24. — Door of Faa

60 IRON.

until far into the seventeenth century. None of it was defensive,
nor very early. That on the granite church of Gronboek, in Jut-
land, is slender, and appears to date from the fourteenth century.
The round-headed doors of Skoneberga, in Sweden, are divided
into transverse panels with a border, closely filled with diapered
ornaments, crosses, scrolls, an arcade, and the knotted cord of
Stillingfleet Another Swedish door is divided by fleurs-de-lis
headed straps into six panels, filled with the date 1489 in black
letters, punctuated with men, fish, two-headed eagles, dragons,
etc. Others, like Redsted Church, recall hinges from the south of
France ; whilst others, again, have a more German aspect. Some-
times the treatment is very plain, and the hinges on one of the
most richly carved wooden doorways in Norway are like our most
simple fifteenth-century straps. Examples seem to be very
numerous and varied, and would deserve careful study, reproducing,
perhaps, the spirit of many a design that once existed here, of
which there is now no trace. Our two examples are taken from
Du Chaillu's Viking Age, and represent a door (in the Stockholm
Museum) from Vanga Church, in Ostergotland, and that of
Faabergs Church, nine feet high, of a type that is extremely rare.
Byzantium and Rome having used little iron in architecture,
we look almost in vain for decorative ironwork wherever their
styles prevailed in Europe. Doors to the more imposing
buildings in France and Germany were in bronze, in the Italian
and Greek fashion, or in its substitute, carved wood. Owing to
the influence of such great Englishmen as Boniface, the apostle
of Germany ; Alcuin, the preceptor of Charlemagne ; and Erigena,
the counsellor of Charles the Bald, English fashions may, however,
have prevailed in places, and something like English hinges are
occasionally represented on doors in Frankish missals of their
date. Whether judged from these or from existing specimens,
ironworking, whilst it flourished in England, seems to have been
in France of the simplest kind. It had no place in the great art
revival emanating from Cluny, and no decorative ironwork appears

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 61

in the accounts of the building and furnishing of the Abbey of St.
Denis, by Suger, 1137-1 140. That the earliest designs were derived
from England seems clear, since they are all based on the crescent
form. In Normandy we find the true English form at St. Lo, and
there were remains at Foulebec of some rude work of the Had-
discoe type. But in appropriating our form, they failed to
recognise that its value lay in keeping the springing of the crescent
and central straps at the very base of the hinge, where the junction
would be protected by the door-jamb. Probably on account of
the great difficulty in forging it so, we either find the lateral straps
forming the crescent, stalked far forward from the butt, and the
central strap omitted ; or the latter was detached, and became a
mere ornament. France at this time consisted of seven or eight
independent provinces, differing radically in race and language,
and each possessing its own style of architecture, founded more or
less on existing Gallo-Roman buildings, or on ideas imported from
the East. The distinctions in style are particularly apparent in
the doorways to the churches, and it is impossible, according to
Viollet le Due, to confound a Romanesque doorway from Cham-
pagne, for example, with one from Auvergne or Poitou. Very
little is known of the ironwork of some of these provinces ; but,
as far as we can see, it differed but little, as if it had spread from
a single centre of origin. The hinges and the strengthening
pieces, instead of being divided into single pieces as with us, are
subdivided into numerous small separate pieces fixed to the
doors, and forming a more or less geometric arrangement of small
detached ornaments, in which the crescent predominates. More-
over, these pieces, instead of being solid, as with us, are very
generally forged or pierced into open-work patterns, like lace,
producing a fantastic effect, very foreign to the quality of strength.
That the art remained exotic is shown in the fact that, except the
cross, the forms had no meaning, either as to strength or symbolic
derivation, and neither animal nor even vegetable forms are ever
introduced. No meaning attaches to the complex designs, and

62

IRON.

we can only regard them as sports from an original stock, which
developed no further. On the cathedral doors of Angers, the
pieces are placed in random patterns over the doors. In Cham-
pagne we again meet with the same small detached crescents and
straps, with much piercing, arranged in patterns, with many smaller
scrolls. The finest example is at Pontigny (Fig. 25), but the style
penetrated to the borders, at least, of Burgundy, at Montreal
(Fig. 26), and Chablis ; and to distant Cologne, in the Church

FIG. 25. — From the Abbey Church of Pontigny.

of St. Ursula. Examples, however, are most numerous ni Aqui-
taine, a fairly consolidated kingdom in the eleventh century ; and
especially in the district of Auvergne, where the churches have not
been rebuilt There are examples at Le Puy-en-Velay, St. Julien de
Brionde, Orcival, Auzon, Champagnac, Frugeres-le-Pin, St. George-
les-Alliers, and many villages; all associated with Romanesque
doors, and probably as old as the twelfth century. Outside the
borders of France, in Alsace, we meet with a single special
development. The hingework of the Abbey of St. Jean-des-
Choux, splendidly illustrated by Cesar Daly, in the Revue Generate

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 63

de F Architecture, is of the richest description. It consists of
three bands on each door, each composed of a crescent and a
circle of broad iron with upturned edges, between which an in-
tricate filigree pattern is enclosed ; like contemporary goldsmiths'
work. The horns of the crescents end in a usual Frankish
tongue between two scrolls, while other scrolls with similar ends
are included, not only within the circles, but in the spaces
between them and the crescents. The peculiar twelfth-century
hinge figured by Viollet le Due from Schlestadt, also in Alsace,

FIG. 26. — Hingework at Montreal, Yonne.

is clearly derived from this example, and we find the crescent and
circle reappear near Brunswick a century later.

The rise of laic, as opposed to monastic architecture, which
commenced, according to Viollet le Due, in the Royal Domain,
led, perhaps, to a more simple and restrained treatment of the
hinge. Examples of such are rare, as most churches of im-
portance were rebuilt or greatly altered during the birth of Gothic
architecture. There are some refined crescent hinges, with
detached straps and foliated ends, at St. Andre', Chartres ; in-
teresting from their likeness to those on the door of the north
aisle of the choir at Canterbury Cathedral, which may have

64 IRON.

been inspired by a French architect. From indirect sources, such
as representations on carving, stained glass, etc., we gather that
in France proper — and perhaps we may add in the provinces in
which Byzantine and Oriental architecture was the model — iron-
work was very simple, the strap with diverging scrolls and the
crescent being used indifferently. But towards the end of the
twelfth century a new and beautiful style of work was introduced
in Le Berri and parts of Auvergne, examples of which are figured
by Le Due and others, from Neuvy-Saint-Se'pulcre, Levroux, Le
Puy-en-Velay, Orcival, and Ebreuil. In these we find the hinge-
straps and scrolls no longer scored with a graver or chisel, when
ornamented, but moulded under the hammer ; and this particular
type is characterised by the constant repetition of a tongue
between two unequal scrolls, for every termination, and a tendency
to geometric arrangement. This ornament is commonly met
with in France on carving, stained glass, embroidery, etc., as
on Becket's robes and mitre ; and it is already discernible on
some French hinges in a manuscript (Cottonian MS., "Nero,"
c. iv.) assigned by Parker to about 1125. We have a splendid
example of this work on the north aisle door of Durham Cathedral
(Fig. 27) leading to the cloisters. It so closely resembles the
French hinges in every detail, and is so unlike anything else in
England, that we must regard it as a French production, especially
as it is in detached pieces, not welded together, but merely nailed
separately to the door — a peculiarity never seen in English work,
but common in France ; and which would in this case have
facilitated its transport. The doorway is regarded as dating from
about 1135. The hinges are of the crescent type, with a large
double scroll springing on either side from near the end of the
strap. Between the hinges is a beautiful and uncommon diaper
of large intersecting lozenges, interlacing with a cruciform design
of scroll-work, similar to the scrolls of the hinges, but on a reduced
scale, and producing a rich effect. There is a consensus of
opinion in France that the French were capable of producing this

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH.

FIG. 27.— Ironwork on north door of Durham Cathedral.

66 IRON.

modelled work from quite early in the twelfth century : and its
foliated work, beaten in relief with deeply grooved stems, was
undoubtedly the precursor of the magnificent stamped ironwork
so intimately associated with the vast cathedrals, planned and
erected between 1180 and 1240, in the Royal Domain of France.
With the exception of some hinges at Ripon, this remarkable
specimen appears to have had no influence on English work,
and down to the introduction of pointed architecture, English
ironwork was scarcely influenced by the Norman-French. The
salient features of the English work were strength, indepen-
dence of architectural style, and designs dictated by necessity
or derived from symbols, embellished with ornament taken almost
exclusively from the animal world. It is a significant fact, that
although Norman craftsmen supplanted ours in every other in-
dustry, so that the English names for mason, painter, carpenter,
joiner, plumber, tailor, etc., disappeared, this was not the case
with either the smith, his tools, or the metals he used. The
merely mechanical branch of the craft, the farrier's, is alone
associated with his Norman rival.

It is difficult to say whether grilles of scrolled iron were first
used in English or in French abbeys and cathedrals, for there are
no illustrations implying their use previous to the twelfth century.
Though the term " chancel " implies the presence of a grille, the
simple plan of early churches would have precluded any extensive
use of them. We find, however, that metal grilles of simple
design were used even by the Romans in doorways ; and as rail-
ings in temples, amphitheatres, and public buildings. The earliest
instance of a Christian grille is of pierced bronze, repeating
the Greek cross within a circle, separating the Church of the
Nativity at Bethlehem from the underground crypt or cave, and
may date back to the fourth or sixth century. A bronze grille
of open scale pattern with the Latin cross, exists in the crypt
of Sant Apollinare in Classe, at Ravenna, and is of the sixth or
seventh ; while the fine bronze grilles to the triforium at Aix-la-

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 67

Chapelle date from the ninth century. Some of the doonvays
and windows of St. Mark's, at Venice, are closed by bronze grilles ;
and there are many references to grilles of bronze in early writers,
and even to the existence of silver grilles at Rome and Con-
stantinople; but the divisions in the interior of basilicas were
ordinarily low, and of stone or marble. The fully developed
Norman cathedral, with its shrines and reliquaries of precious
metals, first necessitated an extensive use of grilles to enclose
the choir, and, later on, the added side chapels. The requisite
strength and translucency could best be obtained by the use
of iron.

No earlier type is known than that at Winchester, which dates
probably from 1093. The north of France and Normandy possess
none which can claim so great an antiquity, and only at Le Puy
do we find one ascribed by Le Due to the twelfth century. From
its richer style, dotted as it is all over with punch-marks, and
its greater lightness, it should be the later of the two. Those in
Spain of the same style are situated within a triangle to the north
of Madrid, and cannot, from the date of the buildings, belong
to so early a period ; they were perhaps introduced with French
architecture.

The Winchester example (Fig. 28), though now reduced to a
mere patchwork of fragments against a door in the nave, formerly
protected St. Swithin's shrine, and was fixed so as to exclude the
pilgrims from the choir, south transept, and nave. It is con-
structed of groups of C-shaped scrolls, which are elongated so
as to admit of a grouping by threes, one within the other ; two
bundles of three scrolls are strapped together back to back by-
iron ties, and the interstices are filled with smaller scrolls. The
ends of the C scrolls are forged into an open cinquefoil cluster in
part of the grille, and a trefoil in the remainder. In- the latter
the heavy effect produced by the six or more thicknesses of iron
bound together is overcome by thinning them down and welding,
by which greater transparency is obtained without any sacrifice

68

IRON.

FIG. 28. — The St. Swithin grille, in Winchester Cathedral

of strength. In Spain there is a grille in the north aisle of the
Romanesque Church of San Vicente, at Avila, near Madrid, which

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 69

has the same cinquefoil clustered termination. A door to the
Capilla de Santa Cruz, in the cloister of Pamplona Cathedral,
is a better known example of the same type, and has been
described by Street. It dates from 1212, and is said to have
been made from Moorish chains. Another exists in the so-called
Reja Arabe de la Capilla del Sagrario in the cathedral of Palencia ;
and windows in the fagade of N. Sra del Mercado, at Leon, are
grilled with similar ironwork. A peculiarity which distinguishes
this type of grille, and gives them a singular resemblance to each
other, is the number of whorls into which the scrolls are worked,
and the persistent way in which, whether large or small, their
final terminations form small but complete rings. There can be
no doubt about these and the Winchester grille having a common
source ; notwithstanding that only one of the kind exists in situ in
France, at Le Puy-en-Velay, in Languedoc. This is the grille just
alluded to, on the west side of the cloister, and has been figured
by Viollet le Due and by Gailhabaud. The finest, and probably
latest, specimen of the type, however, has been broken up, and
pieces, especially one of them, converted into a fire screen, have
been figured by many authors. It forms a rich arabesque, like
old Venetian point lace, with the scrolls gathered into thick
masses under the collars. Two superb panels (Fig. 29) have been
acquired by M. le Secq des Tournelles, who exhibited them at the
Trocadero, when they were assigned in the catalogue to the
thirteenth century. He states that they came from the great
Abbey of Ourscamp, in Picardy, ruined in the Revolution; in
which case they may be of the date of its reconstruction, 1201.

A more simple and probably rather later type is seen in the
choir grilles at Lincoln (Fig. 30), which, though disfigured by a
modern cresting with gas-burners, are still the most perfect 01
their kind existing. They are composed of a massive framing
divided into panels of the whole height of the screen, filled in
with a multitude of small C scrolls tied together in pairs. A small
pierced sheet-iron border of quatrefoils forms a base, and, as in all

FIG. 29.— Part of a panel said to be from the Abbey of Ourscarap.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 71

screens of this type, the cresting must have been a simple arrange-
ment of spikes for defence. Canon Venables points out the
identity between them and some of the screens closing the circular
choir of the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, which must have

FIG. 30. — Part of the choir grille in Lincoln Cathedral.

been erected by the crusading monarchs between its capture in
1099 and its recapture by Saladin in 1187. The Lincoln example
may be of similar age, since the twelfth-century choir and eastern
transept, 1186-1200, must have required protection from the

72 IRON.

beginning. The type seems to have been very popular, as a
picture in the Louvre, by Jean Jouvenet, shows that all the
chapels behind the maitre autel at Notre Dame, Paris, were
closed with grilles of this kind ; and another is shown in an old
view of Arras Cathedral, securing the altar and reliquaries. The
destruction of old church grilles in England has been almost com-
plete, not a vestige of any remaining in the Cathedrals of York,
Durham, Chester, Peterborough, Ripon, Lichfield, Norwich,
Worcester, Hereford, Gloucester, Exeter, Manchester, Bristol,
Carlisle, nor in any of the great abbeys or churches. A fragment
shows that St Albans once possessed such grillework, and the
grilles to St. Anselm's Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral are late
survivals of the type. In France the change of fashion under
Louis XV. was even more destructive, and the only choir grilles
of the kind remaining are at St. Germer, near Beauvais ; though
there are fragments preserved from St. Denis, Cluny, and else-
where. Windows at Noyon, Beauvais, and the fortified church
of Be*ziers, are still protected by the same description of grille;
and numerous specimens are to be found in the public and
private museums of France. In the Cathedral of Conques there
is an ancient choir screen somewhat linking this type with that
at Winchester, and remarkable for its formidable spikes.

A third type of early grille is represented in Chichester
Cathedral, and is distinguished by its want of symmetrical
arrangement ; the smith having apparently had licence to diversify
the work as he pleased. These were removed when the tower
was rebuilt, and for a time lost sight of. The grilles are arranged
in two series of panels of small scrolls between upright bars,
divided by a horizontal bar in the centre, the vertical bars of
the lower and upper series not necessarily corresponding. Its
chief peculiarity is that the fashion of the scrolls, particularly
in the upper series, change at every few feet in an irregular
manner, many of the varieties of C, E, S, and other scrolls being
unknown elsewhere, so that it was a perfect storehouse of design.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 73

Fragments of it have been figured ; but the only considerable
drawing is by Mr. Chas. Baker King, of a piece as it stood in a
builder's yard in 1872. 1 Some of the scrolls terminate in rude
stamped rosettes — an obvious foreshadowing of the highly
enriched grilles of the next century. A fine grille of the same
irregular kind, and of early thirteenth-century date, is figured
by Gailhabaud from St. Aventin. A later variety, in which the
frames are filled with scrolls, welded in pairs to short detached
bars with slightly beaten ends, is to be seen in the museum at
Auxerre, and in the Porte du Cimetiere at Cravan, Yonne.

As we reach the thirteenth century, we see the older diverse
elements fusing into one definite style, and, as Romanesque and
Norman pass to transition, the unlimited freedom of the smith is
curtailed. The birth of Gothic architecture, with its scientific
construction and refined ornament, is reflected after a time in
the increasing grace and elegance of the ironwork. The need
for defence had passed away ; Celtic, classic, and Oriental have
merged; and the traces of the Dane are barely discernible with
us in the occasional dragon or grotesque monster. A rich system
of easy-flowing, yet elaborately foliated scrollwork was the first
result. One of the most beautiful examples, and probably the
earliest, is preserved in one of the entrances to Worksop Priory.
It lines the doors, unconnected with the hinges, and completely
covers them with its graceful scrollwork. The leading scrolls
take bold sweeps, forming six nearly complete circles, which are
filled with the lilies and scrolls proceeding from their branching
ends. Each leading scroll bears four twelfth-century iris flowers
of varied forms, increasing in complexity towards the apex ; those
at the summit being as rich as any seen in painted decoration.
This specimen, which is the finest of its kind, influenced a great
deal of work, and there are hinges taken from it as far distant

1 This piece has now been recovered from the hands of a marine store-
dealer, and replaced in the cathedral. The drawing is reproduced in the
Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects for 1891.

FIG. 31. — The hingework at Semperingham Church, LhiojU-s'ilre.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 75

as Burford in Oxfordshire, and Abbey-Dore in Herefordshire.
Another interesting and unique example of early thirteenth-
century design occurs at Wells, in which scrolls spring from the
hinge-straps and branch into small lozenge-shaped leaflets, while
slender wingless birds, attached in pairs with flowers between
them, fringe the straps. It is, of course, impossible to record
in a limited space all the exuberant forms that mark the Transition.
For a time they were dictated by caprice, though the ideas were
probably suggested to the smith, but they soon settled, where
foliage was used, into reproductions of the vine, the emblem of
the Church ; for which its fruit, foliage, and tendrils, its trailing,
climbing, and drooping habit, pre-eminently fitted it. The vine,
already highly conventionalised in Greek and Roman art, had
been incorporated into Byzantine and Romanesque ornament.
The form chiefly taken hold of by the smiths had already
appeared in bronze on the ninth-century doors at San Zeno, in
Verona, modelled in high relief, and is of the type so thoroughly
familiar in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and thirteenth-century
carving. Its use in smithing seems to have undoubtedly arisen
in England, for we find it in the richly worked Early Norman
doorway of Semperingham Church (Fig. 31). The hinges are of
the crescent form, greatly enriched with leafwork, and the door is
bordered with ornaments like the hinges in miniature ; while nine
cruciform pieces of similar detail lend additional strength, and
under the arch the rude figures of a cock on one side, and a man
on the other, are still traceable. The whole effect is clumsy, but
distinctly foreshadows the later work to come. A curious set of
hinges is to be seen on an early thirteenth-century doorway in
Market Deeping Church (Fig. 32). They are slender and of
crescent shape, branching copiously into leaves beaten almost flat
along one edge, and with something of the simple outline of the
peascod. They are associated with rude attempts at bunches of
grapes, and a couple of rude human or fiends' heads lurk among
the foliage. A slightly later example, perhaps derived from it,

IRON.

FIG. 32.— Hinges at Market Deeping Church.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 77

occurs in the north aisle door at Lincoln. It consists of two
strap-hinges, whose scrolls fairly cover the entire door, and form a
centre with only one additional strengthening piece ; the scrolls
branch twice, and all terminate in a central and two recurved
lateral slender leaves. There is quite as beautiful a door at
Caistor, and the remains of another in the church at Hunstanton.
At both Faringdon and Uffington are Early English doors,
covered with rich scrollwork proceeding from their crescent
hinges and strengthening pieces, which have numerous termi-
nations in stamped rosettes ; and the same stamps occur at
Bisham and many other places among work of simpler design.
All these are links in the development of the richly stamped
ironwork produced later in the century by Thomas de Leghtone,
and show that in England the use of stamps crept in gradually,
as soon as the smith began to make use of vegetable forms
involving much repetition.

To produce stamped work, the smith had to strike the hot iron
into prepared dies, as wax is pressed into a seal ; and by this means
designs for ironwork could be executed with the same minute
elaboration as in carving or stained glass. The secret of preparing
and using steel or chilled iron dies was certainly known in
England quite early in the thirteenth century, but a really lavish
use of them appears to have been first made in France, where the
secret must have been jealously kept ; for, notwithstanding the
efforts of the German and other smiths, they never acquired it
When once portions of hinge-straps were moulded in relief, the
invention of stamps could not be far distant ; yet we meet with
nothing leading up to them in France, unless it is in the MS.,
" Nero," c. iv., already mentioned, and believed to date from
about 1125, in which a French type of hinge occurs, consisting
of a bundle of stems bound together and springing into a tuft
of leaves at the end. These may, however, have been beaten
out under the hammer like some of the same form at 'Rouen.
Otherwise, as far as actual specimens go, the work suddenly bursts

78

IRON.

upon us in France in fully developed magnificence, and seems
to have been closely bound up with the earliest development of
the rich pointed architecture of the lie de France. The
typical thirteenth-century vine is generally used, but another
trefoil or cinquefoil vine (as in Fig. 35) often takes its place, and
these are always mingled with rosette-like flowers and some-
times fruit. The lobes of the leaves are sunk, and the divisions
representing the larger veins and the periphery are raised, and
the stems usually grooved. Extensive use was made of it at
Noyon Cathedral, in hingework for the presses, chests, and for the

FIG. 33. — Hinge from Rouen Cathedral.

treasury and sacristy doors. In the hospital is a unique supposed
paschal candlestick formed of a bunch of slender stems and leaves,
charmingly fashioned into a tall open-work shaft, curling over at
the summit in large rosettes and clusters of grapes. At Sens
Cathedral it is used for the sacristy and treasury doors ; and at
Rouen for the sacristy and the north and south transept doors
(Fig. 33). It was used for the great north door at Mantes and
at Vezelay ; and the scrolls of a most graceful grille at Braisne,
near Soissons, terminate in the same leaves and grapes. Though
only a low grille to one of the crypt chapels now remains in the

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 79

\bbeyofSt Denis, stamped work was lavishly used there, accord-
in- to Le Due ; for portions of two magnificent grilles, one almost
a counterpart of our Eleanor grille, were figured by him as existing
in the "magazine" Numerous fragments, both of grilles and

ne of the hinges to the Porte Ste. Anne of Notre Dame, Paris.

hinges, exist in the Carnavalet, Cluny, and private museums,
which are known or surmised to have come from the metropolitan
Cathedral of Notre Dame, and in the former there is a large and
perfect chest covered with hingework of the vine pattern. The
work culminated, however, in the celebrated hinges still existing

8o IRON.

on two out of the three magnificent western portals of the cathe-
dral (Fig. 34). Each of the double doors is hung by three hinges
and two strengthening pieces between, any of them being large
enough to almost entirely cover an ordinary parish church door.

The work is extravagantly rich, representing, it is supposed, the
terrestrial Paradise, with its foliage sheltering innumerable birds,
dragons, and other fantastic beings. The stems are deeply fluted ;
not, as stated by Le Due, composed of bundles of rods welded
together, but with wide and deeply moulded collars or staples,
and richly tufted ends in the French style. The small human
heads, the quatrefoil and sexfoil centres to some of the straps,
and details in the treatment of some of the leaves and rosettes,
are features quite unknown in England in work of this period ;
but, on the other hand, much of the ornament is of the English
vine-leaf and rosette type, and the dragons' heads are those of
our Eleanor grille. Each hinge and strengthening piece is a
separate, independently designed work, complete in itself, with
little reference to its neighbour, neither interlacing nor dovetailing,
nor planned to any general scale. The designs differ so con-
siderably as to somewhat destroy the general symmetry, and,
though consisting of most florid scrollwork, each piece is so
circumscribed within its own rectangular share of space as to
deprive the whole of the freedom so eminently characteristic of
work of this period elsewhere. In spite of these defects, how-
ever, they are the grandest and most colossal work of the
blacksmith of their age, yet, though belonging to the central
church of the Metropolis of France, not the faintest tradition
of their manufacture exists, and their date is therefore unknown.
A nation which began to treasure the names of its artists in
metal from the days of St. Eloi, can but ascribe this extra-
ordinary production in iron to the devil, or to Biscornet, a
Burgundian smith of the sixteenth century. The latter fable
had taken such hold, however, that Mathurin Jousse, writing
in 1627, regrets that Biscornet had not divulged the secret

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 81

of running iron as other fusible metals. No higher tribute
could be paid than this confession by the most noted smith
of the day, that he was unable to conceive that anything so
rich could possibly have been forged, and that he was driven
to suppose it had been cast by some utterly lost process.
Nothing is really known as to where or when they were made,
but several French writers ascribe them to the latter part of the
twelfth century. We are inclined to regard them as not earlier
than about the middle of the thirteenth century.

It is remarkable that almost all this work exists in the He de
France, or in churches designed by architects of the Royal Domain
of Philippe Auguste, and is met with nowhere else in France ; even
the great Cathedrals of Amiens, Chartres, Bourges, Laon, etc.,
being destitute of any stamped work of the kind. It lasted but
a brief period, the excessive extravagance of the magnum opus
having, perhaps, rendered all rivalry impossible. Outside France
it is only met with in a single town on the continent, Liege, where
it was doubtless imported. The fine hingework on the treasury
door of the Cathedral of St. Paul is very similar indeed to the
designs used in England; while the hinges of a press in the
sacristy at St. Jacques (Fig. 35) show the cinquefoil leaf peculiar
to French examples.

The distribution of richly stamped ironwork of the French
type in England is rather remarkable, and the specimens are so
limited in number that they might well have been the work of
a single smith. Through the Eleanor grille we are able to connect
them with Thomas de Leghtone, and from the similarity in the
forms and stamps used we can only conclude that he had been
to France, or had an opportunity of studying some typical piece
of work, particularly the grille at St. Denis, which resembled so
closely the one he made for Westminster Abbey. That Thomas
de Leghtone is rightly identified with Leighton Buzzard is pretty
certain, since the hinges on the parish church door are of the
same work, and the only other church doors similarly decorated

G

82

IRON.

are also in Bedfordshire — >at Eaton Bray and Turvey. Of the
remainder of the fourteen existing specimens of any importance
— for that at Colchester seems to have disappeared somewhat
recently — two are in the Eastern Counties, at Norwich and

FIG. 35, — Press in the Church of St. Jacques at Liege.

Tunstall ; others at Windsor, Oxford, Lichfield, and York, could
have been made in one prolonged tour; the small hinges at
Chester could have been sent by road; and the work at West-
minster involved, as we know, a special journey, for which the

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 83

smith was paid his expenses. All the work has certain charac-
teristics in common : thus it is all formed of easy scrolls,
flowing one from the other, and which rarely complete a second
whorl ; the leaves springing from these grow invariably from
the outer edge of the curve only ; nothing but the vine is used,
and the stamps consist almost solely of the asymmetrical
thirteenth-century leaf, a trefoil, a bunch of grapes, and a few
sizes of rosettes ; the same dragons' heads are introduced in all,
and the collars or fastenings are alike.

Our most magnificent example is now on the inside of the
east doors of St George's Chapel at Windsor, having been removed
from the Chapel of Henry III. The design is a large vesica diaper
filled with flowing scrollwork, profusely embellished with leaves
and rosettes. On the Chapter House doors at York the whole
vine is represented growing from the root, which is prettily treated,
to the top, where it overflows on one of the doors and falls
trailing down on either side. A special feature in these are the
dragons in high relief at the top, which are clearly relics of Danish
tradition, and very charming, when perfect, were the open-work
handles, recalling the basket-hilts of rapiers. On the aumbry
doors at Chester the grapes and dragons' heads are all but
omitted, and the work is so delicate that the smallest leaves
are no larger than the finger-nail. The west doors of Lichfield
Cathedral present an example of the vine design on a grand
scale, the woodwork between the four hinge-straps of each door
being covered by the great scrolls and the foliage proceeding from
them. They have been restored, when, unfortunately, the leaves
were made to spring from both edges of the scrolls, giving the new
work a different character to the old. St. Mary's, Norwich,
presents an example on a lesser scale, and introduces some small
fleurs-de-lis in the design. Merton College, Oxford, possesses some
well-known hinges, distinguished as the only ones of the kind, in
which the old crescentic form is the basis of the design. One of
the two cope-chests in York Cathedral is covered with a bold

84 IRON.

scrollwork of the vine pattern with flowing curves ; beside it is the
other of the same date, presenting a perfect foil, the main lines
being stiff and pointed, and ending in tufted flower-spikes, which
were not produced in dies, but were rounded under the hammer.
As the one is taken from the vine, the other suggests the corn ; the
second element of the sacrament being doubtless represented to
escape monotony, as we observe under similar circumstances at
Sens. The three Bedfordshire doors are much alike and of
inferior interest, but the treatment of the Tunstall door is quite
unique, and seems to have no parallel in France. It consists
of two narrow plain strap-hinges destitute of ornament, while the
entire space between them is occupied by a most elaborate cruci-
form handle-plate, of delicate branching scrolls ending in the
usual leaves and rosettes.1 The most important specimen of all,
however, of which there is a reproduction in the Museum, and
the one by which we are enabled to approximately date the rest,
and to attribute them with certainty to an English smith, is the
Eleanor grille or herse in Westminster Abbey. The records show
that this was made by Thomas of Leghtone, in 1294, at a cost
of ;£i3, a sum equalling ^180 of our money. It consists of
eleven panels resembling hingework, riveted to the face of
a plain rectangular frame, to which the arching or herse form
was given, and surmounted by a row of trident spikes, used
perhaps, as suggested by Mr. J. J. Cole, as prickets. Though
none of the panels are exactly alike, the easy flow of the vine
pattern is apparent in nine, while the stiffer growth of the corn
is conspicuous in two, notwithstanding that the vine-leaf stamp
is used to finish them off. These two panels are further empha-
sised by the particularly small tridents which surmount them.
The rich effect produced by the application of hingework to
grilles is very successful, but it is impossible to tell whether the
idea was borrowed from St. Denis, or vice versa. Tradition has

1 See Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects^ vol. vii.,
iNew Series, pp. 153 and 155.

86 IRON.

unfortunately not preserved the form of the lost grille to the
adjacent tomb of Henry III., made by Henry of Lewes, nor of
the contemporary railings that are recorded to have been set
round the Eleanor crosses.

Except the Eleanor grille (Fig. 36), there is nothing certain as
to the dates of the stamped ironwork in either France or England.
We have ventured to attribute its sudden cessation in the former
country to the over-magnificence of the Notre Dame hinges ; for
fashion in working iron, as in everything else, had its ebbs and flows
from rich to plain ; and that which no emulation could possibly
equal, far less surpass, was let alone, since in France there seems
to have been no attempts to imitate them. This could not have
been the case in England, for the great esteem the work was
held in is shown by so many of the wealthiest establishments
vying with each other to possess it. It must have ended with
the death of Leghtone, who appears to have carried the secret, or
the manipulative skill, with him to the grave. Nor is it possible
to doubt the great influence these designs had on English smith-
ing. Efforts to reproduce them l exist on several chests, such as at
Malpas and Icklingworth, which are profusely covered with similar
leafwork, but hammered without the aid of stamps. Other examples
exist, as at Tinswell, Arborfield, Santon, Filby, etc. ; while yet others,
as St. Peter's, Colchester; Wootton, Northfleet, Hunstanton, etc.,
though existing until recently, have now disappeared.

We have seen that the rich stamped work held no monopoly
either in England or France, and we must glance at the more
unpretending styles of work which accompanied it ; but as in a
condensed history only the stirring events are chronicled, so in our

1 It is obviously possible, on the other hand, that these may, like the Sem-
peringham work, antedate the use of stamps. Their gradual introduction into
English work favours the theory that they were invented here ; and it is also
possible that even Leghtone's work may have preceded the French, and that
he went to France, in which case the French work would be later than
hitherto supposed. But all is unfortunately quite conjectural, owing to the
absence of records in France.

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 87

record, only the more striking waves of fashion can be described.
Of these, perhaps the most noticeable is represented by the rather
massive hinges on the west doors of Lincoln Cathedral, which
cannot be earlier than 1235. In these the crescent type is main-
tained, as in the older ones of Haddiscoe, though in a rather rect-
angular form, and with several scrolls springing off in the old style,
but with their ends and those of the strengthening pieces finished
off into rude flowers and leaves. Somewhat similar, but ruder,
are those from St. Mary's, Rushden, in Northamptonshire. But
the crescent form was obviously on the decline : its strength was no
longer needed, and it was giving place to the simpler strap-hinge
ending in easy scrolls or a cross. Thus we see at Oundle the
strap-hinge preserving only a diminutive crescent; and at Spalding
one with a very small crescent at the base, but reversed, and
an even smaller one halfway, with scrolls at the end. Thus
lingeringly the crescent drops out, until, in the fourteenth century,
it is almost forgotten. The rich Lincolnshire work at Deeping,
Lincoln, and Caistor, is much simpler elsewhere, branch after
branch of the ornament being apparently shed until nothing
remained but the mere strap with foliated end. A coarser type,
with shorter and much broader-bladed leaves, of the peascod
character, is found in the south, great numbers of examples still
existing. The narrow-leaved type seems to have developed into
the strap with cross end, and the broad leaf became a strap with
a peculiarly broad-bladed and vigorous kind of lily-like end. It
is impossible to describe all the varieties to be seen on church
doors and parish chests. It must be remembered that at all
periods, if no skilled smith was at hand, the simplest forms were
put up with, very rich Norman doorways being often associated
with plain iron straps. On the other hand, a gifted smith might
often for a time revive richer styles, that were generally obsolete ;
while changes of fashion would penetrate to the remoter counties
in mediaeval times with extreme slowness.

Precisely the same changes took place in France. The

88 IRON.

thirteenth-century hinges at Amiens, Troyes, and other cathedrals,
and at Laon, which possessed no stamped iron, might be English,
except that the forms are different and, on the whole, perhaps, of
somewhat better design.

The history of ironworking in Germany begins at a later date
than in either England or France. It would seem that, as heirs
to the Holy Roman Empire, Germans cared nothing for decorative
iron while Romanesque architecture survived. Bronze was their
metal, and if we find a few doors with scrolled iron hinges, like
St. Ursula's, at Cologne, the designs are taken from across the
Rhine. Yet even in the twelfth century we have indications of
the national love for iron, which afterwards became so very pro-
nounced. The magnificent hinges of Alsace, already described,
were, it would seem, a perfectly spontaneous development, and
the same form recurs on the tower door at Kaisheim, near
Donauworth. The twelfth-century hinges to the door between
the castle and St. Magnus' Church at Brunswick, present another
original treatment. Each consists of eight scrolls springing from
a central stem and ending in a single flattened cinquefoil leaf. The
iron is deeply channelled, and a peculiar character is given by
the introduction of flat discs along the stem at the springing of
the scrolls. There are also in Austria, at the Liebfrauenkirche in
Wiener Neustadt, and in Friesach and Piesting, Romanesque
doors covered with iron in the Danish fashion. These essays,
however, led to nothing, and for the time the art went no further.

By the end of the thirteenth century pointed architecture was
established in Germany, and the new style demanded, in its early
developments at least, the use of decorative ironwork. The
designs introduced were naturally those associated with the grandest
expressions of Gothic ironwork in France, and were taken from
the rich stamped work of St. Denis or Notre Dame. One of the
most remarkable specimens is the grille closing the cathedral
sacristy at Hildesheim. It is fashioned, as in French examples,
of vertical bars filled in with C scrolls, ending in leaves and

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 89

rosettes. The leaves and rosettes are, from their shapes, most
obviously intended to represent the stamped leaves of the He de
France, but they are beaten out thin and flat, and the sunk parts
pierced right through, giving the work an entirely novel and
rather Oriental effect. It is just the sort of rendering we might
get from a smith, set to work from a drawing without sections,
and unacquainted with the process of stamping. These pierced
ornaments, produced apparently through a mistaken interpretation
of the original drawing, were repeatedly copied by later smiths,
and were the basis of one of the most persistent and charming
features of later German smithing. We shall see, in fact, that the
German school was entirely founded on an imperfect rendering of
French types, owing chiefly to ignorance of the art of pressing hot
iron into dies, as practised in England and France. Its rapid
development was due to the efforts made in Germany to carry
Gothic architecture beyond the limits of restraint and refinement
imposed in France — efforts which led almost immediately to a
general deterioration, betrayed by a quite peculiar mannerism in
the ironwork. Their constant recourse to natural foliage in archi-
tectural ornament, no doubt led to foliated forms being made the
basis of smithing throughout the Gothic period, though, down to
the fifteenth century, the smith seldom went outside conven-
tionalised forms of the vine for his models.

The number of examples belonging to the first and second
periods of Gothic architecture in Germany — roughly from 1225
to *375 — appears, unfortunately, to be limited, for though many
portfolios of illustrations of German ironwork have been published,
they deal almost exclusively with the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries. One of the grandest among them is found on the
doors of St Elizabeth's Church, at Marburg, near Cassel. • These
date from 1283, and King regarded the ironwork as contemporary.
The hinges are broad tridents, in form somewhat like those of
Lincoln, and certainly borrowed from the crescent ; the upper
ones have a fantastic central strap and three points ending in

90 IRON.

smaller tridents, bearing altogether over fifty cinquefoil vine leaves
of the French outline, seen in Fig. 35, from Liege ; while the lower,
of simpler form, carry about forty vine leaves of. the more tra-
ditional thirteenth-century outline. A flowing border of the same
is made to follow the outer edges of the doors, while a magnifi-
cently interlaced quadrupled cross fills the space between — the
precursor, perhaps, of the interlaced work used so largely later on.
In the hinges at Magdeburg we have another of the thirteenth-
century renderings of the vine occasionally seen in France, in
which the leaves are ovate, narrow, and deeply indented. The
design is the strap with branching scrolls, the inner of which are
prolonged on both hinges, so as to interlace over the centre of
the door. A singular development is shown in the hinges of
Schmalkalden, near Coburg, in which all likeness to the original
vine is lost, the leaves, so far as they are visible under the great
round-headed nails which transfix them, being merely cleft at the
point ; but to compensate for this, and to identify the plant,
we have very realistic tendrils. Other variations of the vine are
to be seen at Miihlhausen, Eschwege, St. Severin at Erfurt, etc. ;
and a remarkably elongated and deeply cleft one at Treysa, near
Marburg, became later on, in the Church of St. Martin, at Bile,
exaggerated till it bears the likeness of a wheat-ear. The vine,
as used in smithing, is indeed a Protean plant, and were it not
that the fruit and tendrils are so often introduced, it would at
times pass beyond our powers of recognition. Side by side with
the foliated hinges were others of plainer scrollwork, and scrolls
and fleurs-de-lis were often mingled in the designs with the
foliage, which in time developed new characters.

The close of the thirteenth century marks, roughly speaking,
the end of a period which we may properly define as that of
genuine blacksmithing. The texture of iron, it is well known,
becomes loosened by heat, and, as it softens, bars will droop and
curl into scrolls under a relatively slight impetus, this property
rendering it so facile a metal in the hands of the smith. When

THE AGE OF THE BLACKSMITH. 91

hot it can be welded, separate pieces adhering firmly together if
hammered or pressed, and the rich and intricate effects we have
seen were mainly produced by this means. The welding point
is the highest degree of heat the iron will bear without burning
and disintegrating, and its management requires skill and
dexterity. The distinction between the blacksmith's art and any
other is that, whatever he intends to do, he must do quickly. He
must strike while the iron is hot, for as the fierce glow fades into
dull red, its plasticity is departing. The quick and decisive
treatment of iron while it is transiently in a plastic condition
must be regarded as the true art of the blacksmith, and of
necessity leads to vigorous and masculine effects. The tools of
the smithy proper consist merely of hammer and anvil, forge and
bellows, tongs and chisels. In the work we have described,
small objects such as hinges, however complicated in design,
were nearly always welded into a single piece, while in grilles the
several pieces were fixed by driving holes through the heated
iron and riveting them together, or more commonly by binding
the pieces round with hot wisps of iron called collars.

In appreciating this old work, we must not forget that, while
the smith of to-day can buy his iron ready rolled into a thousand
different sections, he had then to beat out every section with
his own hand. Hence old ironwork possesses interest and
attractions which few modern examples can equal, for scarcely
any piece of old iron fails to please. A great deal of the modern
ironwork introduced into cathedrals and churches has been
designed with little reference to the properties which should
determine its artistic treatment, and will, as our taste improves,
probably be swept away ; but even where some happily surviving
antiquity has been copied, it needs no antiquary or specialist to
become at once conscious which is the old and which the new.
The explanation is simply that the olden-time smith cut a piece
from his shingled bar which he judged by the eye would beat
out into a rod of the required length, or curl into a scroll of the

92 IRON.

desired form. More or less sufficed for him, and by his method
of work he produced an irregularity and play in even the most
monotonous designs, which is artistically charming to us, but
which was possibly a source of reproach to himself. The designs
are so practical, yet so rude, that they were obviously produced
by the smith who executed the work. Even if directed by a
designer, the smith's capacity must have been thoroughly gauged,
and the technical details left well within his powers. It appears
that, when no specially skilled smith was available, only the
simplest forms were used, the capacity of the workers controlling
the demand. When some unusually important occasion demanded
a particularly fine work, it was not the man with local claims who
obtained the commission, but the best man, and we find smiths
fetched from a distance, as from Leighton or Lewes, and
maintained in London and elsewhere, until the work was
accomplished.

IV.
THE TRANSITION.

THE fourteenth century marks a transition period in the art
of the blacksmith. The " Haupt Period," as the Germans would
call it, has passed, and the smith no longer relies exclusively
on hammer and heat to produce his effects. He begins to deal
with iron while cold and stubborn, the results of the two treat-
ments, unless the metal used is too thin to offer resistance, being
as opposite as can be. File and saw, vice and drill, are called
to his aid to shape the pieces, and they are bolted or riveted
together without heat, or tenoned and morticed as in joinery.
Sheet iron pierced into tracery, or cut and hammered into the
shapes of leaves and flowers, begins to enter into the compositions,
and the art of the blacksmith branches into those of the locksmith
and armourer.

In order to understand how this change came about, we must
now turn our attention to regions we have thus far neglected.
The Papal motto, " Ex Oriente lux," adopted when the Crusades
were mooted, was prophetic of the higher civilisation and luxury
which was soon to reach Western Europe from the East. In
the main, art and design had always passed from East to West,
but in the older smithing, Eastern influence, by the time it reached
our remote island, was scarcely perceptible. As years rolled on,
and the Crusades brought the princes of the West into familiar
contact with Eastern magnificence, travel bore its fruit, and the
refinements of the Eastern became the necessities of the Western

94 IRON.

civilisation. Oriental art and architecture were the sparks which
kindled our magnificent Gothic architecture. The influence was
powerful both for good and bad. From the East the smith
learnt to use the file and saw, and the sumptuous arts of graving,
inlaying with gold and silver, damascening and embossing; but
from the East also came the wave of fashion which required the
smith to produce in iron the wood lattice and the pierced marble
window, forms proper to wood and stone, by which his art
declined.

The East had been celebrated for its skill in working iron
from the earliest times, chiefly for the manufacture of weapons
and armour. The coats of mail were made of iron pliable as
thread, and the armour was damascened and ornamented with
gold, silver, and engraving. To such an extent was the richer
armour produced, that the Khalif of Bagdad is stated to have
exhibited ten thousand suits of gilded mail to the astonished
ambassadors from Rome; but for an account of this Eastern
armour the handbooks on the Arts of Persia, India, etc., must be
consulted. If little use was made of iron in architecture, on the
other hand, except as dowels and girders, it was from no lack
of skill. India, indeed, presents us with the most extraordinary
forging of antiquity, qf a magnitude never attempted even in
England until the introduction of steam. This, the far-famed
iron pillar of Delhi, standing in the centre of the court of the
Kutb Mosque, is a solid shaft of malleable iron, twenty-three feet
eight inches in height, with a diameter of over sixteen inches at
the base, and fully twelve inches at the capital. Fergusson assigns
it to about A.D. 400, and from its vast antiquity it has become
the object of many traditions and much veneration. The shaft,
except for a foot or two near the base, is smooth and round, the
contact of the greasy bodies of the Hindoos who make pilgrimages
to it, and whose custom is to climb it, having probably preserved
it from rust during the fifteen centuries it has been exposed to
the air. The cast in the Indian section of the Museum shows

THE TRANSITION. 95

that the capital, which is three feet and a half high, and the
inscriptions upon it, are still as perfect and sharp as when first
carved.

It was, however, the Saracenic art and architecture which
penetrated to Europe from Western Asia, and, following the trade
routes, appeared in Northern Italy. All architectural traditions
had been derived previously from the ruins of the Roman Empire,
and neither in Roman architecture nor in its descendants,
Romanesque and Byzantine, was there much scope for the
employment of decorative ironwork. In the Christian art revival,
the traditional love of costly materials was, moreover, maintained,
and for rails and screens we find, instead of iron, the richest
marbles and bronze and even silver employed, in St. Sophia and
St. Peter's. The use of iron as a decorative architectural feature,
in fact, appears to have originated in England, and to have spread
from England to Western Europe and Spain. But it was never
admitted into Italy — a sun whose rays deigned to illumine the
outer world, but was not itself receptive.

The Venetian Republic, however, a trading organisation, with
many points of resemblance to our East India Company, was,
fortunately for Italian art, what the leaves are to the tree. Freely
exposed to the outer light and air, it performed the functions
of absorption, transpiration, and assimilation, by which the tissue
of the parent art stem was nourished and renewed. But Venice,
from its position, was far more open to the influence of the East
than of the West, and thus, though the first use of decorative
ironwork to be found in Italy is on Venetian soil, its forms are
wholly independent of either English or French influence. The
first attempts consist of a few grilles, copies (for the sake of strength)
in iron of the pierced marble so extensively used in Saracenic
architecture; and, emanating from our instructors in geometry,
they are naturally geometric in design.

Examples of these exist at St Anastasia's, in Verona, and St.
Mark's, Venice, which are probably as old as the thirteenth

96 IRON.

century. They are made of an iron framework, grooved to
receive pierced sheet-iron panels, and were evidently produced
with great labour. Also they appear to have been soon aban-
doned, and the geometric design arrived at by the simpler process
of riveting straps of iron together. They were probably gilded,
and we occasionally see them thus represented in paintings by
old Italian masters. Still later the geometric treatment was less
rigidly adhered to, and Mr. Parker, of Oxford, has a sketch from
Verona, in which quaint animals and quatrefoil ornaments are
cut out of the sheet metal and riveted between the geometric
lattice-work. By an easy transition, armorial badges and cyphers
took the place of meaningless ornament, and we have an example
in the Palace of Perugia, made of broad flat straps riveted so as
to form rectangular spaces, in which are rampant griffins and
coroneted A's within circles. It is inscribed, •' Gull. Rufinelli
me fecit, 1338."

It is probable enough that the use of the circle in grilles,
very likely taken from the roundel glazing of St. Mark's, sug-
gested the far more decorative quatrefoil — a form in singular
harmony with the Italian pointed architecture, by that time at its
best Grilles of circles and of quatrefoils are, indeed, to be seen
in juxtaposition at San Miniato, Florence. The happy effect of
those constructed of quatrefoils was immediately recognised, and
for an appreciable period no other design seems to have been
used.

The best known examples of this work are probably the grilles
to the Delia Scala tombs in Verona, The richest of the many
designs is round a tomb which must have been erected soon
after 1375,* but the outer enclosing grille may date back to the
very end of the thirteenth century. The evolution of the quatre-
foil grilles from the earlier plate grilles is clearly shown in these
Delia Scala railings, part of which are made from plate metal.
We can well imagine the surprise so inferior a construction would

1 One of the grilles has been attributed to Bovinio di Campilione, 1380.

THE TRANSITION. 97

occasion in the minds of travelled English or French men, and we
can hardly wonder to find it soon abandoned, and the remainder
forged from bars in the English and French fashion. The
plainest of the designs is merely the quatrefoil tied together, with
a sharp spike welded in where the segments join. In the richer
designs the spikes and the loose ends of the collars or ties are
beaten into leaves, and the ladder, the badge of the Delia Scala,
is introduced, either in an octagon or a circle, in the centre of
each quatrefoil. There is sometimes an additional border of
leaves, and a leafy cresting with arching tridents for protection.
Grilles of this type were soon associated with the magnificent
Cathedrals of Siena, Orvieto, and other buildings erected towards
the close of the thirteenth century. They are formed in a
massive-looking and richly moulded framing, really built up of
plates of iron, dividing the grille into rectangular panels filled
with the quatrefoil ornament. There is usually a rich frieze of
foliage and armorial bearings of sheet iron, commonly surmounted
by a defensive and foliated cresting. The earliest dated example
is at Orvieto, inscribed, " Conte Lelli de Senis me fecit, Ann.
1337." In this there are but four quite simple quatrefoils in
each panel, and the frieze is of ivy or vine leaves with a pierced
shield of arms, the introduction of the latter being a feature
almost peculiar to Italian ironwork at this time. The cresting is
of slender fleurs-de-lis studded with spikes and lofty finials, with
two tiers of very elegant cusped foliage surmounting the vertical
divisions of the framework. The grille at La Santa Trinita,
Florence, is an adaptation of this with much larger panels, con-
taining thirty quatrefoils instead of four, and without the cresting.
The vine leaves in the frieze are more numerous and cut up, and
the quatrefoils have spikes and little leaves where the segments join.
This is again almost reproduced in one of the grilles at Prato.
Another adaptation from the same original is in the Palazzo
Publico at Siena, in which the interspaces between the original
nine quatrefoils of each panel are filled with subsidiary pointed

H

98

IRON.

quatrefoils. The cresting is of straight spikes intermixed with
an occasional flower-spike, like an agave or yucca bloom, and
a lotus-like finial over the vertical bars of the framing. Under-
neath is a frieze of the richest beaten foliage, introducing shields
and the wolf of Rome in the panels (Fig. 37). The filling of these
interspaces may have been suggested by the grille to the
Campo Santo of Santa Croce, at Florence, in which the quatrefoils

FIG. 37. — Frieze of the grille in the Palazzo Publico, Siena.

are placed within circles. There is a further development of this
work, much later in date, in the cathedral at Perugia. These
quatrefoil grilles remained in vogue certainly down to the
beginning of the sixteenth century, and were revived in the
seventeenth and eighteenth : susceptible of an endless variety
of treatment, they still retained the main features in common.
Still richer developments of the same design were carried out in

THE TRANSITION. 99

bronze, or with carved and inlaid marble framing and bronze
panels.

Perhaps the most interesting of the quatrefoil grilles is the
elaborate and perfect specimen at Santa Croce, above mentioned,
dated 1371. It is divided into rectangular panels, like all the
rest, by a massive-looking framework, each panel containing six
quatrefoils within circles, and with the subsidiary ornament in the
interspaces. The meetings of all the segments are beaten into
leaves, and a simple cornice, with a dedication to the Virgin in
black letter, takes the place of the richer frieze, and there is no
defensive cresting. The remarkable departure in this grille, how-
ever, is the gate, which is a reproduction in iron of a richly traceried
Italian Gothic window of the fourteenth century, copied perhaps
from Or San Michele. Most of the iron used has been punched
into the forms of caps, bases, and mouldings by tools, as well as
chiselled and filed, and the twisted pillars are ingeniously com-
posed of several pieces of moulded iron. The tracery is quite out
of scale with the quatrefoil work, which is rendered coarse by
comparison, and, whether from this circumstance or the great
difficulties in producing it, the fashion did not spread in Italy.
Such an essay at a purely architectural treatment of iron was, per-
haps, the inevitable outcome of the richly moulded and built-up
frames and transomes of the Orvieto grille. But it must be
remembered that Italian ironwork, from its very inception, partook
more of the character of joinery and carving in iron than of
smithing, and it was not till the seventeenth century that it eman-
cipated itself from its old traditions.

The Italian style stole imperceptibly into France, its fame,
perhaps, inciting French ironworkers long before they were actu-
ally aware of the peculiarities of its construction. On the other
hand, geometric design, the basis of Gothic architecture, was
already beginning to be applied to ironwork in France, and the
Italian work, perhaps, merely gave it an impulse.

The choir aisle gates from Rouen Cathedral, now in the Rouen

ioo IRON.

Museum, show one of its earliest introductions in grillework.
Each door is formed of half-round iron bars crossing diagonally,
with other bars intersecting the spaces at right angles, and stamped
at the ends into leafy terminations. Every triangle thus formed
contains a looped scroll, finishing alternately in stamped heads
and rosettes, with a simple tracery in the eye of the loop.
There is some apparently later work at the bottom of the doors,
but the trellis design at least must be late thirteenth or early four-
teenth century work, presenting, perhaps, the earliest example
anywhere of flat iron tracery applied to grilles. This introduc-
tion of tracery and sheet iron eased the smith, and had most
important results. Henceforth richer effects were sought and
obtained with less labour, and the work was pieced together by
rivets, instead of by welds and collars, which required heat. A
small grille formerly in St. Denis, figured by Le Due, affords an
interesting instance of the new construction. The sharply bent
scrolls of which it is composed have their ends beaten thin and
cut up into quatrefoil leaves, and are riveted to the upright bars,
which are themselves faced with sheet-iron strips, on which a
slight ornament is punched. These changes in design and con-
struction, slight as they appear, herald an entire revolution in the
craft of the smith, who, no longer relying exclusively on the forge
and hammer, has to adopt the tools of the armourer and lock-
smith. The irresistible set in the direction of architectural and
geometric design is next exemplified in a fourteenth-century grille
in the cloister of Le Puy-en-Velay. It is composed of vertical
bars, hammered at the ends into caps and bases, and with sheet-
iron crockets and terminals. The caps and bases are produced
by the hammer without the use of the file, and the sheet ironwork
is still welded, and not riveted — processes soon afterwards aban-
doned. The same cathedral possesses a beautiful geometric grille
of a richly diapered design. During the fourteenth century grilles
made of small bars threaded vertically or diagonally through each
other were usual in France. These are sometimes enriched with

THE TRANSITION. 101

pierced plates and border?, as in a window grille in St. Etienne,
Dijon. Geometric design is the basis of these, and of such scroll-
work grilles as the one in Notre Dame, Paris, surmounted by
prickets, or one figured by Le Due from Rouen. The choir
gates of the Collegiate Church at St Quentin are partly filled
with looped scrolls, but also introduce panels of open quatrefoil
work and of sheet iron. Designs of quatrefoils seem to have been
greatly appreciated, and were apparently imported from Italy;
many instances are to be found of grilles formed of small quatre-
foils in squares, or in circles, or circles within squares. Some
have the cusps shaped into points more or less enriched, and one
remarkable window grille belonging to M. le Secq des Tournelles
has the bows of the quatrefoils united by passing through jesters'
bells. The beautiful screen at Langeac, in which the quatrefoils
are arranged diagonally, so that there are no considerable inter-
spaces, is a superb example of fourteenth-century ironwork ; and
it is possible that an Italian look was intentionally given to the
framing by twisting the bars and decorating them with rosettes,
while the Italian cresting is rendered by spikes growing through
tulip-shaped flowers, with shields on the main standards.

As we have seen, examples of rich window grilles, though so
rare with us, abound in France. Two splendid late fourteenth-
century specimens are figured by Chabot from Troyes Cathedral,
consisting of bars rendered more defensive by their decoration of
scrolls and hooks, and spinous leaves. Another finely decorative
double-window grille, also from Troyes, is overlaid with pierced
bands, battlements, and rosettes, and possesses a richly crocketed
top. A fine fifteenth-century grille of trelliswork, almost hidden
by the beaten foliage, tracery, and pinnacles which enrich it, has
been figured from Nancy. Numerous window grilles of more
severe type also exist, with the ends of their vertical bars beaten
either into tufts of spiny leaves, fleurs-de-lis, bunches of lilies, or
tridents, and the intersections of the vertical and horizontal bars
often concealed by flowers or rosettes. One, said to be from the

102

IRON.

FIG. •$.— Grille belonging to M. Le Secq des Tournelles.

THE TRANSITION. 103

bouse of Jacques Cceur, at Bourges (Fig. 38), has the vertical
bars opened out to form the outline of a heart.

The far-off influence, having passed like a wave over France,
profoundly modifying its ironwork during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, in due course also reached England, which,
from its geographical position, has borrowed its art-impulses
from France, ever since France became a consolidated nation.
The new mode did not, however, embrace the decoration of
doors with ironwork, and this chief branch of English smithing
consequently fell out of fashion. We meet very rarely with
elaborately decorated hingework of the old English style in
the fourteenth century, and then only in comparatively remote
places. Interesting examples of such exist at Cley Church, in
Norfolk ; and others at Hunstanton, probably by the same hand,
were figured by Digby Wyatt, but have now disappeared. The
fashionable geometric treatment was chiefly applicable to grilles,
but our churches have been so entirely swept out and gutted
of everything not actually structural, that it is impossible to tell
to how great an extent these had been introduced. Hardly any
examples remain, except in cathedrals, and modern restoration
has removed much from them that even Puritanism had spared.
The oldest indications of geometric grilles in this country are
the iron supports to the leaded windows in Canterbury Cathedral.
Their forms are varied, and dictated by the designs of the
windows which they follow. Their presence is no doubt due
to the French architect, William of Sens (who was killed by a fall
from the scaffolding in 1179), since we usually used plain stan-
chion bars for the purpose. In France the use of such guards was
extensive, as at Chartres, Le Mans, etc., but they did not always
absolutely follow the lead lines, as we see in the celebrated grille
to the rose window of Notre Dame de Dijon. These, perhaps,
belong rather to the domain of constructive ironwork, which was
in increasing use, as proved by the accounts of Notre Dame and
the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. Our earliest decorative geometric

104 IRON.

grille protects the shrine of St. Alban, and is of the time of
Edward I. It is divided into numerous rectangular panels, filled
with a network of small half-round bars, only half an inch in
diameter, which cross each other diagonally and at right angles
in alternate panels, and are pinned together at every intersection.
A border of sheet iron pierced in quatrefoils forms an appropriate
cornice. It is interesting as the only example of a trellis
grille in England, and seems to be earlier than any in France,
and long precedes any of the German grilles that resemble it ;
but in which the bars are threaded instead of pinned. We are
also fortunate in still possessing two of the quatrefoil grilles so
frequent in France. A pair of gates remain in Chichester
Cathedral of late fourteenth or early fifteenth century work, made
of bars neatly halved where they intersect, forming a number of
small square panels, each framing a plain quatrefoil ; a novel
feature in English work is that they are put together, as in joinery,
by pins or rivets, without the use of iron collars or welding.
Some small panels at Wells, now dropping to pieces, show
remains of similar quatrefoils arranged with the cusps vertically
instead of diagonally, so that the interspaces are reduced; they
have no rectangular dividing bars, and the quatrefoils seem
consequently to have been welded at the cusps, instead of merely
bent over as at Chichester. These are the most decidedly Italian
of the grilles yet left us. In Salisbury Cathedral there are some
rude grilles in the choir, made of flat iron straps, about three
quarters of an inch wide, forming a rectangular framing, con-
taining rough pointed quatrefoils with the cusps perpendicular.
Some identical work has been made up into gates at Christ-
church, Hants, and it was remarked that they were put together
as if a carpenter had made them of wood, by halving the bars
where they cross, and letting the cusps into a mortice-hole in
the bars.

One of the best of the "joiner's" grilles closes the Chantry
of Henry V. in Westminster Abbey, and was made by Roger

THE TRANSITION. 105

Johnson, of London, in the sixth year of Henry VI., 1428, the
agreement being still extant. It is unquestionably an Eastern
design, exactly like some of the fourteenth-century joinery, such
as that of St. Pierre, at Caen, from which it is perhaps borrowed,
since all the details, including the massive timber framing, are
reproduced in iron by a combination of smith's work with the
use of pierced sheet iron. The design of the doors consists of
two tiers of long, narrow, round-headed arches, rilled with a
quatrefoil diaper. Behind the arched pieces, which are applied
on the face to hide the construction, are heavy vertical bars.
The diaper is formed of short and nearly uniform pieces of forged
iron, halved where they intersect, and merely wedged into
notches prepared in the concealed upright framing. Richness
was obtained by duplicating these pieces in sheet iron, cut a
little broader, and riveted to the back. The filling in of the
arch over the gates presents the earliest example in England of
a purely architectural design worked in iron, being filled with
tracery, constructed and put together like the diapered work below.
It is difficult to believe that the design, as a whole, was not, at
least indirectly, inspired by the grille at Santa Croce, for though
there are no armorial bearings in the iron, old illustrations show
that it was once powdered with gilt fleurs-de-lis and roses. The
diapered portion of this grille, like most others in England, has
its counterpart in France, at Le Puy-en-Velay. Another direct
copy in iron of fourteenth-century joinery of Eastern design closes
the side entrance to the choir at Canterbury. It is of much
simpler construction, consisting merely of long notched straps
of iron placed vertically, with other similar straps crossing them
diagonally, and halved and riveted so as to form a rich and
essentially Saracenic diaper. The same design, but in wood,
occurs at Luxeuil, and has been sketched by Le Due.

It is very obvious that the smith had no hand whatever in the
production of such designs as these, and even in their execution
his part was quite subordinate, for they are little more than

io6 IRON.

joinery executed in iron. His interest in an art in which his
share was but mechanical naturally declined, and by-and-by fell
off altogether, and, except for military purposes, smithing as a fine
art became almost extinct in England for a couple of centuries.
Yet it could only be dormant, for so long as men rode armed into
the field, and trusted their lives to helmet and cuirass, there could
be no real lack of skilled workers.

The most essentially English development of smithing is seen
in the tomb-railings, formed of plain and massive vertical bars,
of which our cast-iron spear-headed area railings are the de-
scendants. While in foreign countries they were endeavouring
to retain beautiful lacy designs for their grilles and tomb-rails,
and to overcome the assailable weakness of these by elaborate
defensive crestings, we were going straight to the point by intro-
ducing a rail constructed of vertical bars, with no horizontal bars
or filling in whatever, between them to afford a foothold. Beauty
was made subservient to practical utility in a way that at once
brought such railings into almost universal use ; so that no monu-
ment of any pretension was left unguarded by them down to the
close of the Tudor dynasty. Sketches of Westminster Abbey
and Canterbury Cathedral, published before the wholesale re-
moval of these rails during the first half of the present century,
present vistas of cage-like bars, which, seen in perspective, com-
pletely concealed the tombs they protected. The date of their
introduction is uncertain, but none now exist that are positively
older than the end of the fourteenth century, though they possibly
supplanted an earlier form in which horizontal bars were numerous,
and of which illustrations exist. The oldest monument in which
they are used is the tomb of the Black Prince at Canterbury,
but since, among the minute directions left in his will for the
construction of this monument, there is no mention of any grille
or rail, it appears probable that they were added when the
monument of Henry IV. was completed, for the railings to both
seem by the same hand. In these the vertical rectangular bars

THE TRANSITION. 107

are placed with the angle to the front ; there is a heavy battle-
mented' cornice, and six tall turret-like buttressed standards,
destined, perhaps, to hold tapers. The cornice, in the case
of the Black Prince, is decorated with small stamped lions'
heads ; and it became customary to enrich it with crests or
devices. The vertical bars were soon afterwards carried up-
wards and sharpened into points, like the stakes of a stockade,
or barbed like arrow-heads. An example of the former guards
Archbishop Langham's tomb, and is the only one remaining in
Westminster Abbey, though there are parts of several others in
the triforium. If contemporary, it would date about A.D. 1376,
but the railing may be a protection added at a somewhat later
time. In the Fitzalan tomb at Arundel, 1415, the standards are
greatly enriched with crocketed finials. Sometimes a richly
traceried border of sheet metal in several thicknesses took the
place of the battlements, or an inscription between twisted fillets
replaced them, as in Dr. Ashton's tomb in St. John's College,
Cambridge. This presents the earliest instance of the introduction
of crests of the founder surmounting the standards, afterwards a
very usual feature.

A singular departure from the normal type is that of the rail to
the tomb of Sir Thomas Hungerford (d. 1411), in the chapel at
Farley, which has horizontal bars hidden by richly decorated
straps, and foliated ends to the vertical bars, and especially to
the standards. The tomb of Bishop Beckington (d. 1464), at
Wells, has a similar railing, but still more decorated, with par-
ticularly massive and richly wrought turret-like standards, with
battlemented finish. Though carried out in a totally different
and English way, the idea for these might have been borrowed
from the foliated railings which were then beginning to be intro-
duced into the south of France. Examples of all these railings
are numerous, and would form an interesting study, but their
claims as works of art do not justify further attention here. The
elaborate work put into the cornices shows that this form of rail

io8 IRON.

or grille was not adopted through economy; and, indeed, con-
sidering that the appliances at the smith's disposal were very
limited, it is not easy to imagine any more difficult and expensive
task than the production of such massive, well-finished, unwieldy
bars, and the still more massive standards. A very little study
shows us that this type of grille was not selected because it was
admired beyond any other, but solely on account of its offering
the best means of protection. Whenever any doorway or open-
ing in masonry that could be entirely filled required a grille, it
was not formed of upright bars. Besides those of Eastern design
already mentioned, we have the beautiful chancel screen in
Arundel Church, with its tiers of small and elegant pointed
arches, and the chapel grilles at Ely, to prove that practical con-
siderations and not taste dictated the railing form.

The plain grilles and tomb- rails so usual in England seem to
have been in little favour in France. Some, however, in the
cloister at Toulouse are of massive upright bars, ending in
dragons' heads and fleurs-de-lis, fine in workmanship, and imposing
in effect. An early illustration makes it appear that the choir
grilles to the Ste Chapelle, in Paris, were of upright bars, bound
together by the iron wattlework still to be seen in some grilles in
Belgium, the idea of which may well have been taken from the
then fashionable trellised hedges which particularly abounded in
the gardens of the Palais de Justice. Few, if any, plain-bar grilles
are now seen in the churches of France, if they ever existed, for
it never seems to have been customary to fence in effigies and
monuments, as with us.

The change in fashion was even more immediately injurious to
door furniture, scrolled ironwork almost at once giving place to
moulded carved wood, with plain iron straps, so that the calls on
the smith were in this direction restricted to necessaries. The
door-handles and escutcheons show, however, even more than
the grilles, how deep and lasting was the Oriental influence.

Innumerable church door-handles of the fifteenth and sixteenth

THE TRANSITION.

109

centuries present examples which might have been taken straight
from the mosque. Of these, the most Saracenic in form is the
flattened ellipse, shaped like a crescent with the horns beaten
round to join the spindle. They show the utmost variety of
treatment, and are often beautifully finished, their broad surfaces
and edges being pounced, pierced, lined, notched, serrated, and

FIG. 39.— Knocker from Stockbury.

pinked ; the old traditions of smithing peeping out in dragons
or dogs' heads, biting at each other or at the spindle, and the
newer fashion being manifest in occasional armorial devices.
The back plates are still more diversified, being either simple
discs of sheet iron notched and lobed round the margin, and
bossed out in the centre, or more or less fancifully pierced with
crosses, trefoils, key-holes, etc. (Fig. 40). The curious knocker

no IRON.

(Fig. 39) from Stockbury, in Kent, is an illustration of a simple
form of this kind of work.

Richer examples combine sheet iron and forging, the plate
being reinforced by stout circular bands, sometimes connected
by cross-bands, which are punched and filed into key-borders,
crenelations, or vandyked edgings. Most beautiful specimens
occur on the sacristy door at Cirencester, and at Dickleburgh,
Martham, Eye, etc. Sometimes the handles associated with these
plates are rings, decorated or simple, or stirrup-shaped, or rarely
interlacing knots. The small bar-handles (Fig. 41), attached at

FIG. 40. — Handle, with pierced tracery, from Stogumber Church, Somerset.

each end to the doors by traceried plates or rosettes, seem mostly
to belong to the fifteenth century. Sometimes they have cleverly
forged knops in the centre (Fig. 42), and sometimes the plates of
attachment extend the length of the handle, and are richly pierced.
Examples of these are to be found, attached to chapel and chantry
doors, in most of our cathedrals. The escutcheon plates, too, are
of endless variety. Sometimes they are merely rectangular or
polygonal plates, with fleurs-de-lis at the angle, as at Winchester
and Chichester ; but mostly they are founded on the shield, though
this is often cut into such exuberant arabesques as to disguise

THE TRANSITION.

the original form. Frequently the design is essentially Oriental,
and one at Rendcombe, in Gloucestershire, has Arabic numerals
and figures engraved upon it, presenting their supposed earliest
use in any work connected with building. Very remarkable, too,
is the large plate at Hereford, with the initials and device of
Bishop Audley, and a butterfly, in raised iron riveted to the plate.
Similar plates are much more rarely seen in France, as at Cordes
and Troyes.

Hinges of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though no

mm: ••

FIG. 41. — Handle in Westcott Barton
Church.

FIG. 42. — Fourteenth-century
door-handle.

longer splendid, were still occasionally required to spread over
the doors, especially those to a sacristy or treasury. The older
forms are in these cases kept to, but with far more refined
drawing, as if the smith were no longer the sole designer. A
perfect example exists on the door at the south of the south
transept, Winchester, which seems to belong to quite the close
of the fifteenth century. In this the termination of every scroll
is a graceful fleur-de-lis, and the door is pretty uniformly
covered by the hingework. Still more elegant are those in
which the simple straps terminate in a triple or even in a single
fleur-de-lis. For graceful ease the Great Casterton example can

ITS IRON.

hardly be rivalled, and the hinges to the door of the triforium in
Westminster Abbey are models of elegant simplicity, in striking
contrast to those of approximately the same form which were
afterwards used, and of which we shall speak presently. Besides
the few door-hinges, there are many magnificent examples of
this work on muniment and other chests, where protection was
of more consideration than fashion. The interesting iron-backed
treasury door at Wells, with its pretty arrangement of cross
rectilinear straps, is of the same date.

In France, as with us, the hingework became severe, and was
reduced in even the magnificent Sainte Chapelle to mere straps
of iron ending in fleurs-de-lis. Those of Amiens Cathedral are
straps dividing into three branches, each ending in three clusters
of tongue and scroll ornament. At Notre Dame de Chalons-sur-
Marne they branch into very unusually realistic leaves of different
forest trees. Rouen has some rich hinges with fleurs-de-lis. At
Coutances two of the cathedral doors and the doors of St. Pierre
have deeply moulded strap-hinges, split at the ends, and bearing
two stamped flowers. The same massively moulded straps form
a diagonal trellis, covering the central door of the cathedral, and
are fixed to the wood by the same stamped rosettes used as
nail-heads. This work, which is very peculiar, also existed at
the not far distant Mont St. Michel, and seems to be late
thirteenth-century. Some of the hinges at Bayeux are also
peculiar, recalling early grillework, though probably contem-
poraneous with the last. Unfortunately, the churches of France,
as a whole, appear to have suffered even more than our own
as regards their ironwork, many of even the grandest abbeys
and cathedrals being destitute of any original work On the
other hand, a few objects of iron have been preserved, of which
we have no representatives in England. The paschal candle-
stick in the hospital of Noyon has been already mentioned.
Another of the fifteenth century, in the cathedral of the same
town, has fine realistic flowers under the pricket. The thirteenth-

THE TRANSITION. 113

century iron tripod, with canine monsters on the feet, and four
lions' heads, now supporting a desk, from St. Martin's Church,
Brive, is of splendid character. Two others and two folding arm-
chairs from Bayeux and Narbonne, all of the thirteenth century,
were exhibited in the Trocadero in 1889.

The merits of English and French smithing during this period
seem evenly balanced. In both countries it was one of retro-
gression, but on the whole it appears to have possessed more
vitality in England, and, where there is a similarity of design
in both countries, England probably led the way. It could
hardly be otherwise in the distracted state of France, and it is
a wonder that, ruined and dismembered as she was by the English
invasions, any art survived at all.

The German smiths, however, kept plodding away and develop-
ing a style peculiar to them. To follow this development will
take us slightly in advance, as we meet with no convenient break
precisely where we need it. The richness of the hingework was
fully maintained, and, though the vine continued to be the only
recognised theme, some rich effects were obtained from com-
binations of scrolls and small fleurs-de-lis without any foliage at all.
Such were the hinges to the Palace Chapel at Marburg ; and those
at Oberwesel, Neukirchen, Kolin, etc.

The vine having now passed through numerous conventional
forms in Germany, some of them as near to nature, perhaps, as the
skill of the blacksmiths could produce, settled in the fifteenth
century into a flat, lozenge-shaped leaf, so deeply cleft as to form
a distinct quatrefoil. The type seems peculiarly Rhenish, and is
characterised by a multitude of leaves branching from straight or
slightly curved and slender stems. There is often some attempt
at pierced, traceried forms on the central strap, and earlier forms
as well as fleurs-de-lis are frequently mixed with the lozenge
leaves. A superb and unusual example occurs at Eriiirt Cathedral,1

1 Many of these are figured in the Transactions of the Royal Institute
of British Architects, vol. vii., New Series, pp. 160-162.

I

u4 IRON.

belonging probably to the middle of the fifteenth century, when
the nave was completed. This consists of six magnificent scroll
hinges, bearing numerous vine leaves and tendrils, covering a
large part of the exterior surface of the doors, whilst their interior
is completely covered by a splendid diaper, rich in rosettes, leaves,
and armorial bearings. There are good examples at Thann,
Oppenheim, Caub, Ziilpich, Magdeburg, and, until 1844, there
were four fine examples at Oberwesel in perfect preservation ;
they were destroyed by the architect who restored the church.
By far the most remarkable example of this work, however,
occurs at Schloss Lahneck, on the Rhine, where there are hinges
almost covering the doors, across which they are trained in the
singularly stiff manner of espaliers, and bearing in all some two
hundred and fifty leaves.

So far it is perfectly obvious that the designs used for archi-
tectural purposes by the ironworkers of Germany were entirely
based on the rich stamped work of France. The general ideas,
the use of the vine, and all the conventional forms it first appears
under, the introduction among the leaves of the small fleurs-de-lis,
and the sparing use of tracery in combination with them, are all
characters peculiar to the French school of Gothic architecture.
A beautiful native school of ironwork was in active process of
development from this French source alone, when, somewhere
about 1450, as we shall presently see, it received an entirely
new direction from Flanders and Brabant.

V.

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH, FIFTEENTH AND
SIXTEENTH CENTURIES.

THE honours of the third period of mediaeval ironworking belong
to the locksmith and the armourer. Heat was now applied only in
the preliminary stages, and the greater part of the work was accom-
plished by the file and saw, or by embossing the iron, or, when
the highest realms of art were reached, by carving the statuette
or other decorative object from the solid. The direct productions
of the forge and hammer were seldom admitted into the design.
To work successfully in iron a combination of artistic perception
with manipulative skill became more than ever essential, and, to
be thoroughly accomplished, it was requisite to understand con-
struction and planning, and to be an adept in the arts of the
locksmith, the armourer, and the jeweller.

The Oriental leaven had done its work, and was submerged
in the rich developments of Gothic art that it had given birth
to. The English smith, discouraged by the change of fashion,
or engrossed in the civil wars, had ceased to lead the way, and
fashioned little but the rudest work. The French smith, more
pliable than the English, and with his country at last relieved
from the fear of invasion, was far from being equally discouraged,
and assimilated the methods and skill of the locksmith and
armourer to his own. As a result, there emerged one of the
most beautiful phases of ironworking that has been seen.

The use of sheet iron became general, and it was the custom

n6 IRON.

to strengthen doors with thin interlaced bands of what we should
call hoop iron, fixed to the wood by rosettes or decorated nails.
One of these, figured by Le Due, has the lozenge-shaped spaces
left by the intersecting bands filled with a rich pattern of sheet
ornament ; and another from the Abbey of St. Berlin, at St.
Omer, in which the plates are horizontal and overlapping, has
edges vandyked in exactly the same pattern as the plate armour
then worn. The hinges to the Cathedral of Auxerre are long
straps with thin vandyked edges. In some parts of France we
find, at the close of the fourteenth century, hinges of sheet iron
pierced and embossed into rich leaf-forms, extremely like the
German work so familiar a century later. Instances of such
hinges are given by Le Due from the Abbey of Poissy, in the lie
de France, and from a house at Gallardon, near Chartres. A
great many hinges were made, at this time and in the fifteenth
century, of several thicknesses of sheet iron, pierced to represent
tracery, and riveted together in strong frames.

This use of sheet iron was coincident with a singularly rapid
development of richly traceried grillework. At first we notice
small pieces, such as the guichet in the south choir aisle at
Chartres, pierced in only one thickness ; but increasing richness
of design soon demanded the use of three or four sheets of piercing
superimposed. This kind of work has, from its great beauty, been
much sought by collectors, and carried away where portable.
Thus a splendid flamboyant door, in private hands, was figured in
Shaw's Decorative Arts, and two sumptuous gilt panels from the
tabernacle of the church of the ancient Abbey of St. Loup, at
Troyes, are figured in Du Sommerard's Arts du Moyen Age.

There is a magnificent portable screen in the Sauvageot Collec-
tion of the Louvre, of the utmost delicacy and refinement, which
shows that at this period any design could be carried out equally
well, whether in iron, wood, or stone. Among the specimens
of these refined and laborious productions still in situ, we may
notice the panels in the sacristy door in Rouen Cathedral, with

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH.

117

flamboyant tracery, and treatment of Tudor-like roses, of which we
illustrate only the handle (Fig. 43) ; and the much finer example
at Evreux, where the cathedral treasury is protected by a screen
of wood and iron, the handles and locks of which are marvels
of art, while the great press it contains has openwork iron
panels, bolts, locks, hinges, etc. (Fig. 44), of the finest imaginable

FIG. 43. — Handle of sacristy, Rouen Cathedral.

work. In all these grander works the crockets, pinnacles, and
leading lines of the tracery are chiselled and filed from the solid
iron in full relief, and the pierced sheet-work plays but a very
subordinate part.

In smaller objects, such as locks and knockers, an even greater
degree of refinement and delicacy is reached, which is hardly sur-
passed by the contemporary work in gold and silver. So exqui-

nS

IRON.

sitely wrought are the finest of the locks, -that over ^1000 has been
paid for a single specimen, and splendid examples are to be found
in all considerable collections of works of art. The best in design
belong to the close of the fifteenth century, but they increase in
richness during the sixteenth. The basis in the design of all is
the flamboyant architecture of the period, with the interest

FIG. 44. — Door-handle in the sacristy of Evreux Cathedral.

centreing in the figures of saints and kings, masks, and escutcheons
of arms, which they freely introduce, chiselled out of solid iron
and chased as if in silver. The twelve apostles under canopies,
the Garden of Eden, and other scriptural subjects are found
represented. These locks were originally affixed to richly carved
presses, trunks, and doors, and their mechanism is careful, con-
cealing bolts and key-holes with great skill. The splendidly

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 119

wrought master-keys, with tracery handles and innumerable wards,
were used with these locks.

Richly ornamented rim-locks appear as early as the thirteenth
century, the front plate being more or less decorated with scroll-
work, ending in thirteenth-century leaves and animals' heads,
while the back plate, by which the lock was fastened to the door,
was extended beyond the lock, and cut into leaves, animals' heads,
fleurs-de-lis, and other forms. It is interesting to find the cock's
head and eagle among them, and that use was made of incised
lines and twisted and notched mouldings. The bolts and latches
were equally ornamented, and the mechanism simple and
thoughtful. The style, with slight changes of detail, prevailed
through the fourteenth century, the ornament being most varied,
elegant, and appropriate. The knockers and closing rings were
peculiarly artistic, nearly always representing some animal form
cleverly forged, often with pierced traceried back plates. The
keys were no less varied and beautiful. It is unfortunately
impracticable to give even a resume of their distinguishing
characteristics within the limits of the present work, and the
differences between small objects of French and other origin
cannot be expressed in a few sentences. The coffers of sheet
iron, strengthened with straps carried from back to front, enriched
with tracery, and with lids curved like a trunk, are invariably
French. They all agree in having panels on the front and sides
of more or less rich tracery, formed of thin pierced metal plates
laid over each other with great neatness, with projecting pieces
shaped like buttresses of two or three stages, those at the angles
being lengthened into legs on which the casket stands. These are
represented both at South Kensington and in the British Museum,
and are of the close of the fourteenth century. This was the
usual form, but others were in use, and all were painted and gilt.
At this time nothing was beneath the smith, even the nails
being of most varied and beautiful designs, demanding attentive
study.

120 IRON.

Hitherto scant reference has been made to the ironwork of the
Low Countries. Owing to their vast prosperity previous to the
Spanish yoke, everything 'was renewed, and there are scarcely any
buildings, and little ironwork throughout the Netherlands, older
than the fourteenth century. Though the stamped hinges at Liege
were doubtless imported, they had some influence on Flemish work.
Except these, the grilles protecting the archives in the Halle
de Bruges, which, though probably of the fourteenth century, are
a light rendering of our Winchester grille, are almost the only
ancient specimens in the country, and they seem to have had a
curious influence on the Flemish ironwork of the seventeenth
century. Some rude and massive strap-hinges, fringed with small
trefoil leaves on stems, on the outer doors of the Hotel de Ville
at Brussels, may also be of considerable antiquity.

It is possible that, as England's supremacy in ironworking was
slipping away, the rapidly growing and enterprising towns of
Flanders and Brabant saw an opportunity. Anyhow, they became
the home of the iron industry in the fifteenth century. A century
earlier, Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels were the recognised centres
of art and commerce; and the magnificence of the wealthy burghers
exceeded that of any European court or monarch. Nor were
other cities, Ypres, Louvain, Mechlin, far behind in industry or
population ; while in the fifteenth century all were eclipsed for
vastness of commerce by Antwerp, whose port received two
thousand five hundred ships at one time, five hundred entering
it in a single day. Ironwork was not a staple industry in any
of these, except perhaps Brussels, whose workers in iron and
steel during the fourteenth century are said to have been unsur-
passed in Europe. We may certainly take for granted that
whatever such essentially commercial towns produced would be
exported to the accessible marts in Europe, and influence the
productions of even distant countries.

Flemish ironwork is interesting in many ways, not the least that
it presents us with a multitude of objects that are rare in France,

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 121

and seem to have been completely swept away by the Puritans
and their successors in England. These embrace many objects
used in Christian churches, such as stands for tapers, hanging-
lamps, and book-rests, especially such as were portable. We
have just seen that ironworking had reached its third and least
vigorous stage in France and England — a stage marked in the
French work by peculiar refinement of design. But transplanted
to a new and virgin soil, it pushed back into some of the older,
more robust, and forcible stages. Thus we find the brawny
Flemish smiths revelling in the hardest manual labour. It is
almost incomprehensible how the monster gun of Ghent, Dulle
Griete, or Mad Meg, weighing 16,803 kilos, and measuring nine-
teen feet in length, by eleven feet in circumference, could have
been produced without modern machinery. Yet there it is,
formed of welded coils in the first half of the fifteenth century,
with the arms of Philippe le Bon stamped upon it. The great
Mons Meg of Edinburgh Castle is another of these productions,
commonly reputed to have been made in Mons, in 1476 ; while
a third Flemish leviathan is at Bale, and yet others at Mont
St. Michel. The vigour with which they threw themselves into
the new industry is no less evident in the beautifully moulded
constructive ironwork in the spires, etc., of Bruges, Ghent, and
Antwerp ; and the massive rails in the market-places of Mechlin
(by Jean de Cuyper, 1531) and Xanten. Nothing is more
eloquent of the force put into the work than the singular hinges
that cover a pair of early fifteenth-century doors of the Church
of Notre Dame at Hal. Perhaps the old hinges of St Paul
and St. Jacques at Liege excited emulation; at all events, we
find these stamped hinges produced as a mere tour de force,
since no others exist, and they seem foreign to the prevailing
style, but they are of a massiveness and relief that is extra-
ordinary and far beyond any produced when the style was at
its zenith. It is interesting to find that, though the vine is
still retained for the design, its rendering is quite new, the

122 IRON.

leaves being symmetrically cleft and spined like thistle leaves,
while the bunches of grapes are oval, and of about the size of
a prickly pear. A face is stamped at about the centre of each
leaf, and the hinge-straps end in massive fleurs-de-lis. The work
on the left-hand door includes a large traceried lock, more than
a foot in length, which must be contemporary with the stamped
work, and is in design like our grille to the Chantry of
Henry V. A cast of one of these doors is in the South Kensington
Museum.

Smithing appears, however, to have been brought to its highest
state of perfection in the Low Countries by the Matsys family of
Louvain. The unique position occupied by the father, Josse
Matsys, is shown by the fact that he held the posts of architect
and clockmaker, as well as blacksmith, to the municipality.
Though, strangely enough, some of his most important works for
the Hotel de Ville have been allowed to perish, at least one
authentic specimen remains in the font-crane of Louvain
Cathedral — a rich piece of traceried work remarkable for the
particularly bold and original treatment of its leaves. A worid-
renowned work, the well-cover against the Cathedral at Antwerp,
dated 1470, is evidently by the same hand. It is very like the
work of Josse Matsys; and the celebrated painter, Quentin
Matsys, to whom it is popularly attributed, could not have been
more than ten or twelve years old when the well-cover was com-
pleted. Legends seem to confound him with Quentin, second
son of Josse Matsys, who was not born till 1466, and followed his
father's calling. In this imposing work no use has been made
of stamps. The canopy is carried by four clustered columns,
supporting four cusped arches converging to a centre. What
might be termed the roof of the canopy is a tangle of interlacing
branches and leaves, intended probably for the vine, and a qon-
ventional flower which both droops to form pendants, and soars
upward into pinnacles. The whole is crowned by the figure of
Salvius Brabo, in Roman costume, holding aloft a spear and

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 123

the hand of the giant Antigonus, and the springing of the arches
is masked by four smaller but more pleasing figures dressed in
skins. The design, though mediaeval in feeling, is executed with
a grace and freedom not known in ironwork of the period, and,
from the ambitious introduction of figures in the round, so rarely
attempted by the blacksmith, together with the crispness and
vigour of the beaten iron foliage, appears to have made a profound
and lasting impression on the art. These well-covers must have
been once common, though only one other example now exists
in the Netherlands, at the Porte de Hal, Brussels. One formerly
stood outside the Hotel de Ville at Antwerp. Perhaps the one
at Dijon, like the neighbouring Jacquemart of Notre Dame, is
of Flemish origin. This Jacquemart, a word of disputed ety-
mology, is a large open iron belfry ending in a fteche with two
quaintly costumed iron automata to strike the bells, and is known
to have been made at Courtrai, in the fifteenth century.

Almost as important, and far more numerous, are the ponderous
cranes so conspicuous in many Belgian baptisteries. They range
in date from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, and those
remaining at Hal, Breda, Bois-le-Duc, Zutphen, Ypres, and
Dixmunde present a fine range of examples. The Museum
possesses a cast of the one at Hal, which is somewhat sparsely
ornamented with tufts of leaves and large fleurs-de-lis. Iron
candelabra are also to be met with in most Belgian churches,
consisting usually of a tripod foot and simple angular stem,
broken by a knop or moulding, supporting circles, or sometimes
rows of lights, stepped one above another. The circles or bars
are furnished with spikes and sockets to receive the candles, and
are attached to the stem by brackets, or hang from it by straps
and scrolls. One at Ypres has its stem most gracefully and
simply ornamented by trefoil leaves and fleurs-de-lis. Another at
Lierre, in which the candles are in rows, has a central spike on
which an extra seven-branched candlestick can be socketed in
case of need. A Tournai example has three tiers pierced with

124 IRON.

quatrefoils, and is crowned with leaves. Magnificent examples,
over six feet high, at Deux-Acren, and Chapelle-a-Wattines,
Hainault, support two hexagonal bands pierced with the " Ave,
Maria ! " and surmounted with fleurs-de-lis, as well as sockets and
spikes. ' The candle-bands in these are supported from the stem
by traceried brackets with lilies, as well as connected by cusped
and trefoiled straps.

The well-known herse-light at Osnabriick, over seven feet
high, is probably of Belgian origin. Its massive tripod foot and
moulded stem supports two spandrel-shaped brackets filled with
tracery, on which rests a vertical triangle of moulded iron bars
filled in with rose-pattern tracery and painted iron shields. On
two sides of the triangle is a step-like arrangement of scrolls and
spikes for fifteen candles, and on the foot are rings by which it
can be moved. Most of these objects were probably for inter-
mittent use, and are planned to carry very large quantities of
tapers to enhance the grandeur of great religious ceremonials,
when the numbers of lights were so vast as to be compared to
the stars descended from the firmament. The permanent and
votive coronas, candelabra, and sanctuary lamps were in more
precious metals, except in the brief period when wrought iron
was intrinsically appreciated. To this belong the splendid twelve-
branched corona at Louvain, attributed to Quentin Matsys ; the
fine chandelier surmounted by the dragon of Ghent, in the
Church of St. Bavon ; the beautiful open-work corona for twenty-
six lights at Hal ; the no less charming chandelier at Zutphen, etc.
Associated with the candelabra, and of precisely the same work-
manship, are the portable lecterns made on the principle of folding
deck-chairs, with leather or pigskin tops. Though nearly always
simple, the iron legs have generally nicely worked mouldings, and
sometimes flower-work, with finials shaped into heads or fruits.
The book-rails are often richly pierced. There are beautiful
examples at Hal, Tournai, Courtrai, and in many of the museums.
Seats, stands, alms-boxes, and even pulpits, catafalques, and

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 125

hearses for church use, are occasionally met with of similar work-
manship; all these objects having been originally decorated in
glowing colours, if not partly gilt The churches of Belgium,
having been less systematically looted than those of England and
France, still contain a great deal of their mediaeval furniture, which
includes most of the finest specimens of ironwork in the country.
Mediaeval iron church grilles were, however, largely displaced
during the Renaissance, and chapels and choirs are now almost
universally closed by screens of carved marble and wood, or
bronze and brass. The fourteenth and fifteenth century grilles
remaining are typically Flemish, composed of massive upright bars
chiselled to indicate slightly, but effectively, the carved caps and
bases of stonework, and forming long linear panels with traceried
arches. The grille to the bapistery at Hal is a good example in
a severe style. Another is afforded by the window grilles from
the treasury of the Hotel de Ville, at Louvain, 1463, with the
decorative addition of a band of imitation wattles in iron over
the top of the arch. This feature is twice repeated in the hand-
somer and more important grilles at Breda. We happily possess
in our own country one of the richest examples of Flemish work
in the gates closing Bishop West's Chapel in Ely Cathedral, 1515
to I533- Tradition has assigned them to Quentin Matsys, and
there can be no possible doubt as to their Flemish origin. A
detailed description would require space ; but the design forms
an upper tier of linear panels of twisted bars, with forged caps
and bases, and very richly traceried arches ; and a more severe
lower tier of narrower panels, with a base of pierced tracery, a
band of very Flemish arabesque work, and a top of very beautiful
traceried arches, including fleurs-de-lis and shields. Above all
this panel-work are some heavy branching interlaced scrolls filling
in the arch, and exactly recalling the work of the Antwerp well-
cover, except that they blossom into Tudor roses instead of
leaves. A touch of Flemish Renaissance feeling is given by the
massive turned and moulded slam-bar. Purely protective grilles

i26 IRON.

of strong bars drifted through each other, forming lozenge or
rectangular interspaces, are found in Belgium, as elsewhere ; but
they are sometimes rendered decorative by the introduction of
traceried designs extending over several interspaces, like those
of the Hotel de Ville of Louvain. Others with roses at every
intersection, and a battlemented and spiked cornice, close the
baptistery of St. Walburgis, at Zutphen ; and at the Hotel de
Ville, of Kempen, the plain rectangular barred window grilles have
a highly decorated cresting and sides. A very rare form of
grille is fashioned of strong plates of sheet iron pierced into differ-
ent arabesque designs, and let into a rectangular framing. The
finest examples are the shutter grilles to the tabernacle of the
ancient chapel of the counts of Flanders, at Ghent, part of which
is happily possessed by our Museum. It appears to belong to
the middle of the sixteenth century, while an older one is figured
in Van Ysendyck's Belgian Architecture.

The stalwart Fleming, having rapidly pushed through the earlier
stages of the art, and shown his complete mastery over the most
massive forgings, quickly caught up with its later development in
fashion elsewhere, and produced works by aid of the file, saw, and
chisel on the grandest scale. It is small wonder that, when the
roles of smith, clockmaker, and architect were combined in one
individual, the more precise, cultivated, and elaborated tools of the
mechanician are brought to bear. In this work there is always
a strong leaning to architectural forms, and the effects of wood
and stone are produced in iron in miniature. Though it never
quite attained the refinement and delicacy of the French, some
magnificent work was produced in Brabant, existing examples
actually pointing to Louvain, the home of the Matsys, as its
principal seat In the Church of St. Pierre, not only the grilles,
font-bracket, chandelier, and locks partake of this character, but
to all the armoires of the chapels in the chancel aisles are fitted
most exquisite little circular guichets filled with flamboyant
tracery of a great variety of design. There is nothing, on the

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 127

other hand, to indicate its production in Antwerp or Flanders.
Had it been produced in any of those vast commercial towns of
the Middle Ages, we should doubtless now find it more widely
scattered over Europe. As it is, we have only isolated pieces
of ironwork of Brabanc.on character in England, Germany, and
Spain. The most familiar objects in collections are, perhaps,
the rather flat boxes of moderate size, of small and intricate
geometric tracery repeated over the cover and sides, often in
longitudinal bands separated by plain ridges and binding. These
have peculiar locks, with uniformly rude and ill-designed buttress-
shaped hasp and decoration ; this identity rendering it probable
that they were produced in one centre and abundantly exported.
Incomparably the finest work in iron of this class stands to the
left of the altar in St George's Chapel, Windsor. It formerly
stood in front of the tomb of Edward IV., but, consisting as it
does of a pair of gates and gate-piers, it can hardly have been
intended for a grille, though the gates, and especially the piers,
were only meant to be viewed from the front. Their intended
destination is a mystery, and tradition does no more than connect
them with Edward IV. and Quentin Matsys. Tradition may be
right in this instance, for no one with less princely resources
could have given such a commission, and in view of his con-
nection by marriage with the Duke of Burgundy, and his vast
trading transactions with the Netherlands, it is to the Netherlands
that the commission would naturally gravitate. The main features
are in the Perpendicular style, but the details are flamboyant, as
if only the general lines had been given by an Englishman, or
taken from English architecture. There is no English ironwork
in the least approaching it in style, and, if made in England, it
must have been wrought by foreign workmen. But it is unlikely
that so extraordinary a work, intended for a royal palace, and
which must have taken years to execute, could have been made
on the spot, or in any part of England, without leaving a tradition
behind. Moreover, it seems never to have exactly fitted any

izS IRON.

position, or that any position in the chapel could be found for it.
But whether due to the whim of a self-indulgent and lavish despot,
or to some carefully considered but incompleted plan, it is the
most magnificent and unrivalled specimen of its kind in exist-
ence. The design is in the richest style of fifteenth-century
architecture worked out in full relief and in the minutest details,
and consists of two gates about seven feet high, and two much
higher hexagonal piers. The gates are formed each of three bays,
separated by buttresses with richly crocketed niches and finials.
The bays are formed of a traceried window in two stories,
surmounted by a three-sided canopy, equally in two stories, with
feathered arches and crocketed pinnacles, and finishing in a
parapet of open tracery. The upper story of the canopy recedes,
and is connected by flying buttresses with the lower, all the spaces
in both being filled profusely with most delicate tracery, with
open-work crested tops and every kind of purely architectural
enrichment known to the period. The piers are an exact repetition
in their lower story of the bays of the gate, arranged in plan as
four sides of a hexagon, so that there are double buttresses at
each angle ; the additional upper story is formed of double-light
traceried windows, overhung by very rich canopies of one story,
almost repeating the lower tier, but with the angle buttresses con-
tinued up, and bearing five richly wrought open cressets or lan-
terns, forming a strikingly effective and rather original finish. This
great amount of repetition is a defect common in Perpendicular
work. Many thousand pieces of carefully filed iron have been
required in the construction of this monumental work ; and the
caps, bases, mouldings, crockets, and cusps are chased out of
the solid, and tenoned, morticed, and riveted together as in
joinery. Depth and richness are given by using one thickness
upon another, over a background of saw-pierced sheet iron, and
the intricacy of detail produced by this process becomes most
remarkable in an object of such dimensions. The whole was
originally gilt, and remained in this state when it was described

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH.

129

by Gough, the antiquary, as a work of gilded copper. On the
south door of the ambulatory is a " vizzying," or guichet, a square
escutcheon, and a handle-plate in form of a rose window sur-
rounded by the Garter, all worked in the same way in tracery of
marvellous minuteness. The chapel also boasts two other fine
flamboyant locks of perhaps Brabangon workmanship (Fig. 45).
Locks, handles, and " vizzyings," of elaborate flamboyant tracery,
are not unknown in other places in England. A most beautiful
specimen of the latter is preserved at Compton Wynyates,
brought from the older house dating from the last years of the

FIG. 45. — Lock in St. George's Chapel, Windsor.

reign of Henry VII. ; while another (Fig. 46) most interesting
specimen, introducing the wattle border, is in the Museum.
Flemish ironwork, like the Flemish chests, was probably in
fashion during the reign of Edward IV., and was certainly
imitated in England during the succeeding reigns. It is not
easy to distinguish, except by its greater elaboration and different
architectural detail ; but the locks, handles, and door-knockers
are sturdier and plainer than the French, which they rarely
rival in taste and refinement.

Belgian work of this date is to be found abundantly in the
towns between the Meuse and the Rhine, once forming the

K

13°

IRON.

i
F,c. 46-An extremely

' vizzying," or guichet, with iron wattlework.

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 131

Duchy of CleVes, and as far south as Cologne. The magnificent
candelabrum and bier-stand at Xanten, the candlestick at Neuss,

FIG. 47.— Tabernacle grille from Ottoburs, Tyrol. In the South Kensington Museun
German fifteenth-century work.

132 IRON.

the dwarf grille at Kempen, the grille at Calcar, the fine bracket
at Ziilpich, the hinges from Viersen, are known examples, and
there are hosts of others. These are distinct from German work,
though the Germans were quite ready to assimilate the style as
far as they could. Thus the traceried work they produced was quite
as elaborate as the Brabangon, if not more so. A singularly rich
and beautiful tabernacle grille is possessed by the Museum, which,
notwithstanding its unusual elaboration, shows clearly that the
German productions were as inferior to the Flemish as these
were in turn to the French. In the specimen illustrated (Fig. 47)
— said to have come from the chateau of Ottoburg, in the
Tyrol — it will be seen that, while the tracery is delicate, the
buttresses and pinnacles are intolerably coarse. German imita-
tions of this purely architectural kind of ironwork are not very
interesting.

Traceried grilles are to be found in the Church of St. Ulric, in
Augsburg, one of which, supposed to date from about 1470,
consists of a vesica-shaped diaper, filled with tracery, in which
the fleur-de-lis is an oft-repeated ornament Tracery ornament
was used for screens at Heidingsfeld, near Wiirzburg, 1510, and
more frequently for tabernacle doors. At Liineburg are beautiful
strap-hinges crossing a door, and richly worked handles, forming
a museum of delicate and, as described by Mr. King, of finely
coloured tracery design. Intricate open tracery handles of
Saracenic outline are peculiarly German, as are the tracery back-
plates, and their intertwining, leafless, and branching handles.
No grander specimen has been produced than the lock-plate,
eighteen inches high, taken from the Church of Maria-Saal, in
Carinthia, now preserved in the Klagenfurt Museum. From its
unusual size and elaborate character, it is regarded as having
been a diploma work (Fig. 48).

It is only, however, when traceried designs began to develop
into something else that they become of interest. At Cologne,
celebrated as a cradle of art, and with so much in common with,

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH.

'33

and united by such close ties to, the trading cities of Flanders, the
Brabangon ironwork roused a strong spirit of emulation. Thus
it is at Cologne that we meet with one of those massive forged
iron cranes for raising the font-cover, which are otherwise wholly
peculiar to Belgium. Its simple triangular form filled with feeble
vesica tracery, and its unnecessary and defective mechanism, pro-

FIG. 48. — Lock, eighteen inches high. In the Klagenfurt Museum. Fifteenth century.

claim it the effort of a 'prentice hand. Then we have, diverging
more and more from the Flemish style, the curious rastellum, a
light traceried railing with fleur-de-lis cresting, and five prickets
for candles and five shields emblasoned with tailors' shears.
This is supported on a rafter most exquisitely painted with
figure-subjects after the Cologne school, while the ironwork is

134 IRON.

rose and blue and gold. In the same traceried character is the
bell-holder of St. Cunibert's, the lantern and bracket at the
Rathhaus, the bracket at Pltickhof, the grille at Gross St. Martin's,
and the trellis grille in the Dom surmounted by a cresting like
that of the rastellum, but more imposing. These suffice to show
how well the Flemish style of ironwork was received and incor-
porated at Cologne, from whence, as from an advanced post, it
penetrated to the heart of Germany. As a specimen of work from
Flanders, or due to Flemish inspiration, we have cited the cele-
brated herse-light of Osnabriick, a large triangle filled with rose-
window tracery, holding fifteen prickets on its upper margins,
supported on a tripod foot, and embellished with tracery, shields,
and fleurs-de-lis. The magnificent Chapelle ardente of Nonnburg,
near Salzburg, restored from existing fragments, and engraved
by Gailhabaud, is another grand specimen of ironwork of archi-
tectural design. It consisted of roof or catafalque with six
gables, supported on twisted columns, filled with tracery and
cusps, holding innumerable prickets along its ridges and eaves,
and adorned with numerous finial-like candelabra at its angles.
Beneath is a dwarf railing filled with tracery, also supporting
candelabra. Among other remarkable specimens are the pulpit
and candelabra of Oberdiebach, near Fiirstenburg. Nor should
we omit, among the many important German works, the magni-
ficent corona made by Gert Bulsinck, of Yreden, in 1489, and
presented to the church by the Corporation of Locksmiths. It
consists of two most richly pierced sheet-iron bands, to which
are attached canopied niches with figures of saints, and in front
of each a candle. In the centre, beneath a wrought canopy, is
a figure of the Virgin in gilded wood, and above are two kneeling
figures.

The Cologne smiths did not confine themselves to repro-
ductions of the traceried work, but were still more bent on
acquiring the particular style, characterised by its mixture of
tracery and beaten leafwork, of which the Antwerp well-cover

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 135

is so famous an example. The Cologne ironwork of the six-
teenth century is distinguished from that which preceded it in
Germany and elsewhere by the constant use of the thistle, a plant
only used rarely with us, as in the choir gate-hinges at Wells.
Perhaps the richly cut and wrapped vine or acanthus leaves of
the Louvain crane and the Antwerp well suggested thistles, or
perhaps the fine form of the plant and its religious associations
led to its spontaneous selection. At all events, not only the
glossy foliage, but the flowers and buds of the holy milk thistle
lend themselves to an extremely rich, and at the same time con-
ventional, treatment, while the legend that the white veins on
its leaves were caused by the falling on it of a drop of the Virgin
Mary's milk, would be likely to render it at that date extremely
popular in Germany. The flowers, buds, and leaves of the plant
begin to appear among the traceried iron from the beginning of
the sixteenth century, and spread thenceforward over Germany
as rapidly as the plant itself is propagated over pastures new by
its airy thistle-down. It immediately ousted the vine, and as
effectually as its original has ousted the indigenous plants of
countries cursed by its introduction ; and for a century no iron-
work of any pretension was forged in Germany into the compo-
sition of which the thistle did not enter. In the funeral candle-
sticks from St. Columba's Church, Cologne, and the beautiful
wall-brackets of the Rathhaus Freitags rentkammer, probably made
in 1549, we see its boldly modelled leaves as well as a band with
towers and buttresses at the angles enclosing the prickets. A
still finer example is figured by Raschdorf, from a private
collection in Cologne.

When treated flat, as in pierced sheet-work, of which great use
was made, the ornament is arabesqued and rendered very rich.
Most exquisite specimens of this work are the two coronce in the
Chapel of the Miinster, at Magdeburg. These consist of a wide
band of richly pierced design, with battlemented top, suspended
from a crown by several curved and decorated rods, to which

136

IRON.

brackets holding prickets for candles are attached. The chande-
lier in the church at Kempen is another magnificent example, in

FIG. 49. — Lock from Neuberg, Styria.

which the whole ornament is derived from the thistle, except the
figure of the Virgin, the leaves having in this instance taken

iPi ..:';£%

!&&&* ^

I

FIG. 50. — Lock of chest. In the Augsburg Museum.

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH.

137

a definite cruciform shape, which henceforth characterises them
until the final disuse of the plant in ironwork. Another example
presents us with the image of the Virgin, with six richly scrolled
iron arms for prickets, all fashioned from this plant. The thistle
formed the basis of all the pierced and slightly embossed sheet-iron,
sea-weed-looking ornament, applied to locks, hinges, and handles,
in which the iron was brightly tinned and laid over red cloth
or paper. The splayed locks peculiar to Germany were often
treated thus, as in the Rathhaus of Cologne, of Bingen, and

FIG. 51. — Lock in Mr. Amerling's Collection, Vienna.

elsewhere on the Rhine. Thousands of examples are to be met
with, varying from the utmost simplicity to extreme richness.
Four typical examples are illustrated (Figs. 49-51). Perhaps
the most complete illustrations of the various purposes the
ornament was made to serve is to be seen at St. Maria im
Capitol, in Cologne, where the reading-desk, door-hinges, locks,
and handles are all ornamented with this pattern. The richest
examples of this kind seem due to A. F. Butsch, whose work is
to be seen in the locks of the Soyter Collection, and the chapel
at Blutenbourg, near Munich. There are also some particularly

'38

IRON.

rich hinges in the Nuremberg Museum, embossed to an unusual
height, and assuming, as frequently happens, an almost geometric
arrangement. The filling-in of a bracket at Xanten is a
magnificent example, in which the scrolled and interlacing thistle
is seen in every stage, from the bud to the fully developed
flower and fruit.

Sometimes the plant is introduced as a single flower termi-

FIG. 52. — Handle from church door of St. Marein, in Styria.

nating a strap-hinge, as at Hagenau, or the vertical bars of a
grille, as in the Cathedral of Freiburg im Bresgau, dated 1538;
but more often every part of the design is an adaptation from it.
In German hands, the thistle, like its predecessor the vine,
became protean, and simulated the oak, the fan, the Eastern
spathe, the fleur-de-lis, the cross, or mere tracery. Even when
almost all sense of its original form is lost, the derivation is

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 139

sometimes betrayed by some cross-hatching, the last trace of
the calyx.

Connected in some .measure with the thistle was the fashion of
lining entire doors with pierced and embossed plates and straps
of iron, already mentioned as occasionally practised in France,
and as having been carried to a point of unusual magnificence in
Erfurt Cathedral. It was very prevalent in Austria, Bohemia, and

FIG. 53 — Part of door-lining from the Rathhaus, Cracow. Fifteenth century.

Poland. Though many examples are met with in Vienna, they
are but little known in this country, where scarcely any attempt
to render the defensive linings of doors a means of decoration
has been made since the thirteenth century.

None of the Austrian examples appear to be older than the
fifteenth century, and the custom was retained long after the
adoption of Renaissance architecture. They are all characterised
by great richness of detail, and, when illuminated in black and

140

IRON.

white, red and blue, and profusely gilded, their effect must have
been very splendid. There are several in the Rathhaus and
University of Cracow, based on the thisl^e, like Fig. 53, by no
means the richest of them. They were evidently produced in
the latter half of the fifteenth century. A still more beautiful
example, perhaps the finest in existence, belongs to the Priory of

FIG. 54. — Part of door in the Priory of Bruck, with pierced and embossed ironwork.

Bruck, on the Mur (Fig. 54). The door is diapered with banded
iron, studded with nails shaped into rosettes, and the interspaces
are filled with the most elaborately pierced and embossed orna-
ments of fine German Late Gothic character. The thistle and
fleur-de-lis are twined into arabesques, or mingled with tracery of
extraordinary diversity and beauty, few of the designs being re-

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 141

FIG. 55. — Iron-bound and painted door in the Castle of Karlstein, near Prague.

142 IRON.

peated. The ground of the lozenges was painted alternately red
and blue, so that the general effect was like gold lace on a scarlet-
and-blue chequer. The more usual plan, however, not only
in secular but in ecclesiastical buildings, was to fill the inter-
spaces with armorial bearings oft repeated. These were some-
times merely painted on the woodwork between the iron straps,
as in the example from the Castle of Karlstein, near Prague
(Fig. 55), in which the black eagle of Austria on gold alternates
with the silver lion of Bohemia on red. The iron straps are fixed
by well-modelled nails, and decorated with gold-and-black rosettes.
The beautiful doors from the suppressed monastery at Krems has,
on the other hand, the armorial bearings splendidly embossed in
iron. The upper half of the door (Fig. 56) bears griffins alter-
nating with a coat-of-arms, and the lower half is diapered with
imperial eagles and lions. The nails are finely worked. Doors
of the same workmanship exist in Carinthia and the town of Steier,
all believed to date from towards the close of the fifteenth century.
These diapered designs appear to have been suggested by the
trellised grilles of the tabernacle doors of Belgium and Germany,
which the richer taste of further east decorated with rosettes and
other ornaments at the intersections of the bars, as seen in the
two fine examples in the Museum. The main bars were always
massive, though often almost wholly concealed by pierced foliage
and arabesques ; and the interstices, which in the richer examples
were rectangular, are filled with carved iron tracery, with filigree,
or with pierced and embossed subjects. The specimen in Fig. 57
shows one of the doors of the ciborium in the Hospital Church at
Krems. The designs filling the interspaces are cut out of sheet
metal, embossed and chased, and are taken, in part at least, from
the New Testament. Three similar doors in the church at Znaim
still preserve their gold and coloured decoration. Other beautiful
examples exist in Vienna, Modling, Pressburg, and in Styria and
elsewhere, on which a great amount of work has been expended,
and which well merit careful study.

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 143

This trellis is as distinctive of German smithing as the thistle, and
was evidently first borrowed by Belgium from the sparse examples
of England and France. In the oldest specimens in Germany,
such as those of Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle, all the diagonal

FIG. 56. — Iron-bound door in the Monastery of Krems. Late fifteenth century.

bars passing in one direction are threaded through those passing
in the opposite way; but in the somewhat later and more
ponderous example of Magdeburg, 1495, they pass through each
other alternately, as in the familiar work of a century later, from
which they differ, however, in being made with square instead

144

IRON.

_

FIG. 57. — Tabernacle door in the sacristy of the Hospital Church in Krems.
Late fifteenth century.

THE AGE OF THE LOCKSMITH. 145

of round iron. It seems as if the German smiths were already
courting difficulties in order to display their skill. These grilles
are complicated by rings and other ornaments interlaced in the
bars, and are associated with richly traceried cornices, twisted
and moulded vertical bars, armorial bearings, etc.

Bound up with the development of the trellis grille was that of
the Passion-flower. A richer form than the thistle was needed
for the termination of the standard bars and the intricate crest-
ings associated with them. This seems to have been supplied by
elaborating the ordinary twelfth-century iris or fleur-de-lis, which
consisted of two inner elevated, and two outer recurved petals,
and two stamens. Like all other forms that passed into the
hands of German smiths, this became rapidly complicated, until
the result bears a somewhat strong resemblance to the Passion-
flower. The mystic sentiment associated with the Flos passionis
from its earliest discovery would appeal strongly to so imaginative
a people, and the form of flower soon became a favourite. Its
interest was due to a fancied resemblance of its flower to the
implements of the Passion. Thus its corona was the crown of
thorns, its stamens the nails or wounds, and its petals and sepals
symbolised ten of the apostles. The effect of fervid imagination
is seen in the illustrations of the flower in contemporary botanical
works. The fully developed type in ironwork belongs, however,
to the Renaissance, and consists of a spindle-shaped coil of wire
for the pistil, with elongated hammer-shaped stamens, and slender
recurved petals. We shall meet with it again in our second
volume.

, INDEX.

[Proper names incidentally mentioned are not indexed.}

Africa, 9, 27

Agricola, 14

Aitchison, 33

Alise, 35

Alloys, 2, 4

Alms-box, 124

Alsace, 62, 88, 163

America, 21-25

Amiens, 87, 112

Angers, 62

Anglo-Saxon, 38-45

Antiquity of the use of iron, 20

Antwerp, 121, 122

Aquitaine, 62

Arabic numerals, 1 1 1

Arras, 72

Arundel, 107, 108

Ashdon, 43

Assyria, 27-29

Augsburg, 132

Austria, 88

Auvergne, 6l, 62, 64

Auxerre, 73, 116

B

Babylon, 27
Hale, 90, 121
Bar iron, 12, 13
Basilicas, 67
Bauermann, 2^, 26
Bayeux, 112, 113
Bedfordshire hinges, 84
Belgium, 120-132
Bessemer prqcess, 1 8
Bibracte, 10, 35
Black country, 19, 29
Blast furnace, 13-15

Bloom, 10, II, 16
Bog ores, 5, 7, 14
Bohemia, 139, 142
Bourges, 35, 103
Brabant. I2O, 126-129
Braisne, 78
Breda, 123, 125
Britons, 9, 34, 36, 38-42
Brive, 112

Bronze grilles, 21, 66, 95
Bruck, 140
Bruges, 120
Brunswick, 88
Brussels, 120
Burgundy, 62
Burwash, 14
Byzantium, 60, 95

Caistor, 77

Cambridge, 107

Cancelli, 33

Candelabra, 42, 78, 112, 123, 124,

129, 134-137
Cannon, 121

Canterbury, 55, 63, 72, 103, 105, 106
Carbon in cast iron, 5, 13

in ores, 7

in steel, 4, 17

Carinthia, 133, 142

Carving, 115

Caskets, 119, 127

Casting, 15

Cast iron, peculiar qualities, 5, 13

in China, 13, 23

in Gaul and Britain, 14, 36

in Greece, 13, 31

, rediscovery of, 14

148

INDEX.

Cast iron gates at Hyde Park, 14

railings at St. Paul's, 14

tombstones, 14

Catalan furnace, 1 1

Cementation process, 17

Chablis, 62

Chafery, 12

Chaldea, 27

Chalons, 112

Chalybes, 28

Chalybon, 29

Champagne, 62

Chancel, 66

Chapelle ardente, 134

Charcoal iron, 14

Chartres, 63, 103, 116

Chasing, 29, 37

Chester, 83

Chests, 33

Chichester, 47, 53, 72, 104, no

China, 13, 17, 22-24, 29

Christchurch, 104

Cibyra, 29

Cleveland district, 16

Cleves, 129

Cley, 103

Cluny, 60, 72

Coal, 15, 16

Coflers, 119

Colchester, 42, 82, 86

Cologne, 33-37, 62, 88, 129, 133-137

Colour of iron, i

cast iron, 13

steel, 4

Compton Wynyates, 129
Conques, 72
Consumption of coal, 16

iron, 3

Coronae, 124, 134-137
Cosmic dust, 21
Courtrai, 123, 124
Coutances, 112
Cracow, 139
Crucible steel, 17
Crusades, 93
Currency, 10, 27, 32, 34, 36

D

Damascening, 35, 37
Damascus, 24, 27

Danes, 36, 37, 44, 45, 47, 48, 57, 73
Darby, 15

Decline of English smithing, 94, 106,
US

Delia Scala tomb-rails, 96
Destruction of ironwork, 72, 103, 1 12,

125

Dies, 77

Dijon,. 100, 103, 123
Discovery of cast iron, 13

smelting, 23, 30

Dome of the rock, 71
Du Chaillu, 59, 60
Dudley, 15
Durham, 50, 64

E

Eastern influence, 93, 105
Eastwood, 53
Edinburgh, 121
Edstaston, 53
Egyptians, 23, 25, 26
Eleanor grille, 81, 84

crosses, 86

Elementary substance, iron not an, 4

Ely, 1 08, 125

Embossing, 34, 35, 115, 142

Enamel, 36

Engineering, 3

English grilles, 67-73, 103-106

hinges, 47-57, 73-77, 87, 103,

in

Erfurt, 113, 139
Ethiopia, 27
Evreux, 117
Export, 3

Faringdon, 77

Farley, 107

Farrier, 66

Flamand hinge, 47

Flamboyant work, 117-119, 126-134

Flemish chests, 129

ironwork, 124-126

Fleur-de-lis, 45, 53, 90, 101, 105,
110-113, 122, 124, 132, 140, 145

Florence, 96-99

Folding lecterns, 124

Font-cranes, 122, 123, 133

Forest of Dean, 6, 12

P'rench grilles, 69, 100, 101, 1 16

hinges, 60-65, 73> 87> 88, 112,

116

locks, 117-119

Furnaces, 9, 10, 15

INDEX.

149

Gailhabaud, 69, 73, 134, 164

Gauls, 9, 10, 34-36, 38

German grilles, b8, 131, 132, 142,

143
hinges, 88-90, 113, 114, 132,

137, 138

ironwork, 129-145

Ghent, 120, 121, 124, 126

Gilding, 35, 37, 46, 48, 96, 105, 125,

128, 134, 142
Girders, 33

Greece, 13, 17, 22, 29, 30-32, 45
Grilles, Belg an, 120-126

, bronze, 66

, English, 67-73, 103-106

— , French, 67-73, 100-108, 116
, German, 88, 131, 132

— , Italian, 95-99
, Oriental, 66

— , Roman, 33, 39

, Spanish, 67, 68

Guichet, 116, 126, 128, 129
Guns, 121

H

Haddiscoe, 55

Hal, 121, 123-125

Hallstadt, 36

Hammer-pond, 1 1

Handles, 83, 108-111, 117, 129, 137

Hartley, 53

Hartlip, 41

Hebrews, 26, 28

Heidingsfeld, 132

Helve hammer, 11, 16

Henry of Lewes, 86

Hereford, in

Ilerse, 84, 124

Hildesheim, 88

Hinges, Belgian, Si, 120

, early forms of, 46

, English, 46-57, 73-77, 87, 103,

in
, French, 60-65, 73, 87, 88, 112,

116
, German, 88, 113, 114, 132, 137,

138

— , Norse, 57-60
Hormead, 50
Hot blast, 16
Hunstanton, 77, 86, 103

He de France, 78, Sr, 89, 116
India, 10, 17, 22, 24, 94
Inlaying, 31, 35, 37
Ireland, 43, 44
Iris, 145
Isemberg, 14
Israelites, 26, 28
Italian grilles, 95-99

1

Jacquemart, 123
Jewels, 2, 14
Josse Matsys, 122
Jura, 9

Kaisheim, 88
Karlstein, 142
Keinpen, 126, 129, 136
Kenilworth, 55
Kingston Lisle, 55
Klagenfurt, 132
Krems, 142
Kutb Mosque, 94

L

i Lahneck, 114

Langeac, 101
: Laon, 88

Le Berri, 64
] Lecterns, 124
• Leghton, 77, Si, 84, 86
! Leicester, 53

I Le Puy-en-Velay, 62, 69, 100, 105
j Le Secq des Tournelles, 69, 101
| Lichfield, 83
i Liege, 81, 121
i Lierre, 123, 135

! L'ger> !3< 33> 39
Lincoln, 69, 71, 77, 87
Liquefaction, 13
Locks, 1 1 8, 119, 122, 126, 128, 129,

136, 137

Louvain, 120, 122, 124-126
Low Countries, I2O
Luncberg, 132

Magdeburg, 90, 135. 143
Mantes, 78

INDEX.

Marburg, 89, 113

Market Deeping, 75

Marseilles, 35

Massagetse, 29

Matsys, 122, 124-127

Mechlin, 120, 121

Medes, 29

Merton College, 83

Meteorites, 7, 21, 22, 25

Mexicans, 25

Mining, 9

Money, 32, 34

Mons, 121

Montreal, 62

Mont St. Michel, 112, 121

N

Nails, 116, 119, 140, 142
Nancy, 101
Naples, 33, 34
Nasmyth, 16
Native iron, 7
Netherlands, 120
Nineveh, 27, 28
Normandy, 61
Norman smiths, 66
Norse hinges, 57-60
Norwich, 83
Nonnburg, 134
Noyon, 72, 78, 112
Nuremberg, 138

O

Oberdiebach, 134

Oberwesel, 113, 114

Ores, 5-8

Oriental influence, 93, 108, 115

Orvieto, 97, 99

Osnabriick, 124, 134

Ottoburg, 132

Ourscamp, 69

Oxford, 83

Palasades, 12
Paris, 72, 79, 101, 103
Parish chests, 86
Parker, 45, 46, 64, 96
Paschal candlesticks, 78, 112
Passion-flower, 145
Patent, first, 15
Percy, Dr., IO, 13, 14

Persia, 23, 29, 94

Perugia, 96, 98

Phoenicia, 29

Pig iron, 15, 16

Plants used decoratively —

Acanthus, 135

Agave, 98

Corn, 84

Iris, 73, 145

Lily, 73, 87, 101, 124. See also
Fleur-de-lis

Passion-flower, 145

Peascod, 75, 87

Rose, 105, 117, 125, 126

Thistle, 135-139

Vine, 75-86, 89, 90, 97, 113, 114,

121, 122, 135'

Yucca, 98
Poland, 139
Polishing, 31
Pompeii, 10, 32-34
Pontigny, 62
Pontus, 29
Poole, H., 12
Prague, 142
Prato, 97

Prehistoric, 20-23, 34
Primitive tools, 10
Production, 7, 12, 15
Puddling, 16
Pulpit, 124, 134
Pure iron, I, 7

Qualities of steel, 4

Quentin Matsys, 122-125, 127

R

Railways, 3
Rastellum, 133
Rendcombe, III
Rhenish, 113
Roger Johnson, 105
Rolling-mills, 12-16
Romanesque hinges, 47-65, 88
Romans, 10, 32-38
Rouen, 77, 78, 99, 101, 112, 116
Royal Domain, 63, 66, 8 1

Saint Albans, 55, 72, 104
Chapelle, 103, 108, 112

INDEX.

Saint Denis, 61, 72, 79, 81, 84, 100,
101

George's Chapel, 83, 127

Germains, 39

Germer, 72

Jean-des-Choux, 62

John's College, 107

Martin, 47

Omer, 116

Patrick, 44

Paul's, 14

Quentin, 101

Salisbury, 104

Samarkand, 29

Santa Croce, 99, 105

Saracenic influence, 95, 105, 109, 132

Sauvageot Collection, 116

Scandinavians, 36, 37

Schliemann, 30

Schmalkalden, 90

Scientific applications, i

Scythians, 29

Selsey, 47

Semperingham, 75

Sens, 78

Sericum ferrum, 24

Sheet iron, 93, 100, 105, 110, 115,

116, 122-145
lining to doors, 112, 114, 116,

139-142
Shingling, 16
Ships, Roman, 31

, Viking, 44

Siderites, 22
Sidonians, 29
Siegen, 14
Siemens, 18
Siena, 97
Skipwith, 50
Slags, 7, 15
Slitting-mills, 12
Smelting, 9, 23
Smiths —

Biscornet, 80

Bovinio di Campilione, 96

Butsch, A. F., 137

Conte Lelli de Senis, 97

Gert Bulsinck, 134

Gull. Runnelli, 96

Henry of Lewes, 86

Jean de Cuyper, 121

Josse Matsys, 122

Mathurin Jousse, 80

Quentin Matsys, 122

Roger Johnson, 105

S m i ths — con tin ued.

St. Dunstan, 45

St. Eloi, 80

Thomas de Leghton. See Leghton
Smithing, 90, 91
Soils, 5

Spain, 32, 34, 35, 67
Spanish grilles, 67, 68
Sparsholt, 55
Spiegeleisen, 18
Stamping iron, 77, 83
Stanchion, 103
Staplehurst, 48
Steel, 4, 17, 18
Stillingfleet, 48
Stockbury, no
Stogumber, no
Stone Age, 21
Strength of iron, 4
Stiickofen, 14
Styria, 142
Sun, 5

Sweden, 6, 14, 50, 57-60
Superiority of old iron, 12, 91

Tabernacle grilles, 132, 142

Tempering steel, 18, 32

Terni anvil, 18

Thistle, i35-J39

Threaded work, IOC, 126

Tiefenau, 36

Tinning, 35, 37, 46, 48, 136

Tomb-rails, 106-108

Tombstones, 36

Toulouse, 108

Tournai, 123, 124

Tracery in iron, 100, 101, 105, no,

114, 116, 122-134
Transition, 93
Trellis pattern, 100, 101, 104, 126,

142, 143
Troy, 30

Troyes, 87, 101, in, 116
Tunstal), 84
Turanians, 29

u

Uffington, 77

Value of iron, I
Venetian grilles, 96

152

INDEX.

Venice, 67, 95

Verona, 95, 96

Vezelay, 78

Vienna, 139, 142

Vine, 75-86> 89, 9°. 97. "3' "4»

121, 122

Viollet le Due, 61-63, 69, 79, 100,

105, 116

W

Wady Meghara, 25, 26

Waste of iron, 3

Weather-cocks, 45

Welding, 24, 31, 90, 91

Well-covers, 122, 123

Wells, 75, 104, 107, 112, 135

Westminster Abbey, 82, 84, 86, 104,

106, 107, 112
William of Sens, 103
Willingale Spain, 50, 53

Winchester, 67, 68, no, 1 1 1

Window grilles, 101, 103

Windsor, 83, 127

Wootz, 17, 24

Worksop, 73

Wrought iron, quality of, 16, 18

Wurree Gaon, 24

Xanten, 121, 129, 138

Y

York, 83
Ypres, 120, 123

Znaim, 142
Zutphen, 123, 126

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