Trade in the 17th Century - The Tallow Chandler

by Deborah Swift

Matthias Storm c.1640 Old Woman with a Candle

I was at a great loss for candles; so that as soon as ever it was dark, which was generally by seven o'clock, I was obliged to go to bed ……… The only remedy I had was, that when I had killed a goat, I saved the tallow, and with a little dish of clay, which I baked in the sun, to which I added a wick of some oakum, I made me a lamp; and this gave me light, though not a clear steady light like a candle."

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719

Light has always been a symbol for move out of ignorance and into the light of knowledge. As long as we can manufacture and control light, then we are no longer bound by the seasons, or forced to work from sunrise to sunset. Light gives us extra time for work and play, and the time to create during the hours free from chores or work.

The candle was one of the earliest forms of artificial light, and in the period in which I write, most candles were tallow. I need to continually think of this whenever I write a night-time scene, or a winter scene. We take the availability of good light so much for granted.

The Stink of Tallow 
Tallow was cheap animal fat, usually the waste material from meat - hence often sheep or bullock fat.

The tallow was prepared by first chopping the fat into small pieces and then boiling it up in a large copper to detach the muscle or membrane from the fat. The resultant mush was pressed to extract the 'juice', or tallow, and the remains or 'greaves' fed to the dogs or pigs, and even to the geese that were being fattened up for market.To produce a pure light, the chandler must wrestle with dead animal carcasses, and the associated smell and mess. For this reason, chandlery was perceived as a very low class trade, and the chandlers premises were often located near the tanneries and slaughterhouses, and close to a river with access to water. The process reminds me that for every 'light' there is the often invisible 'dark'.

'A woman reading by Candle-light' by Frans van Mieris the elder,
c.1665; black chalk on vellum.

Fir candles, made of a long thin splinter of fir, were commonly used in Scotland, and a fir candle holder was known as a "puirman"(poorman). But tallow candles were the common household candle in early England, and by the 13th century, candle-making had become a guild craft in England and France, controlled by ancient City Livery Companies. The Tallow Chandlers Company, one of the London Guilds, sill exists. It was formed in about 1300 to regulate and manage candle-making. Over the next 150 years they expanded in membership and influence, until King Edward IV granted them a coat of arms in 1456.

In rural areas, where no Livery Company existed, chandlers would sometimes go from house to house with their moulds, making candles from the kitchen fats saved for that purpose, or in smaller towns they made and sold their own candles from a shop. Candle-making was usually done in winter by a householder, as livestock was generally slaughtered around Martinmas (November 11th) to save the expense of over-wintering them. Tallow candles could be made for you in your own home with your own saved drippings by an itinerant tallow chandler (tallow chandlers and wax chandlers had separate guilds, and jealously guarded their products).

Candles, especially tallow ones, were kept in a wooden or metal box hung on the wall in order to protect them from vermin, as being animal fat, mice regarded them as food. Being away from the fire also prevented the candles wilting and bending in heat.

A candle box of 1680

Holy Beeswax
Unlike animal-based tallow, beeswax burned pure and cleanly, without producing a smoky flame. It also had a pleasant sweet smell rather than the foul, acrid odor of tallow. However,  it took an entire honeycomb's worth of beeswax to make one 4" candle, so it was very expensive. Beeswax candles were widely used for church ceremonies. The beeswax itself had a religious significance in 17th Century England. One story is that bees were absent from the Garden of Eden and so escaped Eve's sin. Another is that medieval monks thought that bees reproduced by immaculate conception, like the Virgin Mary, and so the beeswax of a church candle came to signify purity.

The Revolutionary Art of Plaiting a Wick
The absorbency and efficiency of a wick depended on the number of individual strands. Adding or subtracting a few extra strands of animal hair or hemp fibre made the difference between a candle that burned well, or one that guttered or dripped. The wicks were made from twisted threads of flax, cotton, or hemp, and trimming the wick to get rid of candle "snuffs" was essential to keeping your candle burning well, or it would flare and smoke. I often imagine my characters having to trim the wick in the middle of conversations, or tackling writing a letter.

The best wicks were invented later in the 19th century, and revolutionised the candle. They were plaited so they curled as they burned to ensure that the tip burnt off during use so they didn't have to be continually trimmed, thus ensuring you could carry out your task uninterrupted. To achieve this curl, the plait or braid of a wick was woven asymmetrically, with a few extra strands in one of the threads. After being cut to length, the wicks were dipped in molten wax so that one end was stiff enough to poke through the hole at the bottom of the mould, and then the moulds were filled.

Wooden & Pewter Candle Mould

The Fall of Tallow

The tallow chandler's fortunes declined at the end of the 17th century. New materials, such as spermacetti (from whale blubber) and paraffin wax, replaced tallow. Then in the late 19th Century gas lighting arrived, twelve times as bright as a candle, only to be replaced by electricity twenty years later. These eras are comparatively short, when you think that we had many hundreds of years where most of our light was by the dim smoky haze of tallow candles.

More about lighting? Lucy Worsley has a post about domestic lighting here.

Thank you for reading. Find my latest book, Pleasing Mr Pepys, here.

Sources:

Images from Wikicommons

The Social History of Lighting - William O'Dea

Restoration London - Liza Pickard

At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime - Roger Ekirch

http://clanntartan.sitesneakpeek.com/manual/lighting.html
https://www.tallowchandlers.org

https://www.periodoakantiques.co.uk

Can I get there by candlelight? by Lydia Syson

In the spirit of advent, I’ve been having some (very secular) thoughts about candles.

These thoughts have come in the middle of a big edit. Being of a disgustingly pedantic disposition, I find it hard to write the word ‘candles’ in a manuscript without wanting to know exactly what kind of candles they might have been – surely not tallow or beeswax, in a church in Montmartre in 1871?  Paraffin wax?  Sperm whale oil? And since this is a church that has become a radical political club by night, would the votive candles have been left burning through all that revolutionary oratory? 

Simon Eliot’s investigation of reading by artificial light in The Nineteenth Century Novel: Realisms (edited by Delia da Sousa Correa) answered some of my questions. A century earlier, the vast bulk of night-time readers had faced more difficulties than choice.  The most basic form of illumination was firelight. Then there were simple oil lamps, not that different from the Roman variety, which smelled fishy or meaty, and were, like rush lights, fairly dim and smoky. Tallow candles, another option, usually made of solidified mutton fat were also unpleasantly smoky, smelly and greasy.  But at least these could be eaten in extremis, as the Trinity House lighthousekeepers apparently did when their feeble rations ran low. 

The beeswax candle had been the most effective as well as the most expensive means of lighting in Europe since the Middle Ages – and smelled divine. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the booming whaling industry transformed artificial lighting with spermaceti wax, which was clean, nearly odourless, and much better able to withstand hot rooms and burning summers without drooping than any of its competition.  (Spermaceti wax candles quickly became so ubiquitous that they provided the original measure for standardised units of ‘candlepower’.) 

In the nineteenth century, everything changed.  Never mind the introduction of gas, then paraffin oil, and finally the electric light bulb, invented in 1879.  Or even the mechanisation of candlemaking, or the developments in chemistry leading to paraffin wax, soon to be improved by the addition of stearic acid, which would have been used to make the kind of candles burning in my Montmartre church.  Until I started reading it up this week, I’d never appreciated quite what an improvement the new tightly-braided ‘self-consuming’ wick turned out to be in the 1820s.  

Before this wicks were simply made of twisted strands of cotton, and they were troublesome things which demanded frequent ‘snuffing’.  This actually used to mean trimming the wick, rather than putting a candle flame out, as I’d always assumed.  Hence the confusing sentence in Northanger Abbey when Catherine is trying to read the laundry list.  Alarmed at the dimness of her candle, she hastily snuffs it:  ‘Alas! It was snuffed and extinguished in one.’   If you’re stuck in a Gothic novel, the last thing you want is a unsnuffed ‘guttering candle’ (or perhaps it's the first?)  Unattended, those pesky old-fashioned wicks – so useful in novel-plotting – simply grew longer and longer until they curved right over and melted the retaining solid wall: all that precious molten wax flowed uselessly away down the gutter thus created, and the candle went out too quickly.

 

Last Sunday evening, I went to see a play at the new, candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for the first time – an exciting, funny and moving production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.  For more about this beautiful theatre built on Jacobean plans, do read Mary Hoffman’s February post. It was a completely new theatrical experience for me and I loved every minute.  At one point, the lights 'began to dim' - two ruffed stagehands came on and flame by flame, extinguished every candle in each hanging candelabra.  And then the stage really was pitch black.  The murder that followed –  a case of mistaken identity – became utterly convincing. Since I’d just heard Mal Peet bemoaning the plot difficulties caused by mobile phones, it also made me wonder if there was a time when novelists complained about the infuriating awkwardness of electric light bulbs.  So much harder to start a house fire (e.g. Jane Eyre) or engineer an encounter with a potential new lover  (e.g. La Bohème).

We’d managed to get the last seated tickets left in the house – ‘a very restricted view’, I was told – in the Musicians’ Gallery.  Actually, these were magical seats, which I thoroughly recommend trying. At only £15, they weren’t quite as much of a bargain as the amazing £5 groundling tickets at the Globe itself (best view in the house, by far) but they give you the same mesmerising proximity to the action.  You have to go backstage to get to them, escorted by an usher – carefully avoiding tripping over empty instrument cases and a musician lying on his back with his feet in the air – and then you sit at the top of the Frons Scenae, (see Mary’s post) looking right down on the actors, and sometimes across, drumbeats vibrating through you, seeing most of the play through a mass of candles. 

The effects of lowering and raising the main candelabra were reversed from our viewpoint, for it grew brighter for us when it got darker for the audience in the pit.  But, so close to the actors, we were all the more aware of the ways in which individual actors were responsible for spotlighting themselves, and often their fellow players, with single, double and triple candlesticks, crude lanterns, torches and sconces on walls or bedposts.  White ruffs and pearlescent make-up help reflect the light onto faces. 

Each performance apparently uses up to £500 worth of pure beeswax candles.  The smell is heavenly, and with their wonderful modern wicks they don’t need all that snuffing.  Jacobean performances had to be interrupted frequently for this to take place.  An experiment carried out in 1838 calculated that a tallow candle only gave off 23% of its original light within 19 minutes of being lit if its wick wasn't trimmed. 

Since encountering the ‘How many miles to Babylon?’ rhyme in my childhood in Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies and Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, I’ve always found its second question ‘can I get there by candlelight?’ extraordinarily evocative.  Now I know that the answer depends entirely on the candle.

(Images of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore are by photographer Simon Kane and reproduced with thanks to the Globe Theatre Image Archive)