Industry

(14/15)

Iron key from Fountains Abbey
© Cistercians in Yorkshire
<click to enlarge>

The Cistercians pioneered the use of water-mills in iron metallurgy, and Kirkstall may have built the first water-driven hammer forges.(29) Iron was an important resource and was required to make tools, horseshoes, implements and fittings.

In the twelfth century, the community acquired a forge at E. Ardsley, which lay about seven or eight miles to the south of the abbey. The Tankersley Ore here was also mined by Rievaulx (at Stainborough and Blacker ), Byland (at Emley and Bentley) and Kirkstead (at Kimberworth).(30) The community had mineral rights at Seacroft, which had been given by William de Somerville.(31) William granted the monks ironstone in specific areas of his lands on two conditions, first, that they would provide him and his men with iron for their ploughs each year, and second, that they would fill up the pits after they had worked them.(32) It is thought that after the monks abandoned the sites at Ardsley and Seacroft, they established smithies nearer the monastery at Weetwood and Hazelwell.(33) Both of these bloomeries were later leased.(34) Whereas the Weetwood site continued to be used for the extraction of iron for some time after the Dissolution, the bloomery at Hazelwell, it seems, only functioned in monastic times. (35)

Trespass and thievery
A charter of 1399 reveals that, at least in the late fourteenth century, the community was working coal mines at Snydale, now in the heart of the Yorkshire coal fields. This records how a Richard Bayldon of Snydale was accused of digging the abbot’s sea-coal there to the value of £20.
[Fletcher, Cistercians in Yorkshire, p. 126.]

There is also evidence of bronze-casting and bell-casting within the claustral area at Kirkstall.(36) It has recently been suggested that one of Kirkstall’s bells that was sold at the time of the Dissolution now hangs near Wakefield, in the steeple of St Peter’s at Kirkthorpe. The bell bears the names ‘Laurence’ and ‘Abbot John of Bardsey’ [Laurentius Iohes De Berdesay Abbas An Di Mo], who is thought to be John Bardsey, abbot of Kirkstall in 1396; Laurence may be after the donor or the saint. Unfortunately the year in which the bell was cast is not included, perhaps because of lack of space.(37)