Technological Change in the Sixteenth Century Yorkshire Iron Industry: The Decline and Fall of Farnley Smithies

The surviving accounts from two periods of Farnley Smithies, a bloom-smithy active in the late sixteenth century, allow fresh insights into the practicalities of the direct process used until that time for iron-smelting in Northern England. They show that the smithies produced an intermediate product that required further processing, at a hammer-forge on a distant site, before it could be sold as wrought iron on the open market. The earlier Farnley accounts demonstrate the business at a time when it was still commercially viable. The later accounts reveal the business in the period leading up to its final closure. Set beside surviving accounts of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s ironworks, they reveal the commercial advantage of the recently-introduced blast-furnace process. The long-lasting secondary effects of the resultant restructuring of the Yorkshire iron industry are finally considered.