A butcher could not a tawyer be
A great friend of mine had a wonderful job.
He wrote the script for every edition of Call My Bluff, creating amazing "definitions" for unusual words.
I wonder what he would have made of "tawyers", "whitawers" and "curriers".
Believe it or not they are all to do with Northamptonshire's once great industry, tanning.
Thanks to the River Nene, the fine pastureland and the vast areas of oak trees, tanning had been part of Northampton's livelihood since the reign of Edward I, when mention was made of "Vicus tannanorum", a tanning quarter in the town.
The tanning quarter was unearthed in Northampton below St Peter's Church right by the Nene.
The area around Tanner Street was excavated and loads of cow horns, leg bones and hooves were found, indicating that the butcher delivered everything but the good meat to the tanner.
Tanning is a complex trade with several different processes.
In the middle of the 15th century it was ruled that no one craftsman had control of the whole process.
For instance, a butcher could not be a tanner, a tanner could not be a currier, so the tanner had to sell the rough dried leather to the currier and so on down the line.
A tanner used tannin extracted by a barker from the bark of oak trees.
In the 1630s, Richard Selby of Brigstock was one of biggest buyers of bark.
Stout ox hides were tanned for the soles for boots, shoes and other heavy-duty leather products. He also tanned calf skins.
A currier was a chap who dressed the calf skins with oil and fat, producing pliable leather for boot and shoe uppers.
He also coloured tanned leathers. At one time in the mid-19th century there were 23 curriers in Northampton, including one in Tanner Street!
Then there were two types of tawyer.
A regular tawyer was an oil dresser who worked with heavier skins, like horse and deer, making them into buff leather.
And there was the whitawer, who used white products like alum and salt to process dog, sheep or goat skins. Neither worked with cow hides.
Traditionally the hides were to be kept in a pit of tannin for a year and a day, giving them a daily swirl, otherwise it was deemed raw. If a tanner failed to do this he lost 6/8d!
You don't want to know what some other processes involved . . . but I'll tell you anyway. Hides were immersed in solutions of bird droppings, dog dung, urine, fermenting barley or rye and stale beer.
Nice!
There were tanneries throughout Northamptonshire.
But many had closed by the end of the 18th century and then the Peninsular War of 1808-14 had a serious effect on British trade in general and on the leather industry locally in particular.
However, heavy leather tanning survived in Brigstock, Higham Ferrers, Kettering, Northampton, Wilby and elsewhere, but by 1890 only three were working and by 1906 none, although two new tanning yards did open in Northampton later that year.
But there was a modern revival; as methods of tanning and demands of the trade changed, Northamptonshire adapted.
By 1911 there were four tanneries in Northampton and gradually more opened until, by 1956, there were 13 in total countywide.
Now they have all gone.
But many of the employees still remain and I have had the thrill of meeting quite a few of them in Finedon, Higham and Rushden.
Naturally they are sad that the trade had died in Northamptonshire, but one thing cannot be killed off, something we can all share. And that is their immense pride in the job they did.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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