Thwick-a-Thwack!

Singing metals

Coat of arms of the Ironmongers’ Company, printed on the title page of Thomas Dekker’s Londons tempe (1629)

You may well have heard the phrase ‘silver-sounding’ before to describe beautiful music or a well-told tale. The expression is mocked in Romeo and Juliet. Peter asks a pair of musicians why a tune would be described as having a ‘silver sound’. The first musician replies, ‘Marry, sir, because silver hath a sweet sound’. The second, however, says, ‘I say, “silver sound” because musicians sound for silver’. The beautiful ring of silver as akin to sweet melodies is quickly degraded to the silver payment musicians play for.

But silver wasn’t the only metallic sound being heard in early modern London. Bells were, of course, one daily source of metallic sound. Another inescapable noise was the hammering of metals ringing from the metalworking dotted across the city. John Stow gives an arresting account in his Survey of London (1598) of the racket of copper foundries on Lothbury, even suggesting that the noise gave the street its name:

This stréete is possessed for the most part by Founders [metal-casters], that cast Candlestickes, Chafing dishes, Spice morters, and such like Copper or Laton [brass] workes, and do afterwarde turne them with the foot and not with the whéele, to make them smooth and bright with turning and scrating (as some do tearme it) making a lothsome noyce to the by passers, that haue not béene vsed to the like, and therefore by them disdainfully called Lothberie. 

I wonder what Stow would have made of the constant drilling on my street? Perhaps foundries and smitheries were the early modern construction works that infuriated work-from-home writers. From silver-sounding music to the loathsome clangour of copperfounding, the sounds of metals were a constant and, clearly, hierarchised soundscape for early modern listeners. This contrast between the silver sound of sweet melodies and the ‘scrating’ noise of blacksmithing is toyed with in my favourite civic pageant of the era, Thomas Dekker’s Londons tempe (1629).

Londons tempe was written for the Ironmongers’ Company in celebration of the newly elected Lord Mayor of London James Campbell, who was previously master of the Ironmongers’ Company. The pageant includes a scene in the classical blacksmith god, Vulcan’s, forge and offers plenty of praise of iron. The king of gods, Jove, even enters and declares ‘Iron! best of Mettals! Pride of Minerals!’. But the scene isn’t without irony (ha!). Iron was, after all, a base metal compared to its fairer cousins gold and silver. Better to be in the golden age than the iron age, right? So rather than a silver-sounding song, Dekker gives us an iron-sounding song. And it is filled with onomatopoeic representations of ironworking - thwick-a-thwacking, knick-a-knocking, and pit-a-pat-patting (John Stow screams somewhere in the distance). Here it is in full:

Braue Iron! Braue Hammer! from your sound,
The Art of Musicke has her Ground,
On the Anuile, Thou keep'st Time,
Thy Knick-a-knock is a smithes Best Chyme,
Yet Thwick a-Thwack,
Thwick, Thwac-a-Thwac-Thwac,
Make our Brawny sinewes Crack,
Then Pit a-pat-pat, pit-a-pat-pat,
Till thickest barres be beaten flat.
We shooe the Horses of the Sunne,
Harnesse the Dragons of the Moone,
Forge Cupids Quiuer, Bow, and Arrowes,
And our Dames Coach, thats drawne with Sparrowes.
Till thwick-a-thwack, &c.
Joues Roaring Cannons, and his Rammers,
We beate out with our Lemnian Hammers,
Mars his Gauntlet, Helme and Speare,
And Gorgon Shield are all made here.
Till thwick-a-thwack, &c.
The Grate which (shut) the Day out-barres,
Those golden studdes which naile the starres,
The Globes-case, and the Axletree,
Who can Hammer these but Wee.
Till thwick-a-thwack, &c.
A Warming-panne to heate Earth's bedde,
Lying ith frozen Zone halfe-dead,
Hob-nailes to serue the Man ith Moone,
And Sparrow-bils to cloute Pan's shoone.
Whose worke but ours? Till thwic-a-thwack, &c,
Venus Kettles, Pots and Pennes,
We make, or else she Brawles and Bannes,
Tonges, Shouels, Andirons haue their places,
Else shee scratches all our faces.
Till thick a-thwack, &c.

The rhythmic sound of hammers beating against metal, alongwith the cracking of both thunder and the bodies of the metalworkers, is presented as musical and organised - a contrast to the chaotic sound of copper founding presented by Stow. This is strengthened by Dekker’s use of ‘ground’, which in music means a short melody or beat that is repeated, along with his earlier suggestion that Tubalcain, the first blacksmith according to Genesis, was ‘the first inuentor of Musicke’. 

There is plenty of comedy in the song. The blacksmiths singing that they must make Venus’ kettles, pots, and pans, or else she ‘Brawles and Bannes’ and ‘scratches all our faces’, is my favourite part. And with silver-sounding being the accepted term for sweet music, the ‘Art of Musicke’ stemming from iron hammering, with the ‘thwick-a-thwack’ against the anvil keeping time, was clearly written with Dekker’s tongue planted firmly in his cheek. But the song tells us more. Iron was the most necessary metal. Cupid’s arrows, Mars’ spear, Jove’s cannons, and even the horse-shoes for Apollo’s chariot that draws the sun all require iron. Love, war, and the rising and setting of the sun could not happen without iron. There were other writers who contemplated this paradox. Why should iron, a base metal, be so much more necessary yet less valued than gold and silver? But I’ll save that for a future blog post…

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Sources

Thomas Dekker, Londons tempe (London: Nicholas Okes, 1629), STC (2nd ed.) / 6509.

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 4 Scene 5.

John Stow, Survey of London (London: John Wolfe, 1598), STC (2nd ed.) / 23341.