Dutch bricks and Serge cloth, blue flax and cheese.

 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.