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"RIVERS," wrote John Taylor (1580-1653), the self-styled Gloucester-born "water poet,” are the cherishing veines of the body of every Countrey, Kingdome and Nation." Their value as means of communication and passageway for trade has always been appreciated, and was a factor which helped to determine the sites of many towns. Larger streams, including the Severn, navigable up to Welshpool, a distance of 155 miles, had been used extensively during the Middle Ages. All rivers belong to the Crown as far as the tide ebbs and flows; these and the reaches which had been used by the public in the time of Edward I were regarded as highways in law, and anyone hindering navigation on them committed an offence. On smaller streams the situation was entirely different. The river was in the charge of commissioners of sewers, local landlords with a royal commission, who were responsible for drainage and the prevention of floods. Anyone trying to take a boat along such a stream might find himself prevented by the opposition of vested interests and a charge of trespass.
To the legal disadvantage was added the practical difficulty of how to pass the weirs built across the stream to keep up the level for water-mills and for fishing. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, when the population and demand for goods were increasing, and while the roads of England were still very bad, many people besides John Taylor began to consider the problem of how to make the smaller rivers navigable.
The difficulties inherent in the conception of a stream as private property were overcome on various rivers, particularly the Medway and the Dee, in the early years of the seventeenth century. In 1622 a Commission on the Wye was ordered to remove nuisances which hindered navigation. But in none of these cases had any satisfactory solution been found for the mechanical difficulty of how vessels could pass up and down the stream without making it temporarily or permanently useless for mills and other purposes.
The so-called "pound lock" with its two sets of gates, enabling a vessel to pass through without altering the level of the stream, was invented in Italy in the later fifteenth century. About 1564 John Trew built the first pound lock in England on the canal at Exeter. If the significance of the invention was immediately appreciated, circumstances prevented its introduction on a large scale in the years that followed. It was not until the second or third decade of the seventeenth century, when all serious hindrances were removed, that the enterprising took advantage of the crying need for cheap transport to embark on navigation works. In 1619 the Corporation of Bath obtained letters patent from the King permitting them to improve the navigation of the Wiltshire Avon; in 1627 Arnold Spencer was granted a patent, having already made parts of the Great Ouse navigable, and in 1634 Thomas Soar was given powers on the Soar. The most ambitious scheme yet projected was that put forward by William Sandys in 1636, and it concerned our own Avon.
This William Sandys, known as "Waterworks Sandys," was the second son of Sir William Sandys, who died in 1641. The family came from Lancashire in the sixteenth century, and Sir William, himself a nephew of Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, acquired lands in Gloucester-shire, at Brimpsfield and Cronham. His second son, William, was born in 1607, and probably spent his childhood on the Cotswolds in the neighbourhood of Miserden and Brimpsfield, where his father lived. At the age of 16 he went up to Oxford, where he entered Gloucester Hall, matriculating on 13th June, 1623. Three years later he became a student of the Middle Temple. On 24th April, 1633, he obtained a licence to marry Cecily, the daughter of Sir John Steed of Steed Hall, Kent. (He must not be confused with his cousins, William Sandys, fourth son of Sir Samuel of Ombersley, Worcs, with Sir William Sandys of Miserden his nephew, who died in 1649, or with William, eldest son of Sir Henry of Sherbourne, Hants, who died in 1668.)
We know very little about why and how William Sandys came to make the Avon navigable, but it was probably about the time of his marriage that the design took shape. In the early months of 1633 he, his younger brother Thomas, and his wife Cecily, obtained a lease of the manor of Fladbury from the Bishop of Worcester, the first time the manor had passed out of the episcopal hands since the eighth century. Various members of the Sandys family held the manor from 1633 until it was seized by Parliament in the Civil War, but it would appear that they did not live in the parish, as there is no mention of any one of them in the parish registers.
Looking for the source of William Sandys' interest in navigation, it seems most likely that it dates from the years when he was a student at Oxford. One of the four commissioners nominated by the university under the Thames Act of 1623-4 was John Hawley, Doctor of Law, the principal of Gloucester Hall, afterwards Worcester College. The works making the Thames navigable from Oxford to Bercot, by building pound locks, were going on all the time that Sandys was at Oxford, and the matter was probably much discussed, perhaps particularly at Gloucester Hall. Hawley was interested in subjects outside the scholastic curriculum, and received his honorary doctorate of law for supervising the building of the new quadrangle of the Bodleian Library.
The pound lock, though it had been used by Trew near Exeter, was still a novelty, and about the time of the Thames Act, Brian Twyne, the University Registrar, visited Exeter and brought back a plan of the type of lock used there. If locks of this kind had been used anywhere else in England at this time, we do not know of them. The enormous advantages they introduced must have made a considerable impression on young William Sandys.
Soon after acquiring the lands at Fladbury which gave him a least one weir and access to the stream, he began on the work, for by 1636, when we first hear of it, he had "already been at considerable charge therein." We only know this because he found it advisable to gain royal support and sanction for his undertaking, and so to have a legal means of forestalling opposition and settling any disputes which might arise. On 9th March an order of the King in Council was made. It tells of Sandys' intention to make the Avon passable for boats from Tewkesbury to near Coventry, and of his purpose that the counties of Worcester, Gloucester and Warwick may be supplied with wood, iron and pit coals, which they want. "For the better furtherance of so good a work" it orders that thirty commissioners shall assess a reasonable recompense to be paid by Sandys to landowners when he uses their lands. It names the commissioners, who live near by and include a viscount, four barons, fifteen knights, and one Doctor of Divinity.
The order shows how Sandys hoped to recoup himself for his initial outlay. We hear nothing more of the navigation of the Teme towards Ludlow, which is also mentioned, and it can never have been undertaken, perhaps because of expense, or because the Civil War prevented the completion of the projected work.
Difficulties soon appeared, owing to the opposition of Sir William Russell of Strensham, one of the Commissioners and then High Sheriff of Worcestershire. On 1st June, 1635, the Lords of the Council were informed that when Sandys sent his boat "to view the river" it was seized by Sir William, "who nonetheless declared that he did not seek to oppose the work, but only desired satisfaction for his particular interest." The lords prayed the Lord Privy Seal to call the parties before him and bring them to an amicable agreement. In November Russell wanted to commit to gaol Richard Hollington and Peter Noxon, who were carrying out Sandys' duties as bailiff in the hundreds of Oswaldslow and Pershore, and on 8th January, 1637, he complained that Sandys had assaulted his miller and that Sandys' servants had abused him in his own house.
At the request of the Council Sandys handed in a petition giving his own, very moderate, account of the whole affair. He set forth the wrongs and assaults of Sir William Russell, and said that "so far as they were at all true, they proceeded not from the petitioner, but from the opposition of Sir William Russell and his servants." Russell, he stated, had not only refused to do anything in execution of the order of the Board of 9th March last, "but in face of costs had termed the service the betraying of the county, and had given out that he, Sandys, went about to entitle His Majesty to men's inheritances." The ground of Russell's opposition is noteworthy, for it was the standpoint of much of the Parliamentary opposition to Charles I.
On 18th January, 1637, the King in Council decided that the dispute between Sir William Russell and Sandys should be heard on 5th February, and the King declared that he had taken Sandys' work specially into his consideration and would be present at the hearing. Later in January Sandys again wrote to the Council because Richard Dowdeswell, another landowner and Sir William Russell's solicitor, wanted more than the 40S. an acre assessed by the Commissioners, for his lands. None of the disputes were serious obstacles to Sandys.
We do not know how far the building of the locks had progressed by the early spring of 1640 when William and Cecily conveyed the manor to Henry Sandys, a cousin who had married William's sister Jane and who was afterwards killed fighting for the King in 1644 Elizabeth Elstob, the eminent Anglo-Saxon scholar who spent much of her life at Evesham and was known to her contemporaries as 'The Saxon nymph," is reputed to have written in 1737 an account of William Sandys' work, which she gave to her friend the antiquary George Ballard of Chipping Campden. Some of the details of her account, such as the attribution to Sandys himself of all the locks between Tewkesbury and Stratford, are not correct, but nevertheless parts deserve to be included, if only as showing the reputation which Sandys enjoyed in the next century. "He was not only worthy for his birth," she writes, "but also in his attempt and performance thereof raised above himself to his country's wonder. . . The Avon never bore a boat of any burthen before industrious Mr. Sandys beginning his unexpected design in March 1635, in three years made it possible for vessels to carry forty and fifty tons from the mouth thereof, where it entereth Severn at Tewkesbury to Stratford, being above twenty four miles by land but nearer fifty by water. . . Purchasing mills, meadow ground and other lands, cutting in some places a course through the firm land for this water work, besides the main channel: and for the accomplishing hereof he hath made sluices at Tewkesbury, in the county of Gloucester; Strensham, Nafford, Pershore, Piddle, Fladbury, Chadbury, Evesham, Harvington, Cleeve Prior (all in the County of Worcester); Bidford in the County of Warwick, Welford in the County of Gloucester, and Stratford in County Warwick; and so wrought by his sluices keeping up the water, that in the summer time vessels of great burthen go to Stratford, when others for lack of water in Severn cannot reach Worcester. He erected also wears in the quickest streams."
We know from other sources that during the Civil War William Say, a judge and Member of Parliament, one of those who signed the warrant for the King's execution, took charge of the navigation, and completed the eight locks and weirs between Tewkesbury and Evesham. How much he had to do is uncertain, but in 1662 William Sandys petitioned for time to repay that part of the £40,000 which he had spent in 1639 in making the Avon navigable, for which Say had been surety. Say had been attained at the Restoration, and the lands and navigation, forfeit to the King, were granted to trustees for the benefit of James, Duke of York. Sandys' petition was unsuccessful, for Lord Windsor, one of the thirty Commissioners of 1636, who is named by Sandys as trying to "bring the affair into confiscation on pretence of the petitioner's being indebted to Say, though Say really received thousands more than he paid," bought the navigation in 1664. It is possible that Say was acting as Sandys' agent and collaborator during the Civil War, when it would have been difficult for Sandys, of a royalist family, to carry on the work, and that afterwards both were involved in financial difficulties. Andrew Yarranton, the Worcestershire engineer and agriculturist, may have had William Sandys in mind when he wrote in England's Improvement in 1667: "I know indeed some speculative gentlemen have of late plunged themselves so far into the deep, that they have not only sunk in their Undertakings to their everlasting reproach; but their Ignorance buoyed up with Pride being the only thing that hath been able to keep above water, they have given the World sufficient Tests of the vast difference betwixt Speculative Notions and Practical Experiments."
In any case it is probably safe to attribute the beautiful workmanship of the navigation works between Tewkesbury and Evesham to the enterprise and ski]l of William Sandys. There is no record of any large alterations or additions to the navigation since 1640, and although this does not prove conclusively that none were made, the large sum which Sandys says he spent implies that the work was well and truly done. The masonry of weirs and locks stands firm even today, and the locks, built so soon after the introduction of the pound lock into England, were used by barges until the navigation became disused.
Sandys - for we know of no "engineer" whom he employed and may assume that he was himself the designer of the works-may have been experimenting when he was building the locks. Six of the eight, including Fladbury, have approximately the same measurements: overall length (A) 108 ft., length between gates (B) 84 ft., width (C) 10 ft.
The two exceptions are Pershore, which Louis Barrow described as looking in plan "like two flat arches facing one another" and which measures 33 ft. across where the arches join; and Chadbury, 53 ft. at its widest point, which is "like the pip of a diamond in a pack of cards."
Before Sandys improved the navigation, the Corporation of Tewkesbury exacted tonnage on a]l goods entering the Avon, deriving therefrom an annual income of £200. Afterwards the duty went to the owner of the navigation, the amount being fixed by him until the Act of 1750. On 27th February, 1639, William Sandys and John Child were released from covenants reserved in the King's grant to them of the duty of 12d. the chaldron on coals. As Sandys had spent much of his money and time on "so public a work" it was not unnatural for him to wish to reimburse himself, but Parliament did not take this view, regarding all such private monopolies as odious. The election of Sandys as Member of Parliament for Evesham in April 1640 was called into question when "one member produced the docket of Mr. William Sandys his patent for raising 12d. upon the chaldron more than the old tax," and the matter was referred to the Committee for Monopolists, who reported on 21st January, 1641, "that Mr. William Sandys is within the Order made against Monopolists; and not fit, nor ought to sit as a Member of the House in this Parliament: and that a Warrant issue forth, under Mr. Speaker's Hand, to the Clerk of the Crown for a new Writ for electing of another to serve for the Town of Evesham in Com. Wigorn, in his stead."
Sandys was thus denied the privilege of sitting in the Long Parliament and witnessing the events leading up to the Civil War, but no permanent stigma was attached to his name, for in 1661 he was re-elected, and represented Evesham in Parliament until his death on 29th October, 1669.
