Turbulence at the turbaries
In 1423 rumpuses were sparked off at Fountains’ turbaries at Malham
and Kilnsey, when they complained that men had illicitly cut turves here.
[Bond, Monastic Landscapes, p. 74].
Fountains engaged in industrial as well as agricultural
work, to provide for the community’s needs. Stones for building and
roofing had to be quarried and metals mined to produce a number
of implements including tools, horseshoes, and piping. The monks
required pottery cooking
vessels, tiles for roofing and flooring, and fuel to power the
forges and for domestic use. The community therefore secured rights
to cut turf (turbaries)
in the rich peat bogs of Dishforth. In areas where peat was less
abundant, restrictions were often imposed to limit how much turf
the monks might cut,
and when and where they might do so.(126)
Fountains’ industrial activity
was not simply a matter of self-sufficiency, but of trade and commerce.
In the 1360s, lead from the abbey’s mines
in Nidderdale was bought for roofing Windsor Castle. The Pipe Rolls
of 1363 record that 168 pigs of lead were sent to Windsor via Hull;
in 1365 two
wagons and ten oxen carried 24 fothers of lead from Coldstones
to Boroughbridge, where they were then sent to Windsor by river,
via York and London. In the
fifteenth century lead from Fountains’ grange at Warsill was sent
to York Minster.(127) By the early sixteenth
century Fountains’ success
in lead trading had come to the attention and concern of the Fellowship
of Merchants at York. Fearing for their monopoly, they wrote requesting
Abbot Marmaduke Huby to cease
business:
We understand that you occupy
buying and selling lead and other
merchandise as a free merchant, contrary to God’s laws and man’s,
and you being a spiritual man and of religion …. We will desire you
to cease and leave such buying and selling … so that we have no
further cause to complain or else we shall be disposed to complain
to the archbishop of York … or the King’s grace.(128)
Huby’s
response is, unfortunately, not known, but given that the community continued
to trade, he was hardly too bothered by these threats.