Ploughs at Cressing Temple

Ploughs in the Chaff Room.

In the stables on the ground floor of the Granary we are lucky enough to have examples of three fine horse drawn ploughs. They are kept in the Chaff Room, an inaccessible bay of the stable block. The most important one is the Goldhanger plough.

The earliest Essex horse-drawn single-furrow ploughs were crude affairs locally made with the whole plough of various types of wood, ash for the beam and oak for the mouldboard with a wrought iron sheath to the front of the mouldboard with a crude cutting edge. This type of plough was very inefficient and with the development of forges it became logical to use wrought iron to its fullest extent.

The Goldhanger plough arrived with the development of local iron foundries. In Maldon was E H Bentall - farmer and blacksmith then ironmaster who developed the forge to a foundry. He then introduced a development of the traditional wooden plough.

Bentall's addition was a frame of cast iron dipping down from the main beam with of course the name 'E H Bentall' cast in. To the bottom of the cast frame was the 'frog' to carry the ploughshare which was pegged into position using an oak peg. Pegs were generally cut by the ploughman/ horseman from the nearest hedge with his knife known then as a 'shut-knife'.

As wrought iron wore away very quickly, development hastened towards chilled castings whereby the wearing face of the cast iron mouldboard was 'chilled'. This was a plate inserted into the sand mould whereupon the molten metal cooled more rapidly when it touched the plate or chill and therefore became what they described as 'dead-hard'.

Ransomes Sims & Head of Ipswich were the progenitors of chilled iron plough parts and it is possible the last of Bentall's wooden ploughs were fitted with 'breasts' or 'mouldboards' made by Ransomes.

A little about the history of ploughs