Trade and Industry in Tudor and Stuart England by Sybil M. Jack

Author:Sybil M. Jack [Jack, Sybil M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780049421561
Google: cxWLQgAACAAJ
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 1977-01-15T16:04:04+00:00

SHIP BUILDING: EVIDENCE OF GROWTH BUT ALSO OF TRADITIONALISM

Not all this tonnage was necessarily English built but there is evidence to suggest that English ship-building yards were becoming larger in scale and more efficient, and furthermore to show that royal concern over the navy played an important part in this.

Owing to the interest that there has always been in Drake’s navy, we are rather better informed about the building of the royal ships and large merchantmen than we might otherwise be. It is clear that at the beginning of the period large ship-building yards hardly existed. Such yards would have to provide sufficiently continuous employment for shipwrights of all sorts to encourage them to settle in the neighbourhood. This would reduce costs per unit by eliminating the discontinuities of ad hoc arrangements and by providing a team with experience of working together. Without continuous demand, however, such teams would tend to scatter to points at which there was enough demand to keep a smaller team going, or even to become peripatetic. When Henry VIII wanted to build the Henry Grace à Dieu he had to press men from all over England to assemble the yard force necessary, and the list of places from which they were brought may serve as a rough guide to ship-building centres as they then existed: Plymouth, Dartmouth, Bere Regis, Exeter, Saltash, Bradford, Bristol, Southampton, Exmouth, Poole, Ipswich, Brightlingsea, Yarmouth, Hull, Beverley and York predominate.95 Not the least useful aspect of the Tudors’ decision to keep a more or less permanent number of royal ships was possibly the fact that thereby they kept a permanent royal shipyard in being, and the royal dockyards at Woolwich, Depďord and Greenwich, and later at Chatham, provided a nucleus of skilled workers for non-naval yards, so that ship building on the Thames increased and some traditions of building developed. In this, as in other matters, the passing on of knowledge tended to be almost a family affair, and although in the Pett family there seems to have been open hostility between some of the members,98 Phineas Pen’s autobiography shows how important the passing of knowledge between master and servant was to the training of apprentices, even in this art. Moreover, the men who were the king’s master ship builders also ran private yards, which meant that designs became widely used.

It is hard to tell how many men were employed in a single yard, and how long a large ship took to build at the beginning of the period. In 1559 there were some 550 men at work repairing, rebuilding and building twenty-two ships at Dartford, Woolwich and Portsmouth, but this was a moment of pressure.97 The largest ships throughout the period seem to have taken about nine months to a year from the moment of laying the keel to the launch, but smaller ones were probably quicker, though not necessarily proportionately so.

Despite the attention which has been lavished on the great ships, however, we are still remarkably ignorant about any technical advances there may have been in the period.

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