17th and 18th Century Herefordshire

Herefordshire was a noted cider county by at least the early 18th century and it was generally thought to be the "Orchard of England". The prevalence of orchards in the county indicated the considerable effect exerted by this feature upon the human environment and upon the pattern of rural settlement.

John Beale observed that "from the greatest person to the poorest cottager all habitations are encompassed with orchards and gardens" and that "one reason why fruit do so abound in this Country is that no Man hath of late years built himself a house, but with special regard to the proximity of some ground fit for an Orchard... and many times Servants, when they betake to marriage, seek out an acre or two of ground, which they find fit for Orchards... and thereon they build an orchard, which is all the wealth they have for themselves".

A close residential grouping would have proved impossible when the normal house curtilage with garden and orchard passed back for 400ft away from the main road, so that the only place for new housing was at one or other end, further enlarging the village pattern. Away from these centres of population the 18th century cottage often occupied a long narrow strip of land parallel to the road, with a garden plot close to the building and at least one orchard at the far end.

Deciduous woodlands remained an integral feature of the landscape. There are many documentary references to the timber trade, including oak for naval ship building and destructive woodland clearing for fuel to feed the iron furnaces of the north-west uplands and the Forest of Dean.

The early incidence of enclosure was of considerable interest to John Leland and received specific mention four times in his Itinerary.

The industries and rural manufactures that did exist were concerned primarily with the processing of local products or with the production of service goods for the rural markets of the immediate vicinity.

Cheese was made around Bromyard and was sent to the Hereford market. The brewing of home-made cider as the principal drink was to such an extent that"few cottagers, yea very few of our wealthiest yeomen, do tast any other drink in the Family, except at some special Festivals, twice or thrice in the year"(John Beale, Herefordshire orchards - a pattern for all England, 1724, p. 4).

In 1700 gloves were described as the principal manufacture of Hereford, and also formed a trade of some importance at Weobley, Kington and Leominster. Clothiers made a good trade at Kington and Ledbury and wool formed the staple trade of Leominster, whilst Ross had a thriving smithing trade.

Elizabethan glass-making was carried out by the Huguenots at St Weonards and during the same reign, to encourage the development of local industries, the queen insisted that her subjects wore English-made caps from Hereford.

Corn and fulling mills also proved plentiful. A comprehensive record of the mills on the rivers Wye and Lugg in existence in 1690 listed 25 mills on the River Wye between Monnington and Wilton, including nine at Hereford, and a further 16 on the River Lugg between Hampton Bishop and Leominster.

The siting of iron works was encouraged by the abundant supplies of woodland at Deerfold, Mocktree and Bringewood in the north-west uplands, and by copious water power at Bishopswood and New Weir. Bishopswood used ore from the Clee Hills and New Weir had iron and timber from the Forest of Dean.

Manuscript evidence has indicated that the blast furnaces at St. Weonards, Bringewood and Bishopswood produced 300, 450 and 600 tons annually, and that the forges at New Weir, Bringewood and Strangworth (near Titley) produced 220, 340 and 150 tons in 1717. Forges also existed at Peterchurch, Whitchurch, Llancillo, Pontrilas and Carey, but with the replacement of water power by steam engine and of wood charcoal by coal or coke few survived beyond the 18th century.

Industrial activities associated with the market towns are suggested by the frequency of trade guilds. In 1720 Stukeley remarked that "Leominster is a town of brisk trade in manufactures of their admirable wool, in hat making, leather and many others" (quoted in J. Price, An historical and topographical account of Leominster and its borough, 1795). Trade guilds in Leominster by the early 17th century included fullers, dyers, glovers, shoemakers and tanners. At Hereford the craft guilds included corvisors (cobblers and other leather workers), clothworkers, tanners, weavers, goldsmiths and glovers (W. Collins, A short history of Hereford, 1912).

Ross, according to Daniel Defoe, was famous for good cider and had a thriving iron-ware manufacture. Belt makers and glovers were mentioned in the early church registers of Weobley, and all towns of course had butchers, mercers, drapers and bakers.

Despite numerous different trades in operation in the county the economic prosperity of Herefordshire never seems to have reached a high level. Although the wool of Leominster was praised as being the best in Europe it never quite reached national significance compared to places such as the Cotswolds. By the end of the 18th century hardly any wool manufacturers were still extant, the raw product being exported to the mills in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Yorkshire. Not even the offer of a £400 interest free loan by Lord Scudamore could tempt anyone into promoting a woollen manufactory in the county town. The explanation for this may lie in the small size of the local market and the difficulties of communication to the ports and the remoteness of the county from the main centres of population.

Poverty was never far from the doorsteps of the other market towns. Defoe in 1725 described Hereford as "an old, mean built, and very dirty city", and in 1700 Cox had written "the buildings are mean and old but thinly inhabited, there not being any staple trade to enrich it, or invite people to go and settle in it... Gloves were the most important manufacture but that is too poor a trade to make a place flourish". Bromyard never formed more than a small marketing centre on the Worcester-Leominster (London-Aberystwyth) road. Only the borough of Ross was provided with an external impetus to growth as a tourist resort for boat trips through the river gorge at Symonds Yat.

The rural areas, despite the fertility of the soil, do not appear to have supported a prosperous rural community. Duncumb, quoting from a letter of 1636, said"for so small a circuit of ground as this shire contains, there are not in the kingdom a greater number of poor people, having no commodity amongst us for the raising of money, but for some small quantities of fine wool which is now decayed for divers years past". In 1610 Rowland Vaughan, writing of the Dore Valley, observed that not one parish could afford to maintain a priest.

One of the results of the industrial revolution was to direct industrial development away from its former location in woodland regions or where water power was abundant to a new venue or nearer the surface outcrops of exposed coal-bearing formations. In Herefordshire carboniferous formations outcropped over less than 1% of the county's surface area. The more valuable coal-bearing seams lay just beyond the county boundary in the Forest of Dean. Alternative sources of coal occurred within ten miles of Herefordshire, to the north of the Teme Valley in the Wyre Forest, around Mamble and in the Titterstone Clee district of south Shropshire and, to the south-west of the county, near Abergavenny.

The river Wye presented the most obvious choice for the transport of coal from the Forest of Dean to Hereford but this provided many navigation difficulties, with the meanders of the river adding over 15 miles to the direct route distance between Wilton and Wye Bridge. The biggest hindrance was the speed of the current and the variations in volume and depth of water.

The construction of horse-drawn tramways between Abergavenny-Hereford and Hay-Kington, the promotion of the railways and the development of rapid inter-regional movement came in the 19th century, but by the end of the 18th century the county still formed a self-contained provincial unit sheltered from the economic and social changes of the Industrial Revolution. Internal transportation depended largely on pack horses and proved both slow and costly.

Containing no large urban markets to create demand for produce and hindered by the restrictions of inaccessibility and remoteness, Herefordshire lacked the economic incentive to expand and develop her natural resources or to utilise fully her agricultural potential. Beale raised examples of Herefordshires lack of incentive: the failure to cultivate nuts which were in demand in France and grew abundantly in the county and that "by defect of transportation our Store of Cyder is become a snare to many".

With the national growth of commerce and the expansion of trade, the remoteness and inaccessibility of Herefordshire from the ports and urban centres proved detrimental to the county's potential agricultural prosperity and, as the provision of a cheap, reliable mode of transport was never established, the gradual change of emphasis towards the coal-field areas in no way lessened the economic difficulties or increased the county's prosperity. Herefordshire continued to be dependent upon its basic agricultural industry, and service manufactures in the market towns remained a largely self-sufficient and isolated regional community at the time of the first population census in 1801.

(Information taken from J.N. Jackson, "Some Observations upon the Herefordshire Environment of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries", inTransactions of the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club, Volume XXXVI Part I, 1958, pp. 28-41)

[Original author: Miranda Greene, 2005]