Читать книгу Great Book of Spoon Carving Patterns - Joseph Fullman - Страница 18

The Southwest saw its fair share of battles during the Civil War, albeit none on the scale of Naseby or Marston Moor. The region was largely, if not universally, on the Royalist side. Support was certainly considered strong enough have the royal mint moved to Truro in 1642–3. The Royalists got much the better of the early fighting, winning at Braddock Down, Stratton, Lansdown and Lostwithiel. However, as in the rest of the country, the story from 1644 onwards was largely one of reverse after reverse. The surrender at Tresillian, near Truro in 1646, marked the end of Royalist resistance in the region.

Rebellion flared up again briefly towards end of the 17th century with many in the Southwest supporting the Protestant Duke of Monmouth’s attempt to seize the crown from the Catholic James II. The revolt ended in brutal fashion at Sedgemoor, the last major battle fought on English soil, and the subsequent trials, known as the ‘Bloody Assizes’, saw hundreds of rebels executed and many more imprisoned.

The decades of calm that followed the Glorious Revolution saw commerce continue to increase. The Southwest expanded its trading network, opening up new markets across the Atlantic. Bristol became its leading slaving port, Plymouth the country’s main naval base, while Falmouth was established as the principal port for trade with the burgeoning British Empire.

Rising imports necessarily meant rising customs duty imposed by a state eager to capitalize on the region’s success, which inevitably prompted a corresponding increase in smuggling. By now Cornwall’s network of cliff caves were a veritable smuggling empire. Many in the region regarded smugglers as the successors to the rebels of yore, standing up against official oppression. Their activities were broadly supported by the local population, and some smugglers even became local celebrities, seen in almost Robin Hood-like terms, stealing from the rich government in order to provide the locals with cheap goods, which in the early 18th century included an exotic new drink rapidly growing in popularity – tea.

Progress was also being made inland. Here the region’s tin and copper mines, a source of prosperity since early Middle Ages, now benefited from a series of technological advances. First, the introduction of gunpowder in the late 17th century allowed miners to blast recalcitrant lodes of tin and copper to the surface. However, it was the increased mechanization offered by the Industrial Revolution that really sent the industry into overdrive. Powerful steam-driven beam engines allowed miners to dig deeper and work quicker than ever before. Many of the revolution’s pioneers were local men, including Dartmouth’s Thomas Newcomen, who invented an ‘atmospheric’ steam engine for pumping water out of pits, Richard Trevithick, who built the world’s first working steam locomotive railway, and Humphry Davy, the inventor of the eponymous lamp which allowed miners to work safely in mines where methane gas was present (although his invention initially led to a rise in accidents, as miners were encouraged to work in mines previously deemed unsafe).

The expansion of mining did not benefit everyone to the same degree. Indeed the contrast in fortunes between the mine-owners, who were soon making obscene profits, and the miners charged with the difficult and dangerous job of extracting the metals, neatly demonstrated the huge social divisions being created by industrialization, not just in the Southwest but across the country.

The miners endured brutally hard conditions, working deep underground for between eight and twelve hours a day, in temperatures often exceeding 30°C, in an environment where roof collapse and gas explosions were regular occurrences. And their reward? A basic subsistence wage of a few shillings a week. To make ends meet, miners’ wives and children were also often employed in the industry doing some of the more fiddly, cleaning and sorting jobs. Home life was equally squalid, with alcohol providing the only respite from the crushing barbarism of their lives. Pubs were always guaranteed to do good business in a mining town. The combination of extremely dangerous, unhealthy working practices and a self-destructive lifestyle meant that few miners made it into their forties.

Into this savage environment stepped John Wesley, the founder of Methodism who preached throughout the Southwest during the mid 18th century. His message of piety, self-reliance and, above all, temperance, seemed unlikely to win over the hard-drinking miners, but his idea of self-sacrifice in this life in return for heavenly reward in the next struck a chord with the downtrodden workers. A century later the majority of people in Cornwall were Methodists.

The 18th century also saw great urban expansion in the Southwest particularly in Bristol where the ugly profits of slave-trading were laundered into beautiful squares and houses for the city’s plump, wealthy merchants, and at Bath where the rediscovery of the Roman Baths and a growing fashion for ‘taking the waters’ saw new streets laid out on extravagant lines as architects – notably John Wood and son – got to work fashioning elegant terraces and squares for the upper classes.