FLOODS.
To quote from our “History of Broseley”:—
In modern times these can to some extent be guarded against, as the news of any sudden extraordinary rise in the upper basin may be communicated to those living lower down. Formerly this could not be done; a flood would then travel faster than a letter, and coming down upon the villagers suddenly, perhaps in the night time, people would find the enemy had entered their households unawares. It was no unusual thing to see haystacks, cattle, timber, furniture, and, in one instance, we have heard old people tell of a child in a cradle, floating down the stream. Many of these floods are matters of tradition; others being associated with special events have been recorded. Shakespeare has commemorated one called “Buckingham’s Flood,” in his Richard III., thus:—
“The news I have to tell your majesty
Is,—that, by sudden floods and fall of waters
Buckingham’s army is dispersed and scatter’d
And he himself wandered away alone,
No man knows whither.”Proclaimed a traitor, and forsaken by his army, he concealed himself in the woods on the banks of the Severn and was betrayed and taken in Banister’s Coppice, near Belswardine.
The newspapers of 1785 record a sudden rise in the Severn and its disastrous results. It appears that on the 17th of December, 1794, the season was so mild that fruit-trees were in blossom, whilst early in January, 1795, so much ice filled the Severn after a rapid thaw as to do great damage. The river rose at Coalbrookdale 25¼ inches higher than it did in November, 1770. The rise in the night was so rapid that a number of the inhabitants were obliged to fly from their tenements, leaving their goods at the mercy of the floods. The publicans were great sufferers, the barrels being floated and the bungs giving way. In the Swan and White Hart, Ironbridge, the water was several feet deep. Two houses were washed away below the bridge, but the bridge itself stood the pressure, although Buildwas bridge blew up, the river having risen above the keystone in the centre of the main arch. Crowds visited the locality to see the flood and the ruins it had made.
On the Coalbrookdale Warehouse, and on a house by the side of the brook, the height of these floods are to be seen recorded. At Worcester, a little above the bridge, a brass plate has the following inscription:—“On the 12th February, 1795, the Flood rose to the lower edge of this plate.” The lower edge measures just three feet from the pavement level. Another plate at the archway opposite the Cathedral bears the following:—“On the 18th November, 1770, the Flood rose to the lower edge of this Brass Plate, being ten inches higher than the Flood which happened on December 23rd, 1672.” This measures seven feet from the ground immediately underneath.
There are three other marks which have been cut out the stonework on the wall adjacent to the archway referred to, which are as follows:—
“Feb. 8th, 1852.
Nov. 15th, 1852.
Aug. 5th, 1839.”The one in February measures from the ground six feet two inches; November, 1852, eight feet two inches; and the one August 5th, 1839, six feet two inches.
COALBROOKDALE.
As an important part of the parish of Madeley, still more as a locality famous on account of its fine castings and other productions, Coalbrookdale is deserving of a much further notice than has incidentally been given on previous pages in speaking of the Darbys and Reynoldses. There are few people perhaps in the kingdom who have not heard or who do not know something of Coalbrookdale; and there are none, probably, who pass through it by rail who do not peer through the windows of the carriage to catch a passing glimpse of its more prominent features. These may be readily grouped, for the benefit of those who have not seen them, but who may read this book, as follows. In the trough of the valley lie the works, stretching along in the direction of the stream, formerly of more importance to the operations carried on in the various workshops than it is at present. Upon the slope of the hill on the south-eastern side the Church, the palatial looking Literary and Scientific Institute, built for the benefit of the workmen, meet the eye, and the more humble looking Methodist chapel. On both sides are goodly looking houses and villa-like residences, where dwell the men of directing minds; whilst here and there are thin sprinklings of workmen’s cottages—few in number compared with the hands employed. A few strips of grass land intervene, whilst above are wooded ridges with pleasant walks, and to the west some curiously rounded knolls, between which the Wellington and Craven Arms branch railway runs, sending down a siding for the accommodation of the works.
These are the chief features which strike the eye, and which would come out into prominence in photographic views taken to shew what Coalbrookdale now is. The buildings are comparatively of modern construction, but quaint half-timbered houses, rejoicing in the whitewash livery of former times, suggest a phase of Coalbrookdale history much anterior to that other buildings indicate. It is not difficult indeed to depict the earlier stages of the progress the little valley has passed through from its first primitive aspect to the present; there are, for instance, in some of its many windings green nooks and pleasant corners where nature yet reigns, and where lovers of a quiet ramble may feast their eyes and indulge their imaginations, undisturbed by the hammering, and whirl of wheels, lower down. Such a spot is that to which the visitor is led by following the stream above the pool, crossed by a footbridge. To the left of the path is Dale House, Sunnyside, the Friends Meeting House, and the road to Little Wenlock. Little is seen of the brook on the right of the path, but its presence on the margin of the slope is made known beneath over-hanging bushes by prattlings over stones, and a waterfall from some ledges of rock. Following it higher up it is found to be partially fed by droppings from rocks dyed by mineral colours of varying hue, and to present curious petrifactions, rarely permitted however to attain any great proportions. The place is variously called La Mole and Lum Hole, and speculations have been indulged in as to each derivation. The former would, of course, suggest a French origin. Lum is Welsh, and signifies a point, as in Pumlummon, now ordinarily called Plinlimmon, or the hill with five points. It is quite certain that the valley here terminates in a point, but whether this has anything to do with it or not we cannot say. All we say of it is that it is a quiet little sylvan retreat, with wooded heights, green slopes, and precipitous yellow rocks, at the foot of which the stream is treasured up and forms a glassy lakelet. But this stream, in which six centuries since “Lovekin” the fisherman set his baited lines, long ago was made to do other service than that of soothing the listening ear, or paying tribute of its trout to the abbot of Wenlock. The choice of the situation for manufacturing operations was no doubt due to woods like these, which supplied the needed fuel; but much more to the motive power furnished by the stream, for turning the great wheels required to produce the blast, and work the ponderous hammers which shaped the metal.
Brave and strong as these Dale men were, their muscles were too weak for the work demanded. As Vulcan found he needed stronger journeymen than those of flesh and blood to forge the thunderbolts of Jove, so an imperative necessity, a growing demand, led men here to seek a more compelling force to blow their leathern bellows, to lift their huge forge hammers, than animal force could supply. Woods were no longer estimated by pannage yielded for swine, but by the fuel supplied for reducing the stubborn ore to pigs of another kind. Brooks were pounded up, streams were turned back upon themselves, and their treasured waters husbanded as a capital of force to be disposed of as occasion required. Dryads now fled the woods and Naiads the streams,—as beams and shafts and cranks were reared or creaked beneath the labours they performed.
The presence of coal and iron ore could not have been inducements for the first ironworkers to settle here; neither tradition nor facts warrant the supposition that either were ever found in the valley. The first syllable of the name is deceptive, and the probability is that it was neither Coal nor Cole-brook originally, although coal appears to have been brought here for use more than five centuries ago from places just outside. Wood fuel seems to have been growing scarce as far back as the first quarter of the fourteenth century, judging from an application on the part of a Walter de Caldbrook to the Prior of Wenlock, to whom the manor belonged, for a license to have a man to dig coals in “Le Brockholes” for one year. It is not unlikely that this Walter de Caldbrook had a forge or smithy in the Dale; a situation chosen on account of the stream, which served to furnish him with motive power for his machinery. This seems all the more probable from the fact that distinct mention of such smithy is made in Henry the Eighth’s time, and that it is called “Smithy Place,” and “Caldbrooke Smithy,” [277] in the deed or grant by which the manor was conveyed by the King to Robert Brook, signed at Westminster and dated July 23, 1544. (See page 59). The fact too that this smithy was still called Caldbrook Smithy strengthens the suppositious, both as to the name and as to the fact that the Caldbrookes used the Brockholes coal for their smithy in the Dale. For smith’s work coal has always been preferred to wood; but the word smithy did not then strictly mean what it now does; that is a smith’s shop; but a place where iron was made in blooms. Thus the “Smithies,” near Willey, at present so called, was a place where there were small iron-making forges, as heaps of slag there now testify; which forges were blown with leathern bellows, by means of water power, a man having to tread them to increase the pressure.
Again, the word “Place,” which is a Saxon term for locality, situation, or a particular portion of space, itself indicates an establishment on a scale greater than a modern smithy. The words in the deed are “Smithy Place and New House.” And again, “the rights and privileges attached to the whole of the place and buildings that go under the name of The Smithy Place, and Newhouse, called Caldbrooke Smithy, with its privileges” &c. This Newhouse long ago, no doubt, had become an old house. At any rate we know of no house answering to this description at present, unless it is the half-timbered house near the Lower Forge; and if so this house must be about 100 years older than the one which has the date upon it at the forge higher up, shewing it to have been built a century later, or in 1642: and both forges no doubt were then in existence. The latter would be about the period when the flame of Civil War was bursting forth in various parts of the kingdom, and when Richard Baxter, whose old house still stands at Eaton Constantine, was witnessing the battle of Edgehill and others. This old house is such a fair specimen of the half-timbered structures of two centuries and a half or three centuries ago that we add a representation.
There are a number of square iron plates at the Lower Forge supposed to have been hearth-plates, with the following dates and initials:—