Simon Grant-Jones A.W.C.B, Cert.Ed,..... blacksmith

Gold is for the mistress -- silver for the maid --
Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.
"Good!" said the Baron, sitting in his hall,
"But Iron -- Cold Iron -- is master of them all."
Rudyard Kipling

A Blacksmith makes many kinds of tools and other objects out of metal. He heats the metal in the forge to make it soft, and then hammers it on an Anvil to shape it. The first metals used were Bronze and Iron. Iron was found to be more readily available and cheaper to produce. Its properties were more useful and desirable than Bronze. Iron is still used today but is nearly always alloyed with carbon to make steel, the steel can then be mixed or alloyed with other metals such as nickel to make steels with special properties. There are two main methods of metalworking used to produce decorative and functional items.....Forging and casting.

Iron Production
Iron was smelted from the ore in a blast furnace and the molten iron allowed to run from the furnace into a bed of sand. There were shallow gutters shaped in the sand with several channels diverting from the main gutter to form a herringbone pattern. The iron was allowed to set hard in these channels. The iron could then be broken into manageable pieces for re-work. These channels were said to resemble the shape of a sow suckling her litter, so the iron was given the name "pig iron". This type of iron was high in carbon and therefore very brittle when solid. It could not be hammered, but it could be re-melted and cast into moulds and also heat treated to make it even harder and more wear resistant. This became known as "CAST IRON"
Cast iron could be re-melted and "puddled" in a special furnace to produce wrought iron. This furnace allowed the metal to be heated and the carbon and other impurities drawn off from the molten metal, it was also stirred or "puddled" with a rod to help with the process. The semi- molten metal was then dragged from the furnace in large lumps and hammered under a steam or water powered hammer or even by hand with sledge hammers. This would then be rolled in different shaped rollers to give various stock bar sizes. Wrought means literally "by hand". As this process was done mainly by hand, this metal was named "WROUGHT IRON". This was the metal of the blacksmiths craft and anything produced with it was known as wrought iron work. Today this metal is now extinct and has been superceded by steel, but decorative forged work is still known as wrought ironwork.

The role of the Blacksmith

The role of the Blacksmith was very diverse not only was he the local toolmaker and "engineer" he was sometimes called upon to act as Dentist, Doctor, Undertaker,Veterinary surgeon and horse dealer. He would also usually hold important offices in the village such as magistrate or Church warden. He would be the obvious choice for these positions as his job demanded a certain level of intelect, numeracy skills and business sense.
The age of the horse was a great source of employment for the old time Blacksmiths and the decline of horses being used for transport and labour has brought about the demise of the traditional country smithy.
The Blacksmith was at the heart of every country village and was very often thought of as a magician, due mostly to his mastery of iron working and the ability to understand the metallurgy of the iron that he used. He knew how to alloy the iron with carbon to produce small amounts of "crucible steel". This could be hardened and tempered to hold a cutting edge. Carbon could be added to iron by heating the iron in a metal box containing a carbon rich compound such as bone dust or powdered hooves and allowing to "cook" for several hours. This would give a hard casing to the object and is called CASE HARDENING. These secret processes were responsible for many Blacksmiths being burnt as witches and wizards. Some villages banned Blacksmithing as a black art in the middle ages with anyone caught practicing the craft being put to death. What went on in the darkness of the smithy was a mystery to most people. Many stories evolved about the man of fire, and some people say that this is where the stories of the Devil in burning hell started.
Blacksmiths were once employed to mend carts and wagons, to make the wheel bonds (metal tyres) that would be shrunk onto the wheels and naves (hubs) of cartwheels, to provide the horse shoes and fit them, to make countless designs of horse drawn implements and associated draught gear...................the list goes on. These skills along with those of armourer, bladesmith, chainmaker, nailmaker, tool maker, rivetmaker and swordsmith have now been consigned largely to the history books.
On a more practical day to day level, the Blacksmiths Knew how to keep a fire going all year round, so he was often asked to make space near his forge or even in a seperate brick or stone box, which in time became known as an oven, for bread to be baked or meat to be roasted. We know that in later times when the Blacksmith stopped work for the day, the hot coals were scooped up and rushed to the Bakery to heat the ovens to bake the bread. In many communities bread was baked at night using the hot embers from the smithy.

Simon specializes in craftsmans tools. Thatchers, wheelwrights, stone masons, they have all become specialist crafts with all tools being made to order as they are no longer always available to buy as standard. Simon also makes replica tools, weapons and other artifacts that are used by history groups to re-enact famous battles or life scenes to show how people lived in the past. He also makes items used in museums and by Archaeologists to re-creat and study experimental Archaeology.

So what is the History of the Blacksmith?
The skills probably began in what we call the "Iron age". Someone obviously discovered that some types of rock would give up a substance when exposed to high heat that would become solid when cooled. This substance could be used to make simple tools like knives and scrapers and eventually spear and arrow heads that were much tougher and sharper than stone. A simple process to produce wrought iron, that we now call direct reduction, was in use in the middle East more than four thousand years ago.
Nothing much changed for hundreds of years until it was discovered how to make charcoal to burn at very high temperatures and how to find and extract better quality iron from the ore. The earliest method of producing Iron was a small furnace built of clay called a bloomery, the fuel was charcoal, made to burn hotter by using manually operated bellows. Small pieces of Iron ore were placed in with the charcoal, and after several hours a small piece of "fist sized" iron was produced called a bloom. The bloom could then be hammered into the desired shape to produce tools and weapons.Blacksmiths suddenly became very important and as the production of iron increased more uses were found for it, this also meant that new skills to work it were being learned and developed. Ironmaking spread across Europe and eventually reached Britain by about 450BC.
When the Romans colonised Britain, Iron production was already well established, they built on the already thriving industry to produce weapons and agricultural tools and implements. Centres of the industry were established in the Weald area of Sussex, South Wales and the Forest of Dean. After the Romans left in about 410 AD there were no further major advances in production until the bloomeries were able to be increased in size from the Thirteenth Century onwards by the use of water power. This meant that bigger bellows could be operated by a water wheel and large trip or tilt hammers could be built to hammer out the larger blooms. The whole process was now well on its way to being mechanised. In parallel the Blacksmiths were also becoming specialised and more in demand to produce weapons, armour and tools. Smiths were now also beginning to be called armourers, bladesmiths, swordsmiths, nailmakers and chainmakers branching out from the trade of general Smith. The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths was formed in the year 1299.
Blacksmiths were now in their heyday with their own trade guilds and Worshipful Company producing not only functional and decorative items in Iron, but horse shoes and agricultural machinery, with the Worshipful Company of Farriers being formed in 1356 in the City of London.
The next major step was the introduction of the blast furnace, the first one being set up in Newbridge Sussex in 1496, and was to supersede the bloomery completely. Large quantities of cast iron could now be produced, but at first only a small number of applications were found for it, such as casting cannon balls and cannon (the first recorded use of a furnace for casting cannon being in East Sussex in 1543), so most of it was converted to Wrought Iron.
The advances in Iron production that were made in the late 1700's started what is now termed as the industrial revolution, and was responsible for the conversion of a manual labour based production system to one of complete mechanisation, cast and wrought iron was now being used to make these machines that would eventually cause the demise of hand-crafted work and would eventually signal the end of the road for the traditional worker in Iron.
Henry Bessemer took out a patent to produce steel from pig iron in 1855, this could produce steel far more effectively and cheaper than it was to produce wrought iron. By 1975 Wrought Iron was no longer being produced and is now classed as an extinct material. Small amounts are still sold that are produced from re-processed scrap Wrought-Iron, it is approximately ten times the price of steel.

Today we have many materials that are lighter and stronger than the metals used in the past. Many materials are used today instead of metal because they are cheaper to produce and their properties are more reliable. We now have plastics and resins that are far stronger and cheaper to produce in large quantities.
All this means that the traditional role of the Blacksmith in the community has all but gone. He is rarely needed because we no longer live in a world where we would use what he made in our everyday lives. Those Blacksmiths that have found enough work to make a living today have become very specialized in what they produce.
So Blacksmithing is a very old craft with a long tradition. There were once Blacksmiths in every Village and town but there are now few left. Learning about the craft and tradition is a valuable way to find out about everyday life through history as there have always been Blacksmiths, and the skills they developed and the objects they created all tell their story.
Happily, Blacksmithing is undergoing a revival in interest, with several colleges now offering qualifications in forgework in conjunction with the City and Guilds institute. To see Blacksmiths at their best, go to any one of the nine agricultural shows that host a qualifying heat for the National Blacksmiths Competition. Any Blacksmith proud of his or her trade will be pleased to answer any questions or give advice or information on where to find out more about the craft or where to go to learn how to do it for yourself.


Simon grant-Jones AWCB, CERT.Ed. MIfl (2009)