The invention of the saw is mythically accredited to Icarus, he of the flying-too-close-to-the-sun fame who used a fish bone as saw. A painting in Herculaneum shows an early example of a saw pit. To learn how saws were made, see The Book of Trades. In a traditional saw pit, one man stands above the tree-trunk whilst his mate saws the trunk in the pit beneath, wedges holding open the fissures as they worked. The rate of pay for such strenuous work was twelve to eighteen shillings a day, a veritable fortune. During the Industrial Revolution, which saw an increasing demand for wood by carpenters and joiners, the mill took much of the strain out of the job. Working examples of saw mills are found throughout the country including Dunham Massey (National Trust) near Altrincham, powered by water. Anybody whose ancestors worked on the Whitbread Estate as a sawyer might find information on the management in the records held at Bedfordshire county library. If your sawyer ancestor worked on an estate, check the local archives.
In London, several guilds oversaw their members, including the Company of Joiners and Ceilers www.joinersandceilers.co.uk forty-first in the order of preference; the Company of Turners www.turnersco.com, a medieval turner put his mark on the bottom of his work; and the Company of Carpenters www.thecarpenterscompany.co.uk, whose archives are kept at Carpenters’ Hall and Guildhall Library/LMA. For a list of what is available from the 1720s see www.londonlives.org/browse.jsp?archive=CC, which describes the Carpenters’ Minute Books of Courts and Committees and you can view names online. An explanation of the lives of carpenters and apprentices and their tools is on www.londonlives.org/static/CarpentersCompany.jsp.
The Shrewsbury Carpenters Company records are held at the Shropshire Record Centre, which has admissions, lists of freemen and apprentice records for 1538–1854. They also hold records for bricklayers and plasterers.
For union records, the Modern Record Centre has information from 1895 but you must know the union and branch or you will wade through an awful lot of material. The annual reports of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners/Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers dates from 1860 and contains obituaries of members and their wives, but you’ll need the date of death, date of admission and the branch. The centre also holds records for the following:
• Associated Carpenters and Joiners’ Society of Scotland, 1863–1911
• General Union of Carpenters and Joiners (earlier the Friendly Society of Operative House Carpenters and Joiners of Great Britain and Ireland), 1845–1921
• Protective Association of Joiners of Glasgow, 1847–61
• Preston Joiners’ Society, 1807–39
• Mersey Ship Joiners’ Association, 1870–1900
For other records, visit the relevant records offices.
The beginning of state control of roads was the Highways Act 1555 when the parish was made responsible for road maintenance. This inevitably failed because of the increase in traffic and too little money. A century later, the Highways Act 1663 (www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47337) appointed Justices of the Peace to employ surveyors to repair roads and collect tolls in Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire; the levy charged was a penny for a horse, sixpence for a coach, a shilling per wagon, eight pence for a cart and tuppence for twenty pigs. Its success led to the Turnpike Act 1707 and numerous Turnpike Trusts setting up and maintaining toll roads countrywide. These were local initiatives requiring individual Acts of Parliament; people paid to use the roads and profits were split between shareholders and road maintenance. The location of English Turnpike Trusts are listed on www.turnpikes.org.uk as well as tollhouses and milestones. Any ancestor living near one could have worked that stretch of road.
McAdam (1756–1836, of tarmacadam fame) and Telford (1757–1834) are credited with developing road building improvements. In 1766, milestones became compulsory on all turnpike roads, and by 1821 there were more than 18,000 miles of turnpike roads in England all requiring labour. Road builders were not necessarily responsible for maintaining wooden bridges which, due to increasing traffic from turnpike roads, were failing and needed to be rebuilt in stone. The ownership of bridges and maintenance fell to regional local government, with separate contracts for maintaining them. The Turnpike Trusts were closed from the 1870s.
The 1851 census listed 10,923 road labourers, but those recorded as general labourers are not included in this figure. Good road builders used the same skills as those of the mason, skilfully cutting stones for paving and crushing stones for aggregate. To save time, money and sweat, they used the stone nearest to hand.
The problem is that, unless they had a specific county contract for, say, maintaining bridges in Bedfordshire, they are unlikely to be named in records. Take Thomas Spurrett (1804–97) of Bampton as an example. My cousin spent hours in Oxford Record Office finally unearthing uncatalogued letters between Thomas and the County Surveyor of Works. Thomas had been caught cheating the county for maintenance he didn’t actually do. If you are prepared to put in time at your local record office, you may strike lucky.
A well-known novel about the life of a housepainter is The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, pseudonym of Irish socialist Robert Noonan (1870–1911). Published posthumously, it is a diatribe against the hypocrisy and double standards of Edwardian society, depicting Edwardian working conditions in scathing terms; an interesting read if your ancestor was a house painter and decorator.
The earliest reference to the Worshipful Company of Painter Stainers www.paintershall.co.uk in London is 1283 when payntors painted everything including using gold; murals, banners, barges and portraits on wood, stone and metal. The steynors applied colour to fabric. Some famous artists belonged to the Company including Reynolds, Kneller and Millais. Records are held in London’s Guildhall Library. An essay written for his B.A. in 1993 on the history of house painting in London c.1660–1850 by Patrick Baty can be found online via a Google search. In it, he explains, among other things, their working conditions, the paint-shop and how painters made their own paint.
A stone mason hews and cuts stone and marble into blocks and squares for building and, unlike wood and thatch, there is no room for mistake. Damage to stone is irreversible. The quarryman extracted the stone from the ground, the banker mason cut it to the correct size and shape on his bench and the banker with the fixer positioned it to the building. The banker mason carved a mark explaining where each stone was to be fixed and these can occasionally be seen on stones displaced from their position. Although no longer in operation, an interesting trip to see 2,000 years of quarrying is at Beer Quarry Caves in Devon www.beerquarrycaves.co.uk, where Beer stone, a form of chalk soft when mined but hard on exposure to air, has been quarried from underground caverns since Roman times. Because it is easy to carve and a wonderful creamy white colour when exposed to air, this stone was used in tracery work at Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle and Hampton Court. Imagine the challenge of transporting four-ton blocks by cart or water from Devon to their final destination…
The Book of Trades explains that cutting larger stones was the stone cutter’s job, although a mason often did it. It is also erroneously believed that a mason carved stone, but in reality it was the carver, although a mason occasionally took on simple carving work. A mason’s tools included a square level, plumb line, bevel, compass, hammer, chisel, mallet and saw, which for masonry had no teeth; the weight of the saw cut through stone. For information on the types of marble, stone and mortars and working with it, refer to The Book of Trades.
Limestone is among the most common stone for building and carving and has several varieties: the Houses of Parliament are built in Anston from Yorkshire;York Minster is from magnesian limestone and St Paul’s Cathedral is built from Dorset Portland stone. The incredible stone carving that embellishes so many of our cathedrals is witness to the skills of the stone carver working with nothing more than hand tools of hammer and chisel.
A journeyman stone mason received between four shillings and four shillings and sixpence a day, a good wage of just under £1 a week. In 1806, he charged for his work by the cubic foot, charging extra for iron clamps and cutting holes for railings. Piece work was common and a stone mason/carver working on an elaborate design expected to receive at least twice as much.
By 1865, bricklayers, masons, carpenters and smiths building the Albert Embankment in London earned six shillings and sixpence a day. Strikes reduced working hours from eleven and a half in the early 1860s to ten hours a day, six days a week by 1865. Perhaps highlighting the importance of brick and bricklayers versus stone, the number of masons decreased during the middle of Victoria’s reign; in 1851, 101,442 men were recorded as masons/paviors, but by 1871 it was 95,243. A stone mason’s apprenticeship traditionally lasted seven years.
The word thatch comes from old English thac meaning roof covering and was the most common form of roofing until the seventeenth century; if an old house has a roof pitched more than fifty degrees, it was probably previously thatched. Thatch was warm and cheap, but its major disadvantage was the fire risk and it was banned in London as early as 1212. Hayricks were thatched after harvest to prevent rain ruining them and, although agricultural labourers were adept at this, specialised thatchers also did it. Some suggest the best local thatcher took Thatcher as a surname.
The type of straw depended on what was locally available. Until the arrival of the railways, enabling cheaper, easier and faster transportation, thatchers utilised local materials. The Midlands, Oxfordshire and the south of England used long wheat straw, whereas East Anglia used local water reed transported via its extensive waterways. This reed was prized because it grew to seven feet in length and, because it grew in water, was particularly hardwearing. In a year of a bad harvest, rye straw might be used. Less popular materials included rushes, sedge and heather. The style of thatching is localised, with different counties sporting different patterns. Straw as a harvest by-product had many other uses besides thatching: straw ropes, hats (see Chapter 9), mats, rush seats for chairs, corn dollies and stuffing horse collars.
After grain harvesting, straw for thatching was dried for two to three weeks in the fields as stooks. It was then bundled into yealms and attached to the roof with hazel spars – twisted and split hazel sticks 30 inches long. It was usual, and still is, for just the top of the roof to be repaired, so old houses have thatch several feet deep with the bottom layers perhaps over 500 years old. The edge of the thatched roof was cut and shaped using a long eaves knife. Other tools required for thatching include the leggat (a square flat tool imbedded with horse-shoe nails for bashing straw into position), a straw comb, shearing hooks and a spar knife.
Very often, a thatcher trained his sons in the craft; from 1727, the Marsters of Guilden Morden had several generations of thatchers. There was no thatchers’ guild and the National Council of Master Thatchers Association (NCMTA founded 1987) suggests it was because communication was difficult for a trade spread so widely over the country. Current county thatching trade associations were formed as recently as 1947 from existing thatching families and are represented by the NCMTA.
The Museum of English Rural Life based at Reading University and its Scottish equivalent, the National Museum of Rural Life based in East Kilbride, might give you a feel for the life of a thatcher, blacksmith, cartwright and wheelwright. Many archives in the Museum of English Rural Life have been catalogued and are accessible via The National Archives Discovery website http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk. For thatchers, once references to Margaret Thatcher have been discounted, there are accounts relating to, inter alia, an unnamed thatcher’s bills in 1795 Cornwall. The subsequent entry in Discovery was Turnor’s (sic) Charity Account Book for Bedfordshire, where we learn the cost of the thatcher’s materials in the late 1700s: the straw for thatching a barn in 1783 cost thirteen shillings, seven and a half pence, four bunches of thatching ropes one shilling and four pence; two bundles of thatching rods one shilling. In 1766, the thatcher must have completed a larger job because here he was paid £1 five shillings and ten pence.