Cannons in the Canon 2: Blast Furnaces

Topic: Cannons in the Canon 2: Blast Furnaces

1. Verified Sourced Facts

• No verified sourced facts have been isolated in this packet yet; current value is mainly as a source map or lead packet.

2. Ken Feinstein Twitter and Blog Information

• A Ken Feinstein blog post dated 23 Nov. 2018 states:

“Sir Henry Neville inherited Mayfield Manor in Sussex which included an ironworks used for casting iron ordnance (cannons).”

• The same post states:

“He was very involved in this business from the mid 1580s to the mid 1590s.”

• The same post states:

“the main component of an iron foundry is the furnace.”

• The same post adds:

“at the time they were using blast furnaces with giant bellows which blew air into the furnace.”

• The same post quotes Venus and Adonis:

“As from a furnace, vapours doth he send:”

• The same post quotes Rape of Lucrece:

“O Night, thou furnace of foul-reeking smoke,”

• The same post quotes 3 Henry VI:

“Scarce serves to quench my furnace-burning heart:”

• The same post quotes As You Like It:

“Sighing like furnace”

• The same post states:

“Most of these metaphors incorporate the "blast" aspect of the furnace.”

• The same post states that The Troublesome Reign of King John includes:

“That rageth as the furnace sevenfold hot”

• Wealden District Council's Healthy Wealden walking guide provides a public local-history control for the Mayfield furnace context. It states that Thomas Gresham established the Mayfield ironworks after taking possession of the Old Palace estate in the late 1560s, that control passed to Henry Neville after Gresham's death in 1579, and that by 1592 Neville worked in a syndicate with the Sackville family and German/Dutch partners to gain a royal patent/monopoly for export of cast-iron guns.

• The same guide describes the technical setting: hammer ponds, waterwheels, bellows, a furnace, vertical gun pits, boring mill, and continuous firing for months.

3. Citations

• Feinstein, Ken. “Cannons in the Canon (Part 2) - Blast Furnaces.” kenfeinstein.blogspot.com, 23 Nov. 2018, https://kenfeinstein.blogspot.com/2018/11/cannons-in-canon-part-2-blast-furnaces.html. Local preservation: blog_cannons2_blast_furnaces_2018-11-23.md.
• Wealden District Council. “A vision of hell.” Healthy Wealden, https://www.healthywealden.co.uk/walks/a-vision-of-hell/.
• mayfield_manor_and_ironworks.md, related packet.
• play_as_you_like_it.md, related play packet.
• play_henry_v.md, related play packet.

4. Evidence Images

5. Notes on Access

• This is a lead packet, not a primary-source packet.
• The play quotations are preserved here because they are quoted in the blog post; the related play packets remain the place for direct Folger-based act/scene quotation.
• The underlying furnace-history and ironworks witnesses should be cited directly before this packet is treated as standalone evidence.
• Web audit result: the Mayfield blast-furnace/ordnance background is stronger than this packet previously showed. However, the Shakespeare metaphor list must be extracted directly from Folger texts and treated as lexical/imagistic evidence, not as proof of authorship.