When this corn to the kniht was sold,
He did it in an arc to hold,
And opened this arc the third day.
In the other it was more carefully put together. The trick of its secret spring, known only to the housewife and her lord—sometimes I dare say, only to the latter—it contained all the treasure the family could boast. Here were kept what parchments they possessed; here lay stored up fold on fold of household linen, venerated by the female inmates nearly as much as the grandmothers themselves, whose thrifty fingers had woven it in days long past and gone. We see thus that upon the whole the wright wrought his manufacture out of his own more specific material, seldom, at any rate, poaching upon the preserves of his friend the smith. The smith worked in iron and the metals. This good old Saxon name, with the many quaint changes that have been rung upon it, deserves a whole chapter to itself. How then can we hope to do justice to it in a few sentences? We do not know where to begin, and having once begun, the difficulty at once arises as to where we can end. How few of us reflect upon the close connexion that exists between the anvil and the smith himself, and yet it is because he smote thereupon that he got his name. As old Verstigan has it:—
From whence comes Smith, all be he knight or squire,
But from the smith that forgeth at the fire?
Putting in all the needs which in this agricultural age his occupation would be necessary to supply, still we could scarcely account for the enormous preponderance he has attained over other artisans, did we not remember that his services would also be required in the production of warlike implements. Sword and ploughshare alike would be to his hands. Chaucer speaks of:—
The smith
That forgeth sharpe swords on the stith.
Between and including the years 1838 and 1854 there were registered as born, or married, or dead, no less than 286,307 Smiths. Were we indeed to put into one community the persons who bear this name in our land, we should have a town larger than Leeds, and scarcely inferior in size and importance to that of the capital of the midland counties.