William Levett (ca. 14951554) was an English clergyman. An Oxford-educated country rector, he was a pivotal figure in the use of the blast furnace to manufacture iron. With the patronage of the English Crown, furnaces in Sussex under Levett's ownership cast the first iron muzzle-loader cannons in England in 1543,N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: a Naval History of Britain, 660–1649, W. W. Norton & Co., London, 1999 a development which enabled England to ultimately reconfigure the global balance-of-power by becoming an ascendant naval force.John Whedbee, Myths and Realities: Conflicting Currents of Culture and Science, iUniverse, 2005 William Levett continued to perform his ministerial duties while building an early munitions empire, and left the riches he accumulated to a wide variety of charities at his death.
Life Thrust into running a family iron business, this rector of the village of Buxted, Sussex, seized on emerging technologies to help establish the iron foundry industry in England. By perfecting the technology behind the iron cannon, and building a business upon it, Mr Levett set in motion events that would make England the envy of the world's powers for its cutting-edge armaments, changing the balance of global power. Parson Levett was the first to cast iron cannons in England.Ernest Straker, Wealden Iron, G. Bell & Sons, 1931, theweald.org
The first iron cannon manufactured in England was cast in Buxted in 1543 by Ralf Hogge, an employee of Parson Levett, a Sussex rector with broad interests, paradoxically enough, in the emerging English armaments industry.Will of William Levett, Buxted the Beautiful, K. H. Macdermott, Pell & Son, Brighton, 1929 Henry VIII's reign was good for Parson Levett's business. While charged by the church with praying for peace, the Sussex parson's business thrived on the prospects of war.
William Levett was born at The Grove, Hollington, East Sussex, the son of Joane (Adams) Levett and John Levett, a large landowner and descendant of a knightly Anglo-Norman family who owned the manor of Catsfield Levett (now simply Catsfield), as well as property across Sussex, including in Hollington, St. Leonards-on-Sea, Bulverhythe, Firle, Hastings, Bexhill-on-Sea and elsewhere.Sussex Archaeological Collections, Vol. X, London, 1858Sussex Archaeological Collections Vol. XIV, 1862. Lawrence Levett inherited the family seat at Hollington,A half-brother of the three Levetts was Adam Ashburnham, son of Joane (Adams) Levett Ashburnham, and her second husband Lawrence Ashburnham, whom she married after the early death of John Levett of Hollington. Adam Ashburnham was MP for Winchelsea. leaving his brothers the Rev. William Levett to pursue a career in the ministry, and brother John to turn to business and ironfounding.
His brother John, who lived at Little Horsted, Sussex, leveraged the family's landholdings into one of the earliest iron foundries in the Weald of Sussex.At Buxted the Levett family purchased their foundry property from their kinsman Edmund Pope, who had bought the land from George Nevill, 5th Baron Bergavenny. From Levett's early efforts sprang the almost complete monopoly that the Weald enjoyed over iron gun-casting for the subsequent two centuries, yielding the region immense profits, increasing its sway on the national stage and setting the scene for England's increasing dominance of world trade and power.
Iron foundries required immense amounts of wood, converted into charcoal, to smelt the iron in blast furnaces. Timber and ore were the raw materials of smelted iron: each furnace required a permanent wood-lined pit for casting. The earliest cannons cast by the foundry belonging to the Levetts were of the Italianate style originating in Venice and copied by the English. By adapting the European style, the English turned Sussex and Kent into the centre of the European gun-making industry.Arthur R. Ankers, Sussex Cavalcade, 1997
Iron smelting was not new to the Sussex Weald: the Romans had a forge at Oldlands in Buxted, where their coins have been found. But the large-scale forging of weaponry was new. In a very short period of time the English made themselves masters of the art of gun-making. The Sussex landscape is sprinkled with names redolent of the forges: Furnace Wood, Furnace Pond, Minepit Wood, Little Forge, Culver Wood, Slag Meadow, Huggett's Furnace, and Hammerpond.
The earliest cannons were crude affairs, "mere cylinders", wrote Sussex historian Thomas Walker Horsfield, "fixed on sledges, and were sometimes composed of iron bars, laid side by side like the staves of a cask, and held together by iron hoops."Thomas Walker Horsfield, The History, Antiquities and Topography of the County of Sussex, Sussex Press, Lewes, 1835, theweald.org These early cannons were so inferior to those made on the continent that the English Board of Ordnance simply ordered abroad, importing cannons and even shot from Europe.
But in the 1540s, all that changed. "With the conscious patronage and support of the crown", notes historian N. A. M. Rodger, "the established iron industry in the Weald of Kent and Sussex was encouraged to experiment with gunfounding iron. The first iron muzzle-loaders were cast at Buxted in 1543." In 1545, Parson Levett was ordered to produce 120 of his state-of-the-art cannons as well as a large amount of ammunition. Suddenly the English iron-masters had become the yardstick by which armorers were measured. Because of the proximity of timber, the importation of foreign (primarily French) ironworkers, and effective new forging methods, the English guns were superior to those manufactured on the European continent. The new English guns were so effective that laws were quickly passed to prevent their export to enemies on the continent.
William Levett served Buxted as its vicar for over 21 years, from 1533 to 1554The Weald of Kent, Surrey & Sussex, theweald.org at St. Margaret's parish church. (In 1533 Levett was also named non-resident rector of a parish in Stanford Rivers, Essex,By 1540 Parson Levett also owned a home and land in Southminster, Essex. where he apparently continued to hold the living during his lifetime, and in 1545 he was also named rector of Herstmonceux, Sussex).Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, 1900 In the same year that Levett was named rector of Buxted he was also named deputy to the Receiver of the King's Revenue in Sussex for a one-year term (1533–34). This curious overlapping of church and state – the vicar as tax collector – demonstrated Levett's talents, his ambition and his ability to navigate the shoals of politics, business and religion.
In 1535, two years into Levett's tenure as parish vicar, Levett's elder brother John died. The founder of the family's interest in iron founding, John Levett instructed the executors of his will (who included his brother Rev. William) to continue operating his "Irron mylles and furnesses" and to devote the profits to providing for his young children. At the time of his death, John Levett was already operating several furnaces in Sussex, producing ironworks.
By 1539, four years after the death of John Levett, Parson William Levett had taken over the reins of his brother's pioneering enterprise.In the same year, 1539, a document from the court of King Henry VIII notes that parson Levett, clearly no ordinary vicar, was attended by two servants. And he was selling iron and ironwork to the Board of Ordnance in London. Two years later, in 1541, Levett was supplying shot to the royal forces. The King appointed the armigerous Levett his chief "goonstone maker". Four years later, in 1545, Levett had proven himself so indispensable to the Crown that the Privy Council noted in haste: "Parson Levet ordered by letter to send hither such pieces of artillery as he has already made."Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, 1905, The following year, 1546, the privy council appointed Levett to oversee the mines of the Duke of Norfolk's Sussex estates.The Gun-founders of England, Cambridge University Press, CambridgeKing Henry VIII had appointed William Levett subtenant of the Royal iron works at Newbridge in 1641.Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 21, Part 2, Institute of Historical Research, British History Online
Nor was Parson Levett confining his iron foundering to Sussex. Contemporaneous records show that Levett was also producing munitions and weaponry at a site close by the Tower of London, where the Royal stores of armaments were warehoused.Two of Levett's cannons are said to be in the armaments collection of the Tower of London.
Parson Levett had taken to his new sideline. Apparently he was a natural, so efficient that the Privy Council appointed him in 1546 to oversee the Sussex iron mines that had belonged to the attainted Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and were confiscated by the Crown.The Archaeological Journal, 1912 Levett employed master gun founders Charles Garrete and Pierre Baude at his Buxted furnace, as well as five other aliens (probably Frenchmen) in 1543, and six in 1550. By 1543 Levett was the leading supplier of cast-iron muzzle-loading cannons to the English forces. The discovery of one of Levett's two-pound cannons marked with the monogram of King Henry VIII and dated 1543 – seized by the Spanish in Oudewater in the Netherlands in 1575 – proved that Levett succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
"In the begyning", said Ralf Hogge in a statement of 1573, "there was none that cast any gonnes or shott of yron but only pson (parson) Levet who was my mr. (master) and my p'decessor who mayde none but only for the service of the Kynges matie (majesty)." Levett had confined his manufacturing to the exclusive use of the Crown, forgoing profits from selling abroad, Hogge suggested to Queen Elizabeth, who should allow Levett's successor Hogge to enjoy the same monopoly in return for Hogge's loyalty and refusal to sell abroad.
By 1553, the Board of Ordnance in London had purchased more than 250 of Levett's guns.The sums being expended by the Crown on Levett's products added up. In the month of August 1545, for instance, the Privy Council authorized the expenditure of £200 to "Wm. Levett, parson of Buckstedde, for iron pieces and shot." During the proceeding month, July 1545, the Privy Council authorized a "Letter to Parson Levett to send hither 300 cannon shot, 200 culverin shot, 300 saker shot, and 300 fawcon shot, or as many as he had ready." The Crown was quickly discovering the meaning of 'military-industrial complex'. At a stroke, this English parson who had the armaments business thrust on him by death in the family had morphed into a full-blown entrepreneur. Iron casting and cannon-making became England's first modern industrial economy. Old landowning families like the Sidneys, the Carylls, the Coverts and the Gratwickes rushed to cash in on the boom, which lasted for more than two centuries. The wars of Henry VIII were good for business: the 20 blast furnaces and 28 forges in Sussex in 1549 more than doubled in 25 years to 50 furnaces and 60 forges. The secret was in the English method of vertical casting.Paul E.J. Hammer, Elizabeth's Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604, Great Britain, 2004