Jeroen Aldertszoon Vlieland and the Rotterdam to Topsham trade
Dutch
bricks and serge cloth, blue flax and cheese
Dear Barbara, a lot of thanks for inform the J.N.Vlieland BLOG by inform us about this article as well"Thanks are due to David Cornforth for information on Exeter’s woollen industry, © Exeter Memories 24 January 2013.
We know that Jeroen Vlieland (stepfather of Jerome
Nicholas Vlieland the elder) was one of the foremost sailing masters on the
Rotterdam to Topsham crossing, until he was made a prisoner of war in 1811, when
his ship L’Esperance was sold and his
family settled in Great Yarmouth. But what drove such shipmasters to brave the
trip from the delta of the Rhine, Meuse
and Scheldt rivers into the North Sea, through the Straits of Dover and a
further 250 miles along the English Channel to South Devon and the sheltered
harbour at Topsham?
The answer from the Devon end of the trade
was woollen cloth. Originally, this was kersey, a coarse lower-grade material
used to make clothing for servants and the poor, but after about 1615 a finer-quality
serge cloth began to be produced from the long-fibre fleeces of Devon and
Somerset sheep. The woollen merchants of Exeter, members of the Guild of
Fullers, Tuckers and Shearmen, controlled the purchasing of fleeces at local
markets, sending them for carding and combing, spinning into yarn and then
weaving into cloth. We know that ‘rackfields’ were set up in the back alleys of
the town, where the finished serge was hung out to dry on ‘tenterhooks’,
reaching from attic to attic across the street. It was said that ‘mixed serges’
from both Exeter and Tiverton, 15 miles inland, ‘clothed the people of the Low
Countries’ until the fashion for lighter cloth and the growth of textile-making
in Holland itself caused the trade to fail.
When the French imposed punitive import tariffs
in the 1680s, Devon merchants began shipping their goods by Rotterdam masters. What
came back to Devon on Jeroen’s ship, The Topsham Post, was common and fine
cheese, scrap iron and wooden hoops, possibly for use in cooperage. A bill of
lading from Alexander Paul’s wharf on the North Shore at Perth shows that he
also carried the unspun fibres of the blue flax plant, in ’20 heads’ or
bundles, so he clearly made another a regular run up the North Sea to the River
Tay, where weaving fine-spun linen from flax was a centuries-old craft. When L’Esperance
was sold in Rotterdam in 1811, her cargo included French salt, cyder, brandy
and aquafortis – nitric acid, used in explosives, dyes and inks.
Especially on the trip to Devon, when the
cargo might be lightweight, Jeroen’s ship would have had ‘Dutch bricks’ as ballast
to stop it keeling over in high winds. These were hard, light-coloured clay, dug
from the banks of the Waal, Rhine and IJssel rivers, mixed with sand, and
finally shaped into ‘raw stones’ that were then oven-fired. Several houses on
the Strand in Topsham along the Exe estuary are made of these bricks, with shapely
curved and hipped klokgevels (clock
gables) on their roofs, showing how deep the ‘Dutch connection’ was.
We have now found more about Jeroen as a
shipping master, since our original post on 19 October 2009; our post on the
Exeter rackfields was on 21 June 2016.
Thanks are due to David Cornforth for
information on Exeter’s woollen industry, © Exeter Memories 24 January 2013.
