Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
indicated the fundamental weakness in English training; what was wrong was the
lack of education in designing or drawing. Craftsmen were capable of copying a
foreign pattern so well that often they exceeded the original, but they could not
measure against the common training, which everybody in Italy, France and the
Low Countries pretends to more or less.
Despite these criticisms, it is freely admitted that native craftsmen in England
were undeniably capable of following foreign designs within their own trade
and matching, if not excelling, quality of execution. The sheer proliferation of
gauged brickwork being used on English brick buildings by the 1670s tells us
clearly that the native bricklayers accepted new levels of precision and quickly
became supremely confident in the highest standards of its use. So much so,
that the use of gauged work was fully absorbed into the repertoire of a good
bricklayer's craft skills, and its use became prolific.
It is an irony that the hugely increased volume of work using brick for
re-building the area of the city destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666, should have
brought disaster to the Tylers and Bricklayers Company controlling the craft.
'Freemen' bricklayers were hopelessly inadequate in numbers to tackle the job
of reconstruction, yet company rules excluded craftsmen from the provinces (or
'foreigners' as they were referred to). Parliament dealt quickly with this matter,
in the Re-Building Act of 1667, decreeing all craftsmen who were not freemen
of the city would, upon being set to reconstruction work, be entitled to the same
privileges and, 'enjoy the same liberty to work as freemen of the said City for and
during their natural lives…'.
Craftsmen flocked from the provinces to London to secure work under state
protection. The Company was active in examining 'journeymen' for evidence
of apprenticeships in distant towns, to ensure they were proficient and to pre-
vent them working in any other trade. Ruthless speculators were also involved in
re-developing London like Nicholas Barbon (
c
.1640-98) who from the 1670s was
responsible for developing standardisation and mass-production in brick-built
housing (Summerson, 1947, 31), that also helped to originate the form of the
classic town house that dominated throughout the following eighteenth century.
An outcome of the enforced union of city and foreign bricklayers from the
late 1660s was the adoption of the high skills displayed in gauged brickwork and
some pointing styles. At a time when news and fashions normally travelled slowly,
these sophisticated techniques spread rapidly across the country when the for-
eign bricklayers returned home, enriching the craft nationally. This trend, along
with the fact that there was a tradition for country boy's being apprenticed in
the city (Webb, 1996, vii) helped to pave the way for the building practices of the
following Georgian period.
The return to the native shires of some of these bricklayers can only have
helped spread nationally and rapidly the knowledge and skills of gauged
