During the 150-year period from 1680 to 1830, the production of leather and leather goods was, by value, the second most important industry in England after textiles, and one of the largest employers outside agriculture. Animal hides were converted into such everyday articles as boots, shoes, clogs, harnesses, saddles, breeches, aprons, gloves, bags, cases and bottles, and for use in industry for bellows and belting. Book binders were also important customers for fine leather.

The acclaimed historical geographer H C Darby, writing in 1973, stated that at the beginning of the 19th century almost every town in England from Berwick to Penzance had its tanners. No wonder then that the landscape is peppered with place-names such as Bark House Lane, Tanhouse Lane, Tannery Street and Ratten Row, the latter being strongly associated with tanneries because the presence of a tannery attracted rats that fed off the flesh still adhering to the animal hides stacked in the tannery yards. At the time of the 1881 census, every county in England had residents called Barker (with 7293 in the West Riding of Yorkshire alone) and Tanner (with 8719 in London).

Woodlands played a major role in supplying tree bark, which before the introduction of chemical substitutes, was the major agent, in the form of a liquor, used in the preparation or ‘tanning’ of the animal hides. The tannic acid from ground bark seeps slowly through the pores of the hide, draws out the water and coats each fibre with a preservative. The tannin content of the bark of oak trees made oak bark the most efficient and therefore the most important tanning agent.

If a wood was predominantly an oak wood it became associated with the leather tanning industry at an early date. The best bark for tanning was obtained from coppice poles of about 20 years of age and so the bark obtained from coppice woods was of the best quality.

At a ‘fall’, ie the appointed time for the felling and sale of the timber trees and multiple-stemmed coppice growth in a coppice-with-standards wood, the bark was peeled in large pieces from both the timber trees and the coppice poles.

This was done by scoring a tree round its trunk at about two feet intervals and then making a longitudinal slit along the trunk. The bark could then be levered off in large plates with a bark peeler called a ‘spud’. A spud was about two feet long with a handle at one end and a small metal spade at the other. It was often the practice to remove as much of the bark as possible while the tree was standing, then felling it when the rest of the bark on the upper parts of the trunk and substantial branches would also be removed with a spud.

Other peelers, often women and children, would peel the bark from the smaller branches, even down to branches one inch in diameter, and their product was sometimes called ‘pikt bark’ or ‘sticking bark’. In 1722, for example, £1-14-04 was paid to “seven Pillars [peelers] of bark” in Hesley Park at Thorpe Hesley in South Yorkshire “for such Bark as stuck to ye wood after ye first pilling thereof”. The peeled bark was stacked to dry and then, as tannin is soluble in water, it was protected from rain in thatched stacks until it was sold to tanners.

For Treeton Wood near Rotherham in 1710 the whole process from the letting of the peeling contract to the selling of the bark to tanners is preserved in the account book of the Duke of Norfolk’s woodward:

&helli;Pd for Ale when we let the Pillings £00-01-00
Paid Thomas Lee and partners for pilling 1420 fathoms of bark £18-14-05
And for stacking the same £2-07-04
Spent at Treeton when I met the Wath Tanners £00-01-00
Pd Mr Turner 104 Thack Sheaves for thatching Bark Stacks £00-04-04
Pd Jno Clayton for covering 5 Bark Stacks with Sods and 11 Stacks covered with straw £00-14-00
Jno Oldham 100 quarts of Bark from Treeton Wood £16-13-08
Lyonel Keyworth bt 62q & 2 from Treeton Wood of Bark £10-09-0

‘Jno Oldam’ was John Aldham, a member of a well-known tanning family from Upperthorpe in Sheffield. The inventory of William Aldham in 1696 records that he had £400 of leather in stock and “in ye pitts”. Lyonel Keyworth was a tanner in Woodhouse on the eastern fringes of Sheffield and just over three kilometres from Treeton Wood. The ‘Wath Tanners’ would have included Richard Jackson, who had 340 hides in stock when he died in 1728.

At the tanyard the hides were first washed and cleaned up, usually in a water pit. This was followed by immersion in pits in slaked lime to open the pores on the hides and facilitate the removal of hair. The hair and any remaining flesh were then removed with ‘de-hairing’ and ‘fleshing’ knives while the hide was hanging over what was called a fleshing beam. After rinsing, the hides were cut into sections known as heads, necks, shoulders, bends and butts. They were then ready for the tanpits.

In the meantime the bark had been ground in a bark mill worked either by horse- or water-power. The ground bark was added to cold water to make a tanning liquor and hides were passed through a succession of tanpits with increasingly strong tanning solutions. After months or in some cases years in the tanpits, the hides were dried, rolled and oiled before being sold to ‘curriers’ for final preparation and colouring.

Late 18th and 19th century newspaper advertisements looking for buyers or tenants of tanneries are full of fascinating detail of the processes and equipment of these early tanneries. For example this advertisement appeared in the Wakefield and Halifax Journal of 17 May 1811:

To be let for a term of years at Grassington in Craven One capital TANYARD consisting of the following Pits and Conveniences, viz. Two Lime Pits, One Water Pit, Thirty Bark Pits, One newly erected patent Bark Mill of the most improved construction, 7 yards square within the walls, with a very commodious room over the same, and extremely lofty, together with three large rooms for the purpose of storing leather, and two good sheds for the same use &helli; There is a capital rivulet of good water running through the premises…

Despite the fact that tanning was a complicated and protracted business in which capital investment was high in order to maintain a smooth-running operation and where large numbers of hides and large amounts of bark were involved, England was peppered with tanyards throughout the medieval and post-medieval period.

Just in South Yorkshire, for example, a tanyard was recorded at Thorne in 1483 and in medieval Doncaster there were tanneries in Fishergate. Tanners are mentioned in Sheffield in the lay subsidy rolls of 1297 and the poll-tax returns of 1378-79. William Rawson of the parish of Sheffield was described as a tanner when he died in 1550 and his descendants were still in the same business in the 18th century. They then occupied a tanyard on the tributary of the Don at Owlerton, in the past called Toad Hole Dike, the dam (pond) of which survives to this day as the fishing pond called Rawson Dam.

The site would have had a good water supply for the tanpits and a water-wheel for grinding bark. The mill was called Rawson Mill or Bark Mill. Thomas Rawson, tanner, occupied the mill in 1783 and took out a 99-year lease in 1789. Sheffield continued to be an important centre for tanning in the 19th century and in a directory for 1833 six tanners are listed including John Aldham of Upperthorpe.

One of the most successful late Victorian tanning businesses in South Yorkshire was run by Henry Clegg of Barnsley. In the 1881 census Clegg was described as a ‘Tanner, Currier, Leather Merchant, Mill Strap and Boot Upper Manufacturer’.

He had 32 employees and owned tanneries at Cawthorne and Denby Dale. In 1882 he purchased more than 62 tons of bark from Hall Wood, Parkin Wood and Woolley Wood in Ecclesfield and from Canklow Wood in Rotherham.

But this concern was dwarfed by tanneries elsewhere. By 1800, for example, Liverpool had the largest tannery in the country dealing not only with hides from the surrounding region but also those imported from Ireland and the New World.

However, the largest concentration of tanneries in England lay just to the south of the Thames with about one-eighth of the nation’s tanning business taking place in Bermondsey. Bermondsey’s last leather firm closed in 1990 but there is still a local guild in existence, the Bermondsey Tanners, now concerned with local educational and other charity activities. Each year a master and two wardens are elected (at which senior members wear tanned leather aprons) which involves a procession to the Leather Market where a feast is held. The Leather Market stands next door to the Leather, Hide and Wool Exchange.

Before leaving the subject of oak-bark one very peculiar use for it must be mentioned: the growing of pineapples. By the 1730s large landowners were said to be in the grip of ‘Pineapple Fever’. The first Marquis of Rockingham of Wentworth Woodhouse, for example, recorded that in 1745 before the 16 June he had cut more than 200 pineapples and he gave the dimensions of his biggest pineapples – 20 inches tall and 16 inches in circumference at their widest!

The pineapples were at that time grown in so-called ‘tan-pits’. Tan pits were brick-lined pits sometimes with a back wall to which sloping glass frames were fixed. The brick pits were then filled with a layer of rubble on which tan bark was laid that would remain in place for between three and six months. Tan bark was used oak bark from tanneries. While used oak bark was fermenting it produced a constant temperature to the roots of between 75-85˚ Fahrenheit.