"A perfect and an absolute work": Expertise, Authority, and the Rebuilding of Dover Harbor, 1579-1583

The rebuilding of Dover harbor was one of the great domestic achievements of Elizabeth I's long reign. ¹ The project involved hundreds of day laborers, overseers, and officers who worked throughout the 1580s and early 1590s making gradual yet dramatic improvements to a harbor that dated back to ancient times. Dover's proximity to the Continent made it a major commercial port for trade with the markets of northern Europe, while the ready access it afforded to the Channel made it a vital base for the Royal Navy--few naval harbors allowed a more rapid response against piracy or invasion. With several harbors on the southeastern coast of England in ruins by 1580, it was deemed economically and militarily crucial to keep Dover open and viable. By all contemporary accounts the project was a triumphant success. ²

Yet as the Dover project was getting underway in the late 1570s, such a successful outcome seemed far from likely. Once they had resolved to rebuild the harbor, the members of Elizabeth's Privy Council faced several difficult decisions. There was no obvious individual to take the reconstruction in hand; instead, a number of candidates vied with one another for the project's chief offices. All claimed to be skilled experts, but the privy councillors had no clear means by which to distinguish the truly capable from the charlatans. How could the council find competent, skilled engineers when there was still no coherent engineering community? How differentiate among valid and false claims to competence before the invention of such modern devices as professional accreditation and licensing? How evaluate the proposals of self-proclaimed experts? Who among the inexpert managers of the project was best qualified to make these evaluations? ³

This article explores how Elizabethan administrators attempted to locate, assess, employ, and manage various "men of experience" who claimed to have the knowledge and skills necessary to rebuild Dover harbor. ⁴ Though they had little or no technical knowledge themselves, the privy councillors had to evaluate the technical skills of others. The difficulties they encountered in finding and managing men competent to design and oversee the works at Dover exemplify problems faced by newly centralized and centralizing states throughout early modern Europe as they sought to assume more active administrative control at the local level. ⁵ The pattern at Dover was manifested in a number of major technical projects and developments in sixteenth-century England, from Cumbrian copper mining to Arctic voyages of exploration. ⁶ Nor was the phenomenon limited to England; in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, administrators grappled with virtually the same problems in strikingly similar contexts. ⁷

From dam construction in Italy to water management in the Low Countries, from canal building across France to the refortification of England, early modern administrators were taking on projects of larger scale than ever before. ⁸ The effort and expense of these works were enormous, the potential benefits from them even greater, and many large-scale projects of the period would have been inconceivable without the high degree of mobilization and coordination of resources possible only under a single, centralized authority. New management techniques had to be developed to enable powerful early modern states to exert greater control over what had traditionally been regarded as local affairs. Increasingly, central administrators turned to trusted, expert mediators to connect themselves with a distant project as closely as possible. These intermediaries had the technical skill and knowledge to observe, understand, and even direct the works on site, and were usually held a level above the common craftsman or laborer because they also had the personal trust of the project's patrons. ⁹

By examining the managerial strategies used at Dover harbor, I hope to shed light more generally on the complicated interactions among local craftsmen, expert mediators...