Heavy industry on the River Meon: Iron by Carolyn Hughes

We are accustomed to thinking of the Meon Valley as a peaceful, very rural place, where cows graze in the meadows, sheep crop the short turf on the hills, and grain and rape and watercress are harvested from the fields and paddies that border the river.

I have said before that, from early times, there were many mills along the banks of the meandering Meon. They were mostly used for grinding grain for flour but also for a number of manufacturing processes, including iron working, cloth processing, paper making and tanning – quite heavy industries. 

Today I’m going to look at iron working, and next time I will consider brick making. Both industries were centred around the lower reaches of the Meon, at Titchfield and a little further upstream at Funtley, and both have been very important to the economy of the area and the country.

Greenwood’s map from 1826 showing the Titchfield Hundred.
The white arrows and circles show, from the south, “Brick Kilns” next to the River Meon,
and to the east, the “Fareham Kilns”; “Iron Mill”; “Funtley Mill”.

Iron making

Iron smelting had been going on in the Meon Valley since Roman times. Evidence of a Roman “bloomery”, a type of furnace, was found during excavations for one of the Forest of Bere’s car parks in Soberton Heath. This method was used from the Iron Age to mediaeval times, and used charcoal and iron ore. The charcoal would have been made from local timber, in this case trees from the Bere Forest, and the iron ore would presumably have come from the Wealden sandstones, found to the east in Sussex and Kent. Once extracted from the ground, the ore was “roasted” before being smelted with the charcoal in the bloomery furnace, which initially was just a hole in the ground, but later was built above ground out of clay, or stone with a clay lining. The bellows used to increase the heat inside the furnace were operated by hand or foot. The result of the smelting was a spongy mass of iron and slag, which needed to be heated again and hammered, as many times as necessary, to remove the slag and produce iron suitable for making plough-shares, cart fittings, weapons and so on.

A "bloomery" furnace

Later on, iron smelting became increasingly located where water power could be exploited to speed the process.

From the 15^th century, “finery” forges used pig iron to produce bar iron. Charcoal was again used to burn the carbon off the pig iron, and the resulting “bloom” was beaten with a hammer to remove the impurities and then draw the iron out into a bar for working.

A finery forge

A slitting mill, invented in the 16^th century, was basically a watermill for slitting bars of iron into rods. It consisted of two pairs of rollers turned by water wheels. 

A slitting mill

The first blast furnace in Britain was recorded in 1496, and they spread across the country during the 1550s. The blast furnaces made pig iron from iron ore, and the basic principle was similar to that of the bloomery, using charcoal, but the smelting temperature was higher. Water was used to drive the bellows to create the draught. Later, in 1709, Abraham Darby used coal/coke as a fuel at his Coalbrookdale (the Midlands) furnaces and, within 100 years, the use of coke was almost universal in iron working.

So what do we know about the Funtley iron mill?

As I have mentioned in a previous post (History Girls, August 2017), until the seventeenth century, the Meon was navigable as far as Titchfield, which at that time was a significant port. Eventually, silting restricted the passage of ships and the busy life of Titchfield as a port began its decline in 1611, when the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, took the decision to block off the estuary of the River Meon from the sea. He built a canal adjacent to the river, one of the very first canals to be built in England, and a sea lock was built across the estuary. However, several years before he blocked off the estuary, the Earl had established an iron mill a little upstream at Funtley, powered by the River Meon, which might suggest that he expected (or hoped) his actions over the port to support, even boost, Titchfield’s prosperity (though in many ways it did decline). Over time, the Funtley iron mill produced a huge quantity of iron.

The iron mill seems to have been built on a virgin site by the Earl in 1603-5. As already suggested, its establishment seemed to be part of the Earl’s attempt to restore Titchfield’s economic health but also his own fortunes after his release from the Tower of London. Wriothesley had been deeply involved in the Earl of Essex’s 1601 rebellion against Elizabeth I. He was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life imprisonment through the intervention of Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State. However, on the accession of James I in 1603, Wriothesley was released and resumed his place at court. And he built his iron mill.

A tin mill was apparently also established in the vicinity in 1623, producing utensils for London and perhaps also Portsmouth, although the origin of the tin itself is not clear but was probably Cornwall. However, in the ensuing decades, the iron mill produced an annual total of c.200 tonnes of iron, so clearly the Earl’s strategy worked, and industry in Titchfield did not slump entirely following the closing of the port. The productivity of the mills was already great enough before 1611 to have seriously depleted the local region’s wood resources, used to make charcoal to fuel the furnaces. 

From the 1770s until 1789, the Iron Mill at Funtley was owned by Henry Cort, the inventor of the rolling mill and the puddling furnace, important for the production of iron during the Napoleonic Wars.

As a young man, Cort was a supplier of naval provisions and by the 1770s he had built himself a small fortune. In 1768, he married Elizabeth Heysham, whose uncle William had inherited the family ironmongery business in Gosport, which supplied the navy with mooring chains, anchors and hundreds of different items of ironmongery. Henry took over the business and, after years of experimenting with improved methods for wrought-iron production, in 1775 he bought a forge and slitting mill at Funtley. He wanted continue his experiments, hoping to find an easier way to turn cast iron into wrought iron without the need for hammering.

In 1780, the Royal Navy hired him to re-roll the iron hoops for their barrels. Henry wanted to install new equipment at Funtley, and he turned to Adam Jellicoe, chief clerk in the navy’s pay office, to help finance the venture to the tune of nearly £30,000. (It was apparently normal for pay office clerks to use surplus funds temporarily for their own benefit, though this would later prove Henry’s undoing.) As part of the deal, Samuel, Jellicoe’s son, became a partner in the Funtley works. Jellicoe lived at Fontley House, situated close by the mill, a house that still survives.

In 1783 and 1784 Henry took out patents for new processes, which represented major technological advances in the production of wrought iron. First came the process called “rolling”. In this, the red hot iron was passed through grooved rollers (the design of which he patented) rather than using a hammer to draw the iron out into a bar. The bars of iron were reprocessed several times to produce wrought iron of the desired quality. Rolling replaced hammering for consolidating wrought iron and was 15 times faster.

A rolling mill

He also invented a new process for fining iron, removing the impurities to enable it to be forged. The earlier method of fining used a hearth fuelled with charcoal, but the wood needed for making charcoal had become too scarce to enable the iron industry to expand. Newer blast furnaces were using with coal/coke instead of charcoal. Henry devised a method of “puddling” iron in a coal-burning “reverbatory” furnace, in which the molten iron was stirred with a long rod before being consolidated, and then rolled into bars with the grooved rollers. The new method produced rolled iron of such quality that the navy soon insisted that all iron produced for their use had to meet the same standard.

Because the puddling method used coal/coke instead of expensive charcoal, and because the system could be mechanised, eventually iron production became much cheaper and faster. It also became essential once blast furnaces were used. Before Henry developed his processes, England imported large quantities of wrought iron from abroad, but within a decade of his patents, the country became a major iron exporter.

However, everything was about to go wrong for Henry Cort. For, in 1789, Adam Jellicoe died, and it was discovered that he had indeed used navy money – public funds – to finance Henry’s business, but he hadn’t paid it back and he died with large public debts. His liabilities passed to Henry, who also didn’t have the money to repay the debts. A court requisitioned the works at Funtley and another one at Gosport. Henry was financially ruined. His partnership with Samuel Jellicoe was dissolved, although Samuel was later able to clear the debt. The Crown later gave Samuel possession of the works at Funtley where he remained for the next thirty years.

As an acknowledgment of the value of the patents, the government did grant Henry a small pension in 1794. But despite his inventiveness and the contribution he had made to British industry, Henry Cort died a poor man in 1800.

There is very little left of the iron works at Funtley, apart from some sections of brickwork surrounding the millstream and a plaque.

However, in modern day Fareham, Henry Cort’s work is celebrated in the Henry Cort Millennium Project, a permanent exhibition of the work of twelve blacksmith artists from throughout Europe.

Self-sufficiency then and now… by Carolyn Hughes

I have been musing recently on how, for the past, say, nine centuries or so, until perhaps the early or even middle of the 20th century, the communities in the Meon Valley were mostly self-sufficient, one way or another.

Map of the Meon Valley William J Blaeu, Amsterdam, 1645

In earlier centuries, people rarely left their village, for almost everything they needed was there, produced by themselves, or local farmers or tradespeople. People’s “needs” of course were, necessarily and aspirationally, much more limited than ours, and, apart from “Shanks’s pony”, most people didn’t have the means to travel far.

There might be a market of some kind in the village, where folk would buy and sell their produce, and itinerant pedlars might bring “extras” that couldn’t be made in the village. In the days when a lot of villagers worked the land in one way or another, they took their grain to the mill to be ground into flour and either made their own bread or bought it from a baker.

  

Many grew their own vegetables and perhaps some fruit. If they were wealthy enough, they might have a cow and be able to make cheese. More likely, they might have a pig and produce their own bacon, and even more commonly, have a few hens to produce eggs and eventually a stringy carcass for the pot. If they didn’t, or couldn’t, have their own livestock, others could provide it for a price. People made their own ale or bought it from the village ale-wives. For tasks they couldn’t do themselves, there would be tradespeople who could – smiths, farriers, wheelwrights, carpenters, builders, thatchers and so on.

That said, I am not clear about the nature of the “market” in rural communities. I have always imagined that villagers would have sold their surplus to their neighbours in some sort of “farmers’ market”: more affluent housewives who produced a lot of cheese, for example, or ran a large number of hens and had eggs to spare, or had a large holding and grew more vegetables than the family could eat.

So when a community was “granted” a weekly market by the lord, perhaps this was a different sort of event, when merchants (to use the term loosely) might also come from outside to sell their goods? Maybe this was where villagers would purchase a new cooking pot, for example, or tools of various kinds?

Titchfield already had such a market in the 11th century, for the Domesday Book says its “market and toll (are worth) 40 shillings”. Titchfield’s was one of the first markets in Hampshire and, in the 12th century, it was the only place in the Meon Valley to have one. It wasn’t until 1231 that Meonstoke was granted a weekly Monday market, and in 1269 that Wickham was granted a charter to hold one every Thursday.

Titchfield Market Hall, built in 1620s, now at the Weald & Downland Open Air
Museum, West Sussex. (MilborneOne at the English language Wikipedia
[CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D,
via Wikimedia Commons)]

To buy something more exotic, folk might make the effort to travel a few miles to the nearest annual fair. Fairs were more than just over-sized markets. They were, as Ian Mortimer says, “the great gatherings of mediaeval England.” They were usually three-day events, held in honour of a specific saint, on the saint’s day and the day before and after it. Merchants would come from further afield with more exotic goods, spices perhaps, fine quality cloth, more sophisticated household and personal items than could be had in the markets. They were also places of entertainment as well as shopping.

In the Meon Valley, there were several fairs, though only one or two would be within walking distance of a particular village. At the sea end of the valley, in the 13th century, Titchfield was granted permission by King Edward I to hold an annual five-day fair, which was of enormous economic significance, and perhaps reflected the importance of the town after the establishment of its Premonstratensian abbey, which was almost certainly visited often by officials and even royalty. Further upstream, Wickham, at the same time as being granted its market, also received permission for an annual three-day fair on the anniversary of the Translation Of St. Nicholas (in May). The Wickham Fair attracted buyers and sellers from a wide area, dealing in goods of all kinds. The fair has continued more or less without a break, and is still held every 20th May, now more of an entertainment than a grand shopping experience. In the upper reaches of the valley, Meonstoke was also granted an annual three-day fair, in 1231, to be held on the “vigil, feast, and morrow” of St. Margaret. East Meon, too, held an annual fair on Lady Day (March), which continued until the 19th century, but has recently been revived as a May Country Fair.

Knowing how very rural and tranquil the communities of the Meon Valley are now, it is interesting to picture them hundreds of years ago as – once a year at least – the busy, bustling centres of trade they once were.

Interesting too, to note how relatively large some of these, now quite little, villages once were. The Domesday Book of 1086 has the details... East Meon for example was very large in relation to the norms of the day, with 138 households (perhaps 700 people), although the area covered was probably more than just the existing village. Only a short distance away was West Meon, also quite large, with 50 households (250 individuals). A few miles further to the south is Exton, still quite big at 46 households, as was Soberton with 35. By contrast, and rather intriguingly, three of the communities that were granted annual fairs – which one interprets as an indication of their power or importance – were not among the largest: Titchfield had only 33 households, Wickham had 26 and Meonstoke had 28. How curious! Mind you, the fairs and markets were granted to these places nearly two hundred years later than Domesday, so perhaps they had by then become more important places.

Obviously, the size of all communities has gone up and down over the ensuing centuries, but it’s quite interesting to see how the relative balance has changed since Domesday. In the most recent census (2011), East Meon and West Meon now have about 2000 individuals between them; Exton and Meonstoke, together with Corhampton (three villages that sit very close together) have 1600, with Corhampton now the largest of the three (having had only 60 or so individuals in 1086) and Exton the smallest. Soberton, too, has 1600. Wickham and Titchfield, however, have grown really quite large, at 4300 and 7200 respectively. As I have shown in a previous History Girls post, Wickham has been a thriving “townlet” for several centuries, and perhaps its location on a main route from the south coast at Portsmouth is a reason. In Titchfield’s case (see this History Girls post), it, too, was an important town for centuries, but eventually lost its status partly as the surrounding conurbation of Southampton/Fareham/Portsmouth grew and overwhelmed it.

Returning to the matter of the communities’ relative self-sufficiency, that way of life must have continued, more or less unchanged, for centuries, certainly into the 19th and in some places into the 20th. I am not clear to what extent the markets or the fairs continued, but change of a sort did take place during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when shops came to the villages. In the Meon Valley, two communities, East Meon and Soberton, offer good, if different, pictures of just how self-contained a village could still be, even up to a time that is well within living memory.

East Meon © Author

For example, East Meon was still virtually self-sustaining in the early 20th century, for then it had over 20 shops and tradesmen’s workshops. The East Meon History group (http://www.eastmeonhistory.org.uk) has a wonderful website with all sorts of fascinating information about the village’s history. The website includes a map, drawn from memory by a resident, which shows all the stores and workshops serving the village in the 1920s, and where they were located (all now, of course, private and highly desirable homes). Inter alia, there were four bakers, a dairy, three grocers, three butchers, two mills, a saddler and cobbler, a wheelwright, farriers, a post office, a herbalist, and a wide range of craftsmen and building trades. One of the grocers, alongside food, also offered haberdashery as well as household goods, fabrics, boots and shoes, and apparently all the grocers sold paraffin, vital for cottagers without electricity. 

In Soberton, in the 1830s, it is thought that there was just a single shop in the High Street, a grocery, but, before long, more shops appeared: a butcher, a bakery, which was apparently also later the post office and sold beer and insurance too, and also a bicycle shop, a boot repairer, a blacksmith, and building craftsmen (carpenters, joiners, masons etc). In Soberton Heath, in the middle of the parish, there were a couple of grocery shops, and, in Newtown, at the southern end of the parish, a shop was opened in the 19th century, which, in the end, was the only shop in the parish and didn’t close until the 2000s. As late as, perhaps, the early 1980s most things could be bought in the village.

Wickham's market square © Author

Wickham and Titchfield, now with very much larger populations than any of the Meon Valley villages, are unsurprisingly rather better served in terms of shops and businesses. In 1939, Titchfield had about 40 shops and workshops, and Wickham’s great square was lined on every side with businesses of different kinds. Now, each little town has a small chain supermarket and a second “open-all-hours” store, as well as a butcher, a post office, a chemist, hairdressers, several pubs, restaurants and tea/coffee houses. Wickham also has two hardware stores, several antiques centres and gift shops, and a chocolate shop…

Titchfield, South Street, looking towards the square. Public domain.

However, there is no shop now in Soberton, and once bustling East Meon has just one shop, which is a general store and part-time post office. But there are also village shops in each of West Meon (which also has a butchers’ shop), Meonstoke and Droxford, all of which offer at least part-time post office services, and are village hubs, offering access to all sorts of local services and tradesmen as well as selling food and household goods.

In truth, it is perfectly possible to live quite well in either Wickham or Titchfield without having to travel further afield too often, provided one is prepared to accept a relatively modest lifestyle in the context of 21st century consumerism.

Yet, some of those village shops are also really striving to recover at least a degree of self-sustainment for the communities they serve. The post office and village store in Meonstoke (which also serves Exton and Corhampton) is a good example. It offers nearly everything you could need for day-to-day living: bread, meat, vegetables and fruit; ale and wine; logs and coal; as well as culinary treats, and access to many trades and services. Moreover, a good deal of what the shop provides is locally produced, much as it was in the Middle Ages. Its website (http://www.meonstokepostofficeandvillagestores.co.uk/) sums up its credo: “Local produce, for us, is key for many reasons – to make sure you receive them when they are most fresh, to support local businesses and to promote a reduced carbon footprint.”.

There seems to be a growing desire (in truth, a need) for “local produce”, for reducing “food miles”, for greater “sustainment”. And some small communities are clearly beginning to return to at least a modicum of the self-sufficiency they had for so many centuries. What is happening here in the Meon Valley is undoubtedly happening in rural communities throughout the country. One wonders if the tide is beginning to turn.

Were there once ships on the River Meon?

Titchfield, in Hampshire, was once one of the most significant towns on the River Meon, enjoying considerable prosperity and status during the mediaeval period, at least partly because of its port. But, over time, as with many places whose fortunes rose and fell, Titchfield declined in importance, largely for social and economic reasons, but also partly perhaps because of its geography.

Titchfield lies at the seaward end of the River Meon, and up until the mid-17th century, the town supported a small port. The woollen industry was important in the area around Titchfield, and mills along the river banks powered the production of iron, tanned goods, salt and cloth. The port enabled the goods produced to be distributed to larger centres such as Southampton, and also allowed the local gentry to move around by boat instead of travelling by road.

Titchfield, South Street, looking towards the square. Public domain

But, in 1611, the life of Titchfield as a port began its decline when the estate owner, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, blocked off the estuary of the River Meon and built a canal directly from the sea to the town. These actions were intended, presumably, to maintain the port, in the face of the silting up of the river mouth, but it is generally considered that, in practice, what he did rather hastened the decline of the town’s prosperity.

Speed’s 1611 map (http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/hantsmap/hantsmap

accessed 07/08/2017). The River Meon estuary is still shown open,

despite it being the year that the river was blocked off and the canal built.

The River Meon had been important for millennia to the groups of people who lived in its vicinity, as a source of water, undoubtedly, and food, perhaps, and also as a route through the woodland of Neolithic Britain (c.4000-2000BCE), and a means of transporting goods upriver from the sea. In due course, the river’s tidal estuary also made it suitable for water-powered industries to grow up along its banks.

In the 10th century, Titchfield was referred to in documents and maps as Ticcefelda, in the 11th century, Ticefelle, in the 13th and 14th centuries, Tichefelde, and by the 16th century, the town was documented as Tytchfelde.

The Domesday book entry for Titchfield states:

The King holds TICEFELLE. It is a berewick, and belongs to MENESTOCHES. King Edward held it. There are 2 hides; but they have not paid geld. (There) is land for 15 ploughs. In (the) demesne (there are) but 2 oxen (animalia), and (there are) 16 villeins and 13 borders with 9 ploughs. There are 4 serfs, and a mill worth 20 shillings. The market and toll (are worth) 40 shillings.[http://www.titchfieldhistory.org]

“Menestoches”, by the way, is Meonstoke, 12 miles or so further up the Meon valley (and more or less where my fictional “Meonbridge” lies).

A port of some kind seems to have existed at Titchfield, with the River Meon possibly serving as an industrial and commercial waterway, since the turn of the first millennium CE, when the river was still easily accessible from the sea. Such a port may not have been all that sophisticated. It is likely that large ships would have just anchored up outside the mouth of the river to unload their goods into little boats, which would then have ferried them to the bank and, perhaps, a little further upriver.

It is thought that, prior to the 10th century, the River Meon was negotiable by small boats along most of its length, making it a viable alternative to road travel through the area. But the late 10th/early 11th century was the start of the construction of many water mills all along the river, mills that were used mainly for grinding corn but also in other industries, such as wool and cloth, iron, tanning, and salt. The mill at Titchfield, mentioned in the Domesday Book, was worth 20 shillings, but there were as many as thirty mills along the river’s length, and they underpinned the area’s economy for the next thousand years. However, it seems that, over time, the very development of the mills, and the associated bridges, weirs and other engineering works, especially those further towards its source, meant that river travel beyond Titchfield became difficult and eventually impossible.

Sometime also in the 10th/11th centuries, Jean de Gisor, a rich Norman merchant, and a vassal of the kings of England, first Henry II and then Richard I, seems to have established a base at his property in Titchfield, in order to facilitate his cross-channel trade, implying the existence of a port that de Gisor hoped to exploit. Titchfield’s location would also have provided a good stopping off point for officials travelling between England and France, and a family like the de Gisors would certainly have attracted a wide array of important visitors, wishing to make use of cross-channel travel facilities. However, by 1180, the de Gisors had already moved on, to found the city of Portsmouth, and, presumably, develop its much bigger and more viable port. One can only speculate, but perhaps de Gisor found that the silty mouth of the River Meon was not as suitable as it might be for the establishment of a really successful port.

However, a century and half later, in 1232, the Bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches, established a Premonstratensian abbey at Titchfield, which, perhaps because of its high social and political standing, in itself resulted in significant economic development both in the town and the surrounding rural landscape.

Titchfield Market Hall, built by the 3rd Earl of Southampton in the 1620s, dismantled and
re-erected in 1970 at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, West Sussex.
MilborneOne [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Titchfield already had a valuable market in 1086, as shown in the Domesday Book. When a town was granted a market or fair, it was a signifier of its importance. In fact Titchfield’s markets was one of the first in Hampshire and, by the 12th century, it was the only place in the Meon valley to have one. In the late 13th century, presumably after the establishment of such an important abbey, which was almost certainly visited often by officials and even royalty, King Edward I granted the town permission to hold an annual five day fair, which was of enormous economic significance.

By the 1330’s, Titchfield was one of Hampshire’s richest towns, despite still being relatively small and, in 1333, it was also one of Hampshire’s most heavily taxed towns, implying that it was both thriving and important. 

However, the town suffered excessively in the Black Death of 1349‐50. The population was substantially reduced, perhaps by as much as 80%, and during the plague’s recurrences in subsequent decades, the tenant population of Titchfield was depleted still further. This dramatic demographic shift must have had a significant economic impact on the town. Before the Black Death, prices were high and labour abundant, and landowners grew rich. But the huge loss of life severely affected the production of key exports such as wool, and the reduction in labour, demands for higher wages and the excess untenanted land unbalanced the economy, at least for a while, with estate owners finding their incomes falling and trade presumably not so buoyant. The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) presumably also had an adverse impact, with the inevitable restriction of trade between England and Europe, and the burden of taxation imposed by the government to fund the king’s armies.

So were economic difficulties caused by the plague and the war the start of Titchfield’s gradual decline in significance? Possibly they played a part, but not quite yet…

The abbey was abandoned by the Premonstratensian order following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1537, but the estate and the monastic buildings were quickly taken over by Thomas Wriothesley, who was granted the abbey and estate for his services to the Crown during the dissolution. Thomas was a member of the royal secretariat, and helped secure the king’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. He was knighted in 1540, and became 1st Baron Wriothesley in 1544, when he also become Lord Chancellor. He was created 1st Earl of Southampton in 1547.

In 1542, Thomas had the abbey buildings converted into a home, known as Place House, some parts of which can still be seen (managed by English Heritage, http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/titchfield-abbey/).

Although this site is widely known as Titchfield Abbey, the remains are largely of the
old gate house from Place House, which was owned by the Wriothesley family.
Photo © Rosalind Hughes

Titchfield continued to be prosperous for some further decades but, as already mentioned, the mouth of the River Meon had always been “silty” and, in 1611, the situation became so bad that the 3rd Earl, Henry Wriothesley, Thomas’s grandson, took action.

As a momentary diversion, Henry was an intriguing character, if only because of his connection with William Shakespeare, who, in 1593, dedicated his narrative poem Venus and Adonis to him. The following year, he did the same with The Rape of Lucrece, and the words of the latter dedication were really rather over the top:

"The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end ... What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours"

The dedication page in The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare,
 to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield. 
Image in the Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, in the Tower of London
 in 1603, attributed to John de Critz.
Image in the Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Henry was Shakespeare’s patron and it seems that Henry may indeed have been the “Fair Youth” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, though he is not the only candidate! However, he appears also to have been a rather disreputable fellow, despite his high status, getting into scrapes of various sorts, one of which so upset Queen Elizabeth that she refused to receive him at court for a while, though his banishment did not last, so perhaps he was silver-tongued as well as handsome?

Anyway, in 1611, Henry took the decision to block off the estuary of the River Meon from the sea, and build a canal adjacent to the river, one of the very first canals to be built in England. A sea lock was built across the estuary, thus removing the port. The sealock would control the passage of ships to and from Titchfield, but would also control the freshwater levels in the area, for a further objective of the scheme was apparently to reclaim the large stretch of sea-marsh lying between the town and the blocked-off estuary (now, the haven) for, one supposes, arable farming and sheep rearing to supply the woollen industry, which was perhaps seen as of greater value to the local economy than the river itself.

The canal was built, presumably, as an alternative to the river, providing a direct link from the town to the sea, and to replace the functions that the River Meon had supported. It was evidently, however, not very successful in the long term and a hundred years later it was no longer in use.

Interestingly, before he blocked off the estuary, the Earl established an iron mill, powered by the River Meon, which surely suggests that he expected his actions over the port to support, and even boost, Titchfield’s prosperity? And, over time, that mill did produce a huge quantity of iron. Wool, cloth, salt, and leather also still kept the town a viable trading community, but perhaps, ultimately, Titchfield could not keep up with the productivity and connections of the larger urban centres to the east and west – Southampton, Fareham and Portsmouth. So, although industry in Titchfield didn’t just fall away immediately following the closure of the river port, at length the importance it had once held did decline.

Taylor’s 1759 map showing the river Meon estuary blocked off from the sea
and the adjacent canal running up to Titchfield Abbey/"Place House".
A road runs along the sea wall and over the sea lock bridge,
suggesting that the canal no longer flows into the sea.
(http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/hantsmap/hantsmap accessed 07/08/2017)

It is probably unjust to lay responsibility for the downfall of Titchfield’s economic health at the door of the 3rd Earl – though some do – when it seems that he hoped his engineering works would be the town’s salvation. But perhaps factors simply conspired, over time, to bring about the decline in the town’s importance. The silty nature of the lower River Meon, the industrial development along its banks, and then the Earl’s attempts to overcome its natural limitations, together with the lingering social, political and economic effects of plague and war, eventually reduce the town’s ability to sustain a port and, finally, its trading prosperity. 

Note:

Some of the discussion as to the background to Titchfield’s decline I shared during the writing of a Masters dissertation, The Economic Significance of the old port at Titchfield Hampshire, by Rosalind Hughes, which was submitted for a Masters degree in Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southampton in 2011 (unpublished).

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