Transport for Eighteenth Century Ironworks

In the early eighteenth century iron manufacturers had to overcome the difficulty of providing transport to and from their works. Where there were no navigable rivers the difficulty lay not so much in bad roads as in few carriers. Public carriers did exist: an Act of I69I enabled J.P.'s in every county to license them and to fix the rates which they charged. Much has been written about these public carriers but none of the historians of transportation has paid any serious attention to a more numerous group-the crickers and husbandmen-hauliers. A large amount of transport was needed to carry iron to and from the ironworks and also to bring in charcoal from scattered coppices which were often not to be reached except by tracks fit only for pack-animals. A pointer to a solution is to be found in the way in which a private individual tackled the same problem on a much smaller scale. Thomas Clewes, an eighteenth-century blacksmith at Kinver, owned no horses and therefore hired a neighbour Sam Browne to plough and harrow his land. Browne also did any odd hauling required, whether it was carrying muck for the fields or bar iron for the smithy. There was in fact a large number of these petty carriers, ranging from the husbandman who did a little hauling in his spare time to the cricker who used his land almost wholly to provide fodder for his horses. Very often tenants were forced to perform a certain amount of hauling by the conditions of their leases. Such leases were, of course, the result of agreements between the landowner and the ironmaster to the advantage of both parties. This is clearly shown in the assignment by Frances Jewkes to Edward Knight of the lease of Wolverley Forge (May I731) which includes certain conditions relating to carrying for the forge. Frances agreed that for ten years the carriage of pig-iron to, and of bars from, the forge should be done by the tenants of her farms at Wolverley who were to work at

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