The Foley Partnerships

T 1HROUGH the courtesy of a descendant of the Foley family, which for several generations in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries shared in the control of a not inconsiderable part of the charcoal-iron industry in Britain, a number of ironworks' account books have been made available for study by the present writer.' Taken together with the Cartwright Hall MSS. (dealt with in an earlier paper in this journal)2, which overlap to a small degree with the Foley MSS., they help to provide a wide coverage of the late seventeenth-century industry. The extent of this coverage can be measured from the earliest known list of furnaces and forges in Britain, compiled in I7I7.3 All but three of the ironworks for which the Foley MSS. provide accounts, are shown in Fig. i, which also includes works referred to in the accounts and in other contemporary MSS. prior to 1717. The table on pp. 324-5 lists the ironworks by regions, with the periods for which accounts have been examined.4 The output of many of these works is summarized in an appendix. It will be appreciated that these account books contain a formidable amount of information, only a fraction of which can be incorporated in a short paper. At least five different methods of book-keeping are represented, which vary widely in the detail recorded. Some accounts are mere summaries of the year's output and the balances of materials remaining in stock; others particularize every farthing of expenditure with an embarrassing wealth of detail, but with little attempt at classifying the information. A further difficulty encountered is due to the different periods covered by the accounts of the various works. As the list shows

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