CGP Grey
Published 30 Sep 2020
October 1, 2020
English lead and the European markets of the 1600s
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the meteoric rise in lead production in England and Wales from the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe:
The well-preserved ruins of Fountains Abbey, a Cistercian monastery near Ripon in North Yorkshire. Founded in 1132 and dissolved by order of King Henry VIII in 1539. It is now owned by the Royal Trust as part of Studley Royal Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Photo by Admiralgary via Wikimedia Commons.
In the early sixteenth century, England was a minor producer of the stuff. It was widespread and cheap enough to be used for roofing buildings (unlike much of the rest of Europe, where copper was preferred), but the country never produced more than a few hundred tons per year. It didn’t really need to. Like stone in [the game] Dawn of Man, you could amass a stockpile and not worry too much about any leaky bucket problems [where stockpiles need to be replenished due to wastage or other “drains”]. The lead in roofs could always be recycled, and hardly any more was needed for pipes or cisterns. The vast majority of the demand came from Germany, and then the New World, where it was used to extract silver from copper ore. Even this dissipated in the mid-sixteenth century, when the New World silver mines began to switch to using mercury instead.
Yet by 1600, England was producing about 3,000 tons of lead a year, up from just 300 in the 1560s. By 1700, it was producing two thirds of Europe’s lead — a whopping 20,000 tons a year. How?
Unlike copper or iron, there is no evidence that lead mining or processing techniques were imported. If anything, they seem to have emerged from the Mendips, in Somerset, where production costs fell with the introduction of furnace smelting in the 1540s. As well as raising the extraction rates from the ore coming up from the mines, the new furnaces allowed previously unusable ores — found in the easily-accessible waste tips of old mining camps — to be smelted after some simple sifting. Unfortunately, we don’t have a clear idea of who was responsible for the innovation.
Yet the source of England’s supremacy was really, at first, religious. Following the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the melting down of their roofs dumped some 12,000 tons of lead onto England’s markets — at least a year’s worth of Europe’s entire output. Although the immediate effect was to annihilate England’s own lead industry, the medium-term effect was to send the other European producers into disarray. By the 1580s, once the stockpile had depleted, England’s lead producers were among the only ones left standing. The sale of monastic lead ensured that the English retained a foothold in foreign markets, while the cost-saving innovations then gave them the competitive edge. These factors explain, at least, England’s eventual hold over the European lead market.
But there was yet another phenomenon responsible for the industry’s massively increased scale: the development of hand-held firearms. Gunpowder technology was of course centuries old, but cannon had largely fired balls made of stone or cast iron. Muskets and pistols, however, used bullets made of lead. With the proliferation of the weapons over the course of the seventeenth century, lead thus acquired a major leaky bucket problem. Bullets were too costly to recycle, leading to an estimated fifth of Europe’s annual production of lead disappearing every year — a wastage that only increased as armies grew, weapons’ rate of fire improved, and the continent experienced extraordinary violence. Europe lost an estimated fifth of its population to the Thirty Years’ War, and England itself succumbed to civil strife.
England’s lead industry thus had to drastically increase its production just to maintain Europe’s stock of lead, let alone increase it. It was from soldiers entering the fray, to trade bullets across sodden fields, that it owed its extraordinary success.
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Historical Breakdown of A Bridge Too Far – Planning and Failure of Market Garden I RHINELAND 45
The Great War
Published 30 Sep 2020Support our brand new World War 2 documentary about The Battle of the Rhineland (not to be released on YouTube): https://realtimehistory.net/rhineland45
After last year’s Downfall video (with over 1 million views!) we thought we look at another classic WW2 movie and give you a breakdown about the historical figures and background. Our pick this time: A Bridge Too Far.
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Support our brand new World War 2 documentary about The Battle of the Rhineland (not to be released on YouTube): https://realtimehistory.net/rhineland45 **We know that some of you don’t like the fact that we upload non-Great War content once in a while. But here are a few fun facts: Last year’s video about THAT scene from Downfall has been one of our most successful videos ever produced. It helped us spreading the word about our crowdfunding campaign last year and it also brought new subscribers to The Great War that hadn’t heard about it. And in the cut-throat world of the YouTube attention economy this is really important for our continued existence. Another “fun” fact: Both this video and the Downfall video were both claimed for copyright violation even though they clearly fall under fair use. We disputed and lost and now there is nothing we can do about the fact that someone else is earning money through our work. Just one of the reasons why it’s increasingly frustrating working with YouTube and why we are exploring other avenues for The Great War and our other projects.
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Far from being in trouble, Canadian film and TV investment has nearly doubled in the last 10 years
The Canadian government — particularly Canadian Heritage minister Steven Guilbeault — is eager to pass legislation to “get money from the web giants” and their primary justification is the claim that Canadian TV and movie funding has been shrinking. As Michael Geist explains, that’s a pants-on-fire lie:
CMPA Profile – Financing, Sources: CMPA Profile 2019, 2016, 2013
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has said that his top legislative priority is to “get money from web giants.” While much of the attention has focused on his ill-advised plan to require Facebook to obtain licences for linking to news articles, his first legislative step is likely to target Internet streamers such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney with new requirements to fund Canadian content and to increase its “discoverability” by making it more prominent for subscribers. Based on his comments at several town halls, Guilbeault is likely to also create new incentives for supporting indigenous and persons of colour in the sector with a bonus for those investments (potentially treating $1 of investment as $1.50 for the purposes of meeting Cancon spending requirements). Much of the actual implementation will fall to the CRTC, which will be granted significant new regulatory powers and targeted with a policy direction.
Guilbeault’s case for establishing new mandated payments is premised on the claim that support for the film and television sector is declining due to the emergence of Internet streaming services, which have resulted in decreased revenues for the conventional broadcast sector and therefore lower contributions to Cancon creation. In fact, Guilbeault recently told Le Devoir that without taking action there would be a billion dollar deficit in support in the next three years. He says that his objective is to actually generate a few hundred million more per year in local production by the Internet streamers. In other words, he’s expecting roughly $2 billion in new investment over three years in Cancon from U.S. entities due to his planned regulations (moving from a billion dollar deficit to a billion dollars in extra spending).
While Guilbeault frames these regulatory requirements as a matter of fairness and “rebalancing”, industry data over the past decade tell a much different story. Indeed, there has been record setting film and television production in recent years, much of it supported by companies such as Netflix. CRTC chair Ian Scott last year said that Netflix is “probably the biggest single contributor to the [Canadian] production sector today.” While that is not entirely true – the data suggests that Canadian taxpayers are the biggest contributor with federal and provincial tax credits consistently the largest source of financing – the claim that there is a billion dollar deficit coming or that foreign streamers do not contribute to film and television production in Canada without a regulatory requirement is simply false.
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Tank Revolutionary: Fuller’s Diary | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 5 Jun 2020J.F.C. Fuller has been described as a satanist, Nazi and bigot. Director Richard Smith, explores this highly controversial character, who was pivotal to the story of armoured warfare, using Fuller’s personal diary.
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QotD: Even so-called “Keynesians” fail to follow Keynes
The thing about deficit spending is that you should only be doing it when you need to be doing it. No, this isn’t a rejection of that Keynesian idea or ideal, it’s the point of it.
When wages are flatlining, when the economy needs that bolus of extra demand then, OK, go borrow and spend. Or, in the MMT world, print money and spend. But once you’ve delivered that bolus and the economy has recovered then you must be able to stop that spending – whether delivered by borrowing or printing. That is, a permanent increase in spending is not Keynesian demand management, only a temporary one is.
Tim Worstall, “The Guardian‘s Absurd View Of NHS Funding”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-06-15.
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