"Swords into Ploughshares": Recycling in Pre-Industrial England.

This article focuses on the recycling industry in pre-industrial England. The recycling of buildings and their constituent materials was commonplace in pre-industrial society. Dwellings were frequently rebuilt for a variety of reasons, including changes in an individual's economic standing or the desire to accommodate a new fashion in house design, the sixteenth-century fad for chimneys--necessitated in part by the increasing use of coal as domestic fuel is a good example. Much rebuilding work took place in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, although it has been argued that there was an even greater building and rebuilding boom a century later. Materials from the original dwelling were commonly re-used during rebuilding, and were supplemented, as necessary, by new materials. Where the demand for stone was weak the costs of immediate demolition could make the exercise uneconomic. Nevertheless, the removal of roofs and partial dismantling of walls made buildings uninhabitable, and a monastic revival unlikely. The evidence relating to the re-use of monastic buildings is particularly plentiful, but it is clear that change of use was also common for secular buildings.