Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/382

 death designates the Anglo-Saxons as 'the illustrious smiths of war!' The Dooms-day Book, though composed in the reign of the first Norman king of England, may be said, for our present purpose, to be Saxon: it often alludes to workers in iron. For instance, we find that in the City of Hereford there were six smiths, who paid one penny each for his forge, and who made one hundred and twenty pieces of iron from the king's ore. To each of them threepence was paid as a custom, and they were freed from all other services. It would appear that the iron-mines of England were well worked in Saxon times. Iron-ore was obtained in several counties, and there were furnaces for smelting. The mines of Gloucestershire, in particular, are alluded to by Giraldus Cambrensis as producing an abundance of this valuable metal; and there is every reason for supposing that these mines were wrought by the Saxons, as they had been by their predecessors, the Romans.

The Anglo-Saxon monks were, as already hinted, like the Druid priests, skilful workers in iron, and the Venerable Bede describes one of these people as well skilled in smithcraft. Speaking of Easterwin, Abbot of Weremouth, he says: 'This abbot, being a strong man, and of a humble disposition, used to assist his monks in their rural labours, sometimes guiding the plough by its stilt or handle, sometimes winnowing corn, and sometimes forging instruments of husbandry with a hammer upon the anvil.'

King Edgar even enacted that the clergy should