Cannons in the Canon 7: The Tempest and Mill-Wheels Strike

Topic: Cannons in the Canon 7: The Tempest and Mill-Wheels Strike

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 10 Jan. 2019 quotes The Tempest:

“As fast as Mill-wheeles strike”

• The same post states:

“If you do a search on EEBO, there are many Mill-Wheel metaphors, but they are different; they deal with the turning of the wheel.”

• The same post asks:

“So why is Shakespeare talking about a mill-wheel striking something, making a noise?”

• The same post answers:

“From the mid 1580s to the mid 1590s Henry Neville owned and operated an ironworks in Sussex in Mayfield.”

• The same post adds:

“The blast furnaces of that time used giant bellows run by a water wheel.”

• The same post further states:

“It also drove hammers that pounded on the iron.”

• The same post gives additional examples:

“Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.”

• The same post also gives:

“hammer'd steel”

• The same post also gives:

“Unless my nerves were brass or hammer'd steel.”

• The Wealden District Council Mayfield furnace guide supplies contextual support for the industrial mechanism: waterwheels powered bellows and machinery at Mayfield, and a separate boring-mill pond powered the cannon-boring process. It does not by itself prove that The Tempest line refers to ironworks rather than other mill-wheel contexts.

3. Citations

• Feinstein, Ken. “Cannons in the Canon 7: The Tempest and Mill-Wheels Strike.” kenfeinstein.blogspot.com, 10 Jan. 2019, https://kenfeinstein.blogspot.com/2019/01/cannons-in-cannon-7-mill-wheels-strike.html. Local preservation: blog_cannons7_tempest_mill_wheels_2019-01-10.md.
• Wealden District Council. “A vision of hell.” Healthy Wealden, https://www.healthywealden.co.uk/walks/a-vision-of-hell/.
• play_the_tempest.md, related play packet.
• mayfield_manor_and_ironworks.md, related packet.

4. Notes on Access

• The preserved local export for this post does not include embedded images.
• This is a lead packet, not a primary-source packet.
• The EEBO search claim and the play-side quotations should be cited directly before this packet is treated as standalone evidence.
• Web audit result: the industrial context is stronger after adding the Mayfield guide, but the key claim requires an EEBO comparison of mill-wheel metaphors and a direct Folger extraction of the Tempest line.