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Jaime
Kaminski
Sussex Archaeological Society
Barbican House
169 High Street
Lewes
BN8 1YE
Queenstock Furnace in Buxted is shown to have been built under the auspices of Archbishop John Morton, probably in 1490. The site was at Iron Plat on the Uckfield Stream, within Morton's lordship of South Malling. The furnace was out of blast in 1509, and also apparently in 1537, but it was mentioned again in the 1570s, when it will have been the Buxted site used by the gunfounder Ralph Hogge. The furnace had most probably been put in blast again around 1512, will have been the Buxted 'iron mill' used by the Rotherfield ironmaster Roger Machyn in 1524 and was the probable source of the iron railings supplied for Rochester Bridge by Archbishop Warham, who died in 1532. Queenstock, and not Oldlands, was the site at which William Levett cast guns from 1543 onwards. The technique of casting iron guns vertically in stave-lined pits had been used in the duchy of J�lich in 1539 and 1540, and it is suggested that it was brought to Normandy in 1540 and to the Weald in 1543, as a result of the alliances of both Francis I and Henry VIII with William de La Marck, duke of Cleves. In the case of the Weald the intermediary could have been Nicholas Wotton, who in 1539 led the negotiations for Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves, and did not return to England until July 1541, when he took up the office of dean of Canterbury.