Science and Invention in Birmingham - Pre 17th Century

Pre 17th Century

Birmingham's reputation for trade and innovation really begins to take off in the 12th century with the expansion of a market held there by the De Birmingham family. Around this time the Birmingham Bull Ring begins to take shape, and with the town's markets there arises a necessity to produce items good enough to be sold elsewhere.

Medieval crafts in the town include textiles, leather working and iron working, with archaeological evidence also suggesting the presence of pottery, tile manufacture and probably the working of bone and horn. The following period sees the new town expand rapidly in highly favourable economic circumstances and there is archaeological evidence of small-scale industries taking place such as Kilns producing the distinctive local Deritend Ware pottery.

The following decades, Birmingham becomes very productive in several trades metal working, including making small, high value items, possibly jewellery or metal ornaments, for Master of the Knights Templar. They are sufficiently well known to be referred to without explanation as far away as London.

Birmingham's first notable literary figure is John Rogers, the compiler and editor of the 1537 Matthew Bible, parts of which he also translates. This is the first complete authorised version of the Bible to be printed in the English language and the most influential of the early English printed Bibles, providing the basis for the later Great Bible and the Authorized King James Version. Rogers' 1548 translation of Philipp Melanchthon's Weighing of the Interim, possibly translated in Deritend, is the first book by a Birmingham man known to have been printed in England.

By the early 16th century Birmingham has already evolved into a well established arms manufacturing town, in 1538 churchman John Leialand passes through the Midlands and writes:

I came through a praty street or ever I entered Bermingham. This street, as I remember, is called Dirty (Deritend). In it dwells smiths and cutlers and there is a brooke that divides this street from Bermingham ........ There be many smiths in the towne, that use to make knives and all manner of cutting tools, and many lorimers that make bittes, and a great many naylours, so that a great part of the towne is maintained by smiths, who have their iron and sea-coal out of Staffordshire."

Birmingham loses its Lord of the Manor in the 16th century, and the district as a whole remains an area of weak lordship throughout the following centuries. With local government remaining essentially manorial, the townspeoples' resulting high degree of economic and social freedom is to be a highly significant factor in Birmingham's subsequent development.

In 1642 the early Birmingham mathematician and astronomer Nathaniel Nye publishes A New Almanacke and Prognostication calculated exactly for the faire and populous Towne of Birmicham in Warwickshire, where the Pole is elevated above the Horizon 52 degrees and 38 minutes, and may serve for any part of this Kingdome.

Birmingham's principal tradesmen during the English Civil War were the smiths, who were called upon to manufacture over 15,000 sword blades, these are supplied to Parliamentarian forces only. One of the town's leading minds, 'Nathaniel Nye' is recorded as testing a Birmingham cannon in 1643. Nye also experimented with a saker in Deritend in 1645. From 1645 he became the master gunner to the Parliamentarian garrison at Evesham and in 1646 he successfully directs the artillery at the Siege of Worcester, detailing his experiences and in his 1647 book The Art of Gunnery, believing that war is as much a science as an art.

The earliest known clock makers in the town arrived from London in 1667. Between 1770 and 1870 there exists over 700 clock and watch makers in the town.

In 1689 Sir Richard Newdigate, one of the new, local Newdigate Baronets, approaches manufacturers in the town with the notion of supplying the British Government with small arms. It is stressed that they would need to be of high enough calibre to equal the small arms that were being imported from abroad. After a successful trial order in 1692, the Government places its first contract. On 5 January 1693, the "Officers of Ordnance" chooses five local firearms manufacturers to initially produce 200 "snaphance musquets" per month over the period of one year, paying 17 shillings per musket, plus 3 shillings per hundredweight for delivery to London.