In the reign of Elizabeth there are two most interesting notices in manuscript. The first of the year 1574, the second of the Armada year 1588. Nowadays we are used to “company promoting,” but three centuries ago there was as wild a scheme countenanced by Her Majesty’s Ministers as ever was floated to-day. Strype, in his “Annals” (quoting the original MSS.), says “a great project has been carrying on now for two or three years of alchymy, William Medley being the great undertaker to turn iron into copper. Sir Thomas Smith, Secretary of State, had by some experiments made before him a great opinion of it,” so had the great Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Leicester, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and others, each of whom speculated, with the result that Her Majesty (for certain royalties allowed her) granted them a patent in January, 1574, incorporating them as the “Governor and Society of the New Art” ... “for making copper and quicksilver by the way of transmutation with the commodities growing of that mystery.” Twenty persons only were to form the company; to “dig open and work for any mines, owers, and things whatsoever.” Sundry sums of 100_l._ each were subscribed by Burleigh, Smith & Co., but “the concern” did not prosper. The assay master at the Tower mint was sent to “the works,” and so was Robert Denham, a relative, by the way, of the Sir Wm. Denham who had been seven times Master of the Ironmongers’ Company; but somehow or other we fail, as Strype failed with all the papers before him, to learn “the wind up” of what was thought to be “a most splendid investment.” Now in 1588 there was the original certificate given by “John Colman, of the Kanc, gent,” of “Chardges belonging to a furnace for making a fowndry of iron for one whole weeke” at Canckwood (Cannock Wood?), co. Stafford. According to this document, for one ton the furnace cost 110_s._ 10½_d._, and the forge 69_s._ 2_d._; total, 9_l._ 0_s._ 0½_d._ Seven years previous to this, the Act of Elizabeth, “Touching yron milles neere unto the Cittie of London and the Ryver of Thames,” enacted that in consequence of the great consumption of wood as fuel for these mills, no woods within 22 miles of the City should be converted “to cole or other fewell for the making of iron or iron mettell in any iron milles furnes or hammer,” except the woods of the wealds of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent, and the woods of Christopher Darrell, of Newdigate, Surrey, gent, and who had already preserved his woods for his own ironworks.