William Levett (vicar)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Levett ( -1554) was the Oxford-educated vicar of the village of Buxted, Sussex, who helped establish the iron foundry industry in England. The first iron cannon manufactured in England was cast in Buxted in 1543 by Ralf Hogge, an employee of Parson Levett, a Sussex rector with broad interests, paradoxically enough, in the emerging English armaments industry.[1]

early French cannon
early French cannon

Reverend Levett was born in Sussex, likely the son of Richard Levett, a large landowner and descendant of a knightly Anglo-Norman family who owned the manor of Catsfield Levett (now simply Catsfield), as well as property across Sussex, including in Hollington, St. Leonards-on-Sea, Bulverhythe, Firle, Hastings, Bexhill-on-Sea and elsewhere.[2] Rev. Levett's brother John, who lived at Little Horsted, Sussex, leveraged the family's landholdings into one of the earliest iron foundries in the Weald of Sussex.[3]

Iron foundries required immense amounts of wood, converted into charcoal, to smelt the iron in blast furnaces. Timber and ore were the raw materials of smelted iron: each furnace required a permanent wood-lined pit for casting. The earliest cannons cast by the foundry belonging to the Levetts were of the Italianate style originating in Venice and copied by the English. By adapting the European style, the English turned Sussex and Kent into the center of the European gun-making industry.[4]

Iron smelting was not new to the Sussex Weald: the Romans had a forge at Oldlands in Buxted, where their coins have been found. But the large-scale forging of weaponry was new. In a very short period of time the English made themselves masters of the art of gun-making. The Sussex landscape is sprinkled with names redolent of the forges: Furnace Wood, Furnace Pond, Minepit Wood, Little Forge, Culver Wood, Slag Meadow, Huggett's Furnace, and Hammerpond.

The earliest cannons were crude affairs, "mere cylinders," wrote Sussex historian Thomas Horsfield, "fixed on sledges, and were sometimes composed of iron bars, laid side by side like the staves of a cask, and held together by iron hoops."[5] These early cannons were so inferior to those made on the continent that the English Ordinance Office simply ordered abroad, importing cannons and even shot from Europe.

But in the 1540s all that changed. "With the conscious patronage and support of the crown," notes historian N.A.M. Rodger, "the established iron industry in the Weald of Kent and Sussex was encouraged to experiment with gunfounding iron. The first iron muzzle-loaders were cast at Buxted in 1543." In 1545, Parson Levett was ordered to produce 120 of his state-of-the-art cannons as well as a large amount of ammunition. Suddenly the English iron-masters had become the yardstick by which armorers were measured. Because of the proximity of timber, the importation of foreign (primarily French) ironworkers, and effective new forging methods, the English guns were superior to those manufactured on the European continent. The new English guns were so effective that laws were quickly passed to prevent their export to enemies on the Continent.

William Levett served Buxted as its vicar for 22 years, from 1533 to 1554[6] at St. Margarets parish church. But in 1535, two years into Levett's tenure as parish vicar, Levett's elder brother John died. The founder of the family's interest in iron founding, John Levett instructed the executors of his will (which included his brother Rev. William) to continue operating his "Irron mylles and furnesses" and to devote the profits to providing for his young children. At the time of his death, John Levett was already operating several furnaces in Sussex, producing ironworks.

By 1539, four years after the death of John Levett, parson William Levett had taken over the reins of his brother's pioneering enterprise. And he was selling iron and ironwork to the Board of Ordnance in London. A couple years later, in 1541, Levett was supplying shot to the royal forces. The King appointed the armigerous Levett his chief "goonstone maker."

Nor was Parson Levett confining his iron foundering to Sussex. Contemporaneous records show that Levett was also producing munitions and weaponry at a site close by the Tower of London, where the Royal stores of armaments were warehoused.

Parson Levett had taken to his new sideline. Apparently he was a natural, so efficient that the Privy Council appointed him in 1546 to oversee the Sussex iron mines that had belonged to the attainted Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and were confiscated by the Crown.[7] Levett employed master gun founders Charles Garrete and Pierre Baude at his Buxted furnace, as well as five other aliens (probably Frenchmen) in 1543, and six in 1550. By 1543 Levett was the leading supplier of cast-iron muzzle-loading cannons to the English forces. The discovery of one of Levett's two-pound cannons stamped with the monogram of King Henry VIII and dated 1543 -- seized by the Spanish in Oudewater in Holland in 1575 -- proved that Levett succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.[8]

"In the begyning," said Ralf Hogge in a statement of 1573, "there was none that cast any gonnes or shott of yron but only pson (parson) Levet who was my mr. (master) and my p'decessor who mayde none but only for the service of the Kynges matie (majesty)."

A vicar who changed the face of warfare
A vicar who changed the face of warfare

By 1553, the Board of Ordnance in London had purchased more than 250 of Levett's guns. At a stroke, this English parson who had the armaments business thrust on him by death in the family had morphed into a full-blown entrepreneur. Iron casting and cannon-making became England's first modern industrial economy. Old landowning families like the Sidneys, the Carylls, the Coverts and the Gratwickes rushed to cash in on the boom, which lasted for more than two centuries. The wars of Henry VIII were good for business: the 20 blast furnaces and 28 forges in Sussex in 1549 more than doubled in 25 years to 50 furnaces and 60 forges. The secret was in the English method of vertical casting.[9]

The feudalism of medieval rural England was yielding to changing times. Wealth, as defined by landholding, was once monopolized by the ancient gentry. But the developments of the age of iron were stoking the ambitions of the entrepreneurs of the first industrial age. Among the earliest beneficiaries of this change were some of England's oldest families: the Nevilles, the Sackvilles, the Sidneys, the Boleyns, the Dudleys and the Howards.[10] Their enormous landholdings translated into wood for furnaces, and combined with their political clout, made them candidates for the ranks of the magnates of the coming iron age. They and their servants became ironmasters.

But the simultaneous increase in the availability of capital, the changing flux of technology (metallurgy), the availability of skilled foreign labor and the rise of an educated middle class meant that iron-making in the Weald would presage change across England. It would, in many ways, pave the way for the rise of the new industrial middle class.[11] A trade consisting mostly of weapons would evolve into other more common tools as well: fire-backs, andirons, anvils, hammers, pots and pans and even grave slabs.

At the same time the constant threat of Scottish and Spanish conflict, culminating in the Spanish Armada of 1588, hung over the iron trade and gave it resilience: one couldn't have enough cannons. That fact, combined with the new age of exploration and the rise of England's naval power, meant that there was an almost unlimited demand for the new armaments.

The towns of the Weald in Sussex and Kent were well-placed to capitalize on the new demand. Buxted, for instance, sat on the edge of the Ashdown Forest, an ancient demesne covering some 13,000 acres. Few woods matched the oaks of southern England for burning. Much of the woodland was in the hands of the old gentry families of the Sussex and Kent Weald.

The old county aristocracy would lead the way, making hay from the early adoption of this new technology. But capitalism is creative destruction. The adoption of the new technology sowed the eventual demise of the old feudal landowning aristocracy. A new class of merchant-adventurers, inventors, innovators, and industrialists would slowly begin to displace the old landed fatcats.[12]

Eventually, the dwindling woods of the Weald, combined with new coke-fired technology, pushed England's ironworking industry north toward the Midlands and abundant coal. In the intervening two centuries, though, the Weald pulsed with industrial activity, providing jobs and riches to those willing to navigate the ever-changing technology.

As for Parson Levett, he became a very, very rich man. His brother John was one of the largest landowners in Sussex. At his death, John Levett died possessed of more than 20 manors across the county. At his death nearly 20 years later, Reverend William Levett's will shows that he fared even better. The voluminous document, in which Levett named Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu as executor, demonstrates the riches that accrued to the entrepreneurs of the coming iron age.

It happens that one of the first was a parson who, caught between the Bible and the bullet, chose both. It was as if the Archbishop of Canterbury moonlighted as the ceo of Northrop Grumman. Levett never gave up his job as vicar as he became an ironmaster. But if Levett's straddling of the gulf between the military-industrial complex and the Holy Scripture troubled him, there was little sign of it, save for extensive donations to charity in his will.

In that document, parson Levett left money for repairs to Buxted Church and to the parsonage. He also left funds to the 'poor householders' of Buxted, as well as monies to provide for meat every Sunday for the local poor, as well as herrings and wheat during Lent for the poor of Buxted, Uckfield and Cowden for seven years. Levett also left £100 to be given to poor scholars by his executors on the advice of Levett's friends the Lord Chancellor, the Bishop of Winchester and Sir Anthony Browne. Levett's will, in which he bestowed more than 40 individual bequests, shows this ironmaster clergyman with a law degree was no ordinary country vicar.

The Levett iron interests fell to the heirs of parson Levett's brother John, chiefly the Eversfield, Chaloner and Pope families. Following Rev. Levett's death, his former servant Hogge carried on the manufacture of iron until Hogge's death in 1585. In his will over thirty years before, Levett made provisions for his young employee, leaving Hogge four pounds in cash and 'six tonne of sows' (a long piece of cast iron made by running molten metal into a sand mold). That simple gesture spoke to the success of their unlikely collaboration. Hogge's name became synonymous with Wealden iron-founding, but it was parson Levett who paved the way.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Will of William Levett, Buxted the Beautiful, K.H. Macdermott, Pell & Son, Brighton, 1929
  2. ^ Sussex Archaeological Collections Relating to the History and Antiquities of the County, John Russell Smith, London, 1858
  3. ^ At Buxted the Levett family purchased their foundry property from their kinsman Edmund Pope, who had bought the land from George Nevill, 5th Baron Bergavenny.
  4. ^ Sussex Cavalcade, Arthur R. Ankers,1997
  5. ^ The History, Antiquities and Topography of the County of Sussex, Thomas Walker Horsfield, Sussex Press, Lewes, 1835, theweald.org
  6. ^ The Weald of Kent, Surrey & Sussex, theweald.org
  7. ^ The Archaelogical Journal, British Archaeological Association, Bloomsbury Square, London, 1912
  8. ^ The lordship of Canterbury, iron-founding at Buxted, and the continental antecedents of cannon-founding in the Weald, Brian Awty, Christopher Whittick, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 2002
  9. ^ Elizabeth's Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544-1604, Paul E.J. Hammer, Great Britain, 2004
  10. ^ Iron and an Early Military-Industrial Complex, University of California at Davis
  11. ^ Wealth and Society in Early Sixteenth Century England, Julian Cornwall, Routledge Press, Great Britain, 1988
  12. ^ Alexander Nesbitt, a Sussex antiquary, and the Oldlands Estate, Janet H. Stevenson, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 1999

[edit] External links

[edit] Further reading