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AN ATOMIC
EMPIRE
A Technical History of the Rise and
Fall of the British Atomic Energy Programme
This page intentionally left blank
 AN ATOMIC
EMPIRE
A Technical History of the Rise and
Fall of the British Atomic Energy Programme

C N Hill
Formerly Charterhouse, UK

Imperial College Press

ICP
Published by
Imperial College Press
57 Shelton Street
Covent Garden
London WC2H 9HE

Distributed by
World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224
USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601
UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Front cover: Cutaway drawing of Sizewell A power station (Nuclear Engineering International)
Back cover: The Queen formally opens Calder Hall, the world’s first commercial nuclear power station

AN ATOMIC EMPIRE
A Technical History of the Rise and Fall of the British Atomic Energy Programme
Copyright © 2013 by C. N. Hill

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-908977-41-0

Typeset by Stallion Press

Email: [email protected]

Printed in Singapore
June 27, 2013 14:49 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-fm

Contents

Acknowledgements vii
List of Acronyms ix

1. Introduction 1
2. Atomic Physics 7
3. People and Places 21
4. The British Production Piles 51
5. The British Bomb 75
6. The Windscale Incident 105
7. The Fast Reactor 139
8. PIPPA and Calder Hall 157
9. CTR and ZETA 181
10. Research Reactors 195
11. The Magnox Stations 219
12. The Second Power Programme: The Alternatives 251
13. The Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor 265
14. The SGHWR 289
15. DRAGON and the HTR 307
16. Atomic Energy at Sea 321
17. Finale 339

Appendix: Chronology 347

Bibliography 351
Index 353

v
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Acknowledgements

Many people have been a tremendous help in the writing of this book, and I am
particularly grateful to:
Nick Hance MBE, formerly of AERE Harwell;
Dr Mike Forrest, formerly of AERE Harwell and Culham, and Nick Holloway,
Media Manager, Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, for the help and assistance on
the chapter concerning controlled thermonuclear research;
The staff of Harwell Archive, and in particular, Eric Jenkins;
Mrs M Olive for the use of the facilities of Charterhouse library;
Barry Marsden, Professor of Nuclear Graphite Technology at the University of
Manchester, for his help on graphite technology;
Stephen Henry of EDF for organising a visit to Dungeness B power station, to
Tim Collins for showing us round, and to Martin Pearson, the Station Manager, for
giving up his time to talk to me;
William Dalrymple and Caroline Peachey of the journal Nuclear Engineering
International. I am especially grateful for the access to their archive and for per-
mission to reproduce images from past issues, in particular the cutaway drawing of
Sizewell A power station on the front cover.

vii
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June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-fm

List of Acronyms

AEA Atomic Energy Authority

AERE Atomic Energy Research Established
AGR Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor
APC Atomic Power Constructions
AWRE Atomic Weapons Research Establishment
BEA British Electrical Authority
BEPO British Experimental Pile 0
BNDC British Nuclear Design and Construction Ltd
BNFL British Nuclear Fuels Ltd
BWR Boiling Water Reactor
CANDU Canada Deuterium Uranium Reactor
CEA Central Electricity Authority
CEGB Central Electricity Generating Board
CFR Commercial Fast Reactor
CTR Controlled Thermonuclear Research
DFR Dounreay Fast Reactor
EDF Électricité de France S.A.
GLEEP Graphite Low Energy Experimental Pile
HECTOR Heated Experimental Carbon Thermal Oscillator Reactor
HERALD Highly Enriched Reactor Aldermaston
HERO Heated Experimental Reactor (0) Zero Energy
HTGCR High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor
HTR High-Temperature Reactor
ICI Imperial Chemical Industries
JET Joint European Torus
LEO Low Enrichment Ordinary Water Reactor (or Light Water Reactor)
MAGNOX MAGnesium Non-OXidising
MOX Mixed OXide

ix
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x An Atomic Empire

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

NDA Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
NDC Nuclear Design and Construction
NESTOR Neutron Source Thermal Reactor
NNC National Nuclear Corporation
NPPC Nuclear Power Plant Company
NRPB National Radiological Protection Board
OEEC Organisation for European Economic Cooperation
PFR Prototype Fast Reactor
PIPPA Pressurised Pile Producing Industrial Power and Plutonium
PRO Public Record Office
PWR Pressurised Water Reactor
RAE Royal Aircraft Establishment
RAF Royal Air Force
SCHWR Steam-Cooled Heavy Water Reactor
SGHWR Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactor
SSEB South of Scotland Electricity Board
TNA The National Archives
TNPG The Nuclear Power Group
UKAEA United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority
USAF United States Air Force
ZEBRA Zero-Energy Breeder Reactor Assembly
ZENITH Zero-Energy High-Temperature Reactor
ZEST Zero-Energy Support Reactor
ZETA Zero-Energy Toroidal (or Thermonuclear) Assembly
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch01

Chapter 1

Introduction

At 12:16 on 17 October 1956, Her Majesty the Queen pulled the lever which would
direct electricity from the Calder Hall nuclear power station into the National Grid
for the first time. ‘This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying
weapon of destruction,’ she said, ‘is harnessed for the first time for the common
good of our community.’
Calder Hall was the world’s first purpose built commercial nuclear power station
and was the first of a series of gas-cooled nuclear reactors of entirely British design.
The last of these, at Torness, was completed in 1988. Many other reactors were built
in Britain during the same period — some for research and some as prototypes.
In the 1950s, Harwell became an internationally renowned centre of research into
atomic energy.
The atomic energy programme was, at first, entirely military. The decision to
build an atomic weapon was taken by the Attlee government. Britain had been a
partner with the United States in the construction of the first atom bombs. For Britain
to build its own atomic weapons it needed plutonium and the timetable was dictated
by the time it took to design and build the Windscale piles, which would produce
the necessary plutonium in time for a test of the first British atomic device in 1952.
Just as soon as Britain had successfully tested a fission device, the United States
and Russia had produced fusion devices — popularly known as the hydrogen bomb.
The scientists at Aldermaston then had to turn their attention to this new technology
and, by the end of 1957, had produced and tested a successful British-designed
fusion device. But the construction of the reactors needed to produce plutonium led
to a design which would produce not only plutonium, but electrical power as well.
This in turn led to the idea of a reactor whose sole purpose was to produce power,
intended to supplement the coal burning stations then in use which were struggling
to produce sufficient power for domestic and industrial use.

1
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch01

2 An Atomic Empire

To give some idea of how enthusiastically the British government embraced

nuclear power, Table 1.1 shows a breakdown of nuclear energy capacity country by
country.1 This was the situation as of March 1968:

Table 1.1. Nuclear energy capacity by country.

Country Capacity/megawatts Electricity generated/million

(MW) kilowatt-hours (kWh)

UK 4,156 99,136
US 2,900 35,182
France 1,101 8,746
Italy 631 13,999
West Germany 317 2,323
Canada 245 334
Japan 178 1,277
Belgium 11 221
Sweden 10 137

Note: This data does not include the Soviet Union.

The total amount of electricity generated from nuclear power stations by coun-
tries other than the UK totalled 62,219 × 106 kWh compared with 99,136 × 106 kWh
generated in the UK. In other words, the amount generated in the UK was more than
half as much again as in all the other countries put together.
In 1995, the reactor at Sizewell B went critical and began commercial operation,
but unlike all the other power reactors built in Britain, this was based on an American
design. Since Sizewell B, no further reactors have been built in Britain. All the
research and prototype reactors have been decommissioned and closed down. Most
of the gas-cooled reactors built in the 1950s and 1960s have closed. The remaining
power stations are now owned by a foreign company: EDF, or Électricité de France
S.A., which is the second largest electric utility company in the world.
The UK no longer has companies capable of designing and building nuclear
power stations. Any future nuclear stations will, by necessity, be built by foreign
companies. This book will look first at how the British developed and exploited
nuclear technology, not only for power stations, but also for military use.
Building a nuclear power station is a considerable engineering feat. Today there
is an enormous heritage upon which engineers can draw. In the 1950s, the tech-
nology was entirely new and many of the problems were not fully understood. To
put it another way, there were many ‘unknown unknowns’. To solve these prob-
lems, research and prototype reactors had to be built. The story of these has not yet
been told, and one of the objectives of this book is to tell those stories. All these
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch01

Introduction 3

research reactors in Britain have now been closed down and are being decommis-
sioned. In some cases, they have been completely removed and the site returned to
a green field. There are other sites which are still considerably contaminated with
radioactivity and will therefore take longer to clear.
The cost of decommissioning the current generation of nuclear power stations
is projected to run into billions of pounds. This is often used as an argument against
nuclear power stations, but it is interesting to see how these sums relate to the
electricity produced. To take an example, each of the reactors at the Wylfa Magnox
power station generated over 1011 kWh of electricity in the course of its operational
lifetime. If the decommissioning costs for the station are £1 billion, that adds 1p to
the cost of each kWh generated.
Another purpose of this book is to describe the policy behind many of the deci-
sions, both technical and political. It can be argued that much of the political policy
was set by technical policy. This is seen most clearly in the unwavering support
given by the Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) to gas-cooled reactors, even when
other options looked more attractive both technically and commercially.
One of the more interesting features of the period is how little influence or input
was provided by elected politicians. During the important part of this period, elec-
tricity generation was run by the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB).
This was a nationalised industry with an appointed Chairman, who, whilst nom-
inally responsible to the Minister of Power, had almost complete autonomy. The
first Chairman was Sir Christopher Hinton, a man of very forceful personality, who
would not have taken lightly to political interference. Similarly, the AEA was almost
completely autonomous. During its history, it reported to a variety of different min-
isters, none of whom played any significant role in the work done by the Authority.
The 1955 White Paper which set into motion the civil nuclear programme originated
from a report written by an official in the Treasury. Almost all the nuclear power
decisions were taken by officials rather than by politicians.
The AEA and CEGB were, in one sense, what would be described today as
quangos, but with powers far exceeding the average present-day quango. They were
also run by a generation of men who had made their mark as planners or direc-
tors during the war or in the immediate post-war period. Such men were part of
what was described as ‘the great and the good’. They were public servants in the
best sense of that word. They were consummate administrators. They were good
leaders of men, but it was a style of leadership that disappeared after the post-war
period.
This book concentrates on the early period of atomic power, where, apart from
the Windscale incident, Britain appeared to be taking great strides in this new
and dynamic technology. Slowly, however, things began to unravel. The Authority
went down too many blind alleys. The firms constructing the power stations were
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch01

4 An Atomic Empire

weak technically, and the fiasco of the first advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) at
Dungeness was to prove a turning point. There were severe weaknesses in what
might be called ‘project management’, as well as, in some cases, simple technical
blunders.
In addition, the public mood, which had viewed atomic power in the 1950s
as the heralding of a new age, began to swing against all matters nuclear. This was
epitomised in the two public enquiries, the first concerning the Windscale reprocess-
ing plant and the second concerning the building of the Sizewell B power station.
The Windscale enquiry in 1977 lasted for 100 days; the Sizewell B enquiry from
January 1983 to March 1985. Environmental groups began campaigning against
nuclear power using arguments which were distinctly suspect from a technical point
of view, but which resonated with the general public mood.
The nuclear power stations in Britain are now being brought out of service.
Whether new power stations will be built in their place is an interesting question.
One area which this book will not attempt to investigate is the economics of nuclear
power — for a variety of reasons.
The early British programme was almost entirely military in origin, and the civil
programme emerged from that. A good deal of money was then spent on researching
and building prototypes for different types of reactor: the AGR with its prototype
at Windscale, the fast reactor and its research and prototype reactors and the heavy
water reactor at Winfrith. None of this expenditure was factored into the cost of
the civil nuclear power programme. In all these examples, only the AGR would
lead to commercial power stations. The magnox stations originated in a design
intended to produce plutonium for military use. There was also the money spent
investigating options which would never even reach the prototype stage, such as the
sodium/graphite reactor. Again, none of this expenditure was set against the cost of
the power stations.
The early power stations might have seemed commercially attractive against the
coal-fired stations of their day, but the problem was that coal became cheaper and the
conventional power stations became larger and more efficient and then gas-powered
stations with a combined gas/steam cycle became more efficient still. To use the
vernacular, the goalposts moved.
A further problem in attempting to evaluate the economics of the magnox stations
is their sheer longevity. They were built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and
Oldbury ran for 42 years, from 1968 to 2012. Over that span of time, the value of
the pound dropped about 50 fold, interest rates varied from 15% or more down to
0.5%. One of the features of atomic power stations is that they are very expensive
to build — they have a very high capital cost. This has to be written down over their
lifetime, but given the economic changes that took place, this becomes meaningless.
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch01

Introduction 5

Thus, trying to make any form of valid economic assessment of their performance
is impossible.

Figure 1.1. Oldbury power station. This was a magnox station which operated from 1968 to 2012.

The first magnox stations had been ordered by the Central Electricity Authority
(the predecessor to the CEGB) very much at government behest. The economics of
nuclear power became very much more exposed when electricity generation was
privatised in 1989. One factor that had been completely ignored at the outset of the
programme now became very much more significant — the cost of decommission-
ing. It was thought that with such an open-ended liability, it would be difficult to
privatise the nuclear section of the industry, and it was initially held back before
finally being privatised in 1995.
It is perhaps significant that the private companies have not sought to build
nuclear stations since privatisation. EDF is proposing new stations, but it has the
knowledge and expertise of the French part of its business.
At the start of this chapter, Calder Hall was proclaimed as the world’s first nuclear
power station. That claim has been disputed: the Russian reactor built at Obninsk
in the USSR has a claim to being the first power station. This had a generating
power of 5 MW(E). (Calder Hall had four reactors, each generating 60 MW, which
were later downgraded to 49 MW after corrosion problems in the magnox reactors)
and was connected to the local grid in June 1954. It used a graphite moderator
and was water-cooled, being a forerunner of the RBMK reactors (which included
Chernobyl RBMK stands for Reaktor Bolshoy Monshchnosti Kanalniy, Russian for
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch01

6 An Atomic Empire

‘high-power channel-type reactor’). On the other hand, the Russian station has been
described as ‘semi-experimental’— the Calder Hall reactors can probably still claim
to be the world’s first commercial nuclear power stations.

Figure 1.2. The Russian reactor at Obninsk.

1
The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) AB 65/422. Advanced
Thermal Reactors: National Policy etc. BE Eltham. ‘British Nuclear Power
Development.’
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch02

Chapter 2

Atomic Physics

Scientists began to understand the structure of the atom just before the start of
the twentieth century. In 1897, JJ Thomson discovered the electron and found its
mass to be a tiny fraction of the mass of an atom. He envisaged the atom to be a
solid lump, rather like a plum pudding, with the electrons acting as the plums. This
idea was overturned by Rutherford in 1911, when he realised the implications of
experiments by Geiger and Marsden — that the atom consisted of a tiny positively
charged nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons, with most of it apparently being
empty space.
Scientists also began to realise that the recently discovered phenomenon of
radioactivity had its origins in the nucleus and by 1930, when Chadwick discovered
the neutron, the modern idea of the atom had evolved.
In this model, the atom is made of three particles: the proton, the neutron and the
electron. The proton and neutron have almost the same mass and are bound together
in the nucleus while the much lighter electrons orbit at certain fixed distances from
the nucleus — or, more exactly, in certain fixed energy levels. The proton carries
a positive charge and the electron an equal negative charge. The neutron has no
charge — i.e., it is neutral. This model is very much a simplification, but it will do
for the moment.
It also meant scientists had to postulate a new force of nature. Up until then, the
three basic forces of nature were gravitational, electrical and magnetic. Einstein had
shown that the electrical and magnetic forces were different manifestations of the
same phenomenon. But the protons in the nucleus all have the same electric charge,
and should repel each other, so that the nucleus would be unstable and fly apart.
There must be some other short range force holding the nucleus together, and this
was called, not surprisingly, the nuclear force. Further experiments were to show
that there are actually two nuclear forces: the strong nuclear force and the weak
nuclear force. For present purposes, however, the idea that there is a nuclear force
is sufficient.
This model could explain another problem. If atoms were made of only protons
and neutrons, then the mass of an atom would be predictable. The proton and neutron

7
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch02

8 An Atomic Empire

have a very similar mass, and so the atomic mass should be a fixed multiple of the
mass of a proton. But this was not always true — chlorine, for example, has an
atomic mass of 35.5, not a whole number. Why was that?
The explanation put forward is that there are two types of chlorine atom, one
with mass 35 and the other with mass 37. There are three atoms with mass 35 for
every one with mass 37 — hence the average of 35.5. These two different types of
atom are called isotopes, and have a different number of neutrons. Thus 35 Cl has 17
protons and 18 neutrons; 37 Cl has 17 proton and 20 neutrons. Atoms of the same
element have the same number of protons and electrons, but may have a different
number of neutrons.
The number of protons in a nucleus determines the position of the atom in the
table of elements. Thus chlorine has 17 protons and is number 17 in the table of
elements. The convention is that the mass number of an isotope is written as a
superscript and the atomic number as a subscript thus: 35 17 Cl. Often the atomic
number is omitted.
Another point to be noted is that with many relatively light nuclei, the number of
protons and neutrons are the same. Thus the most common isotope of oxygen has
eight protons and eight neutrons. This ratio begins to change as the nucleus becomes
larger, with more neutrons than protons. By the time we reach uranium, we have the
two isotopes with 92 protons but 143 and 146 neutrons respectively.
Some isotopes are unstable, and will decay to a different, more stable, nucleus —
that is, they are radioactive. For naturally occurring radioactivity, there are two ways
in which the nucleus can decay, and when this happens, particles appear to be ejected
from the nucleus. Rutherford named these alpha and beta particles respectively.
Sometimes the particles are accompanied by high-energy electromagnetic waves —
gamma rays.
An alpha particle was found to be made of two protons and two neutrons (a helium
nucleus). Hence when a nucleus ejects an alpha particle, it becomes an atom of a
different element — lighter by four units, and two places lower down in the list of
elements.
A beta particle was found to be a high speed electron, which has a negative
charge and negligible mass. Thus the new nucleus is effectively the same mass but
has moved up one in the table of elements — the electron having a negative charge,
the new nucleus has an extra positive charge to compensate.
For example:

235
92 U → 231 90 Pa + 4 2 alpha and 90 38 Sr → 90 39 Y + 0 −1 beta.

The development of the mass spectrometer meant that the mass of atoms could
be measured to a very high degree of precision — which revealed something rather
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch02

Atomic Physics 9

odd. The mass of the nucleus was slightly less than the mass of the constituent
protons and neutrons. This difference is known as the mass defect.
The explanation for this lies in Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2 . A large
amount of energy (relatively speaking) is released when a nucleus is formed. Part
of the mass of the nucleus has been converted to energy. This is called the binding
energy of the nucleus.

Figure 2.1. Curve of binding energy per nucleon against nucleon number.

Figure 2.1 is the graph of binding energy per nucleon. The data show that more
energy is released per nucleon for 56 Fe than any other nucleus — that is, it is
the most stable. Thus energy would be released if a heavy nucleus were split into
two smaller fragments, or if two light nuclei were forced together to make a new,
more massive nucleus. The first example is nuclear fission, the second is nuclear
fusion.
But because a process is energetically favourable does not mean it will neces-
sarily happen — or at least, not without a good deal of persuasion. The paper of
this book is thermodynamically unstable in air, but it will not catch fire sponta-
neously — a lighted match is needed. Splitting a nucleus is difficult. Making nuclei
fuse together is even more difficult. Controlled fusion has remained an El Dorado for
scientists for well over half a century, and appears no closer to solution. Indeed, one
of the earliest attempts at controlled nuclear fusion was the zero-energy toroidal (or
thermonuclear) assembly (ZETA) experiment at Harwell in the 1950s, described in
Chapter 9.
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch02

10 An Atomic Empire

Like much work in the field of radioactivity, fission was inadvertently discovered
as the result of an experiment that fell into a category which might be described
as ‘try it and see what happens’. When new particles were discovered, scientists
would try firing them at various elements simply to see what happened. The neutron
was discovered by Chadwick in 1932, and so Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz
Strassmann tried bombarding uranium, the heaviest known atom at that time, with
neutrons. The easiest way to find out whether new elements had been created was
by chemical analysis, and to their surprise, barium, a much lighter nucleus was
discovered. Meitner correctly interpreted this result as the uranium nucleus being
split into two smaller fragments. This process was named fission.
There is still no one definitive model of the structure of the nucleus. To explain
these results, the nucleus was pictured in the ‘liquid drop’ model, in which the
nucleus is imagined as a drop of liquid. The force holding a drop together is surface
tension, and like the nucleus, it can split apart if hit in certain ways. This model,
although useful in other respects, does not say anything about the internal structure
of the nucleus.
A nucleus that can be split by neutrons is called fissionable. Not all nuclei that
are fissionable can be split by relatively slow moving neutrons. Ones that can are
called fissile. To complicate matters, natural uranium consists of two isotopes, 235 U
and 238 U. The 235 U isotope is fissile, but the 238 U is fissionable, since it can only be
split by very energetic neutrons. Natural uranium contains only about 0.7% 235 U,
the remainder being 238 U.
When the uranium is split, energy is released at the same time as the fission
products. How much energy depends on exactly how the nucleus has been split.
This energy may appear in various forms: as gamma radiation, as recoil kinetic
energy of the two daughter nuclei and as kinetic energy of the neutrons released.
Compared with most chemical or physical processes, the amount of energy released
is very large. The energy released by the fission of 1 kg of 235 U is of the order of
1014 J, whereas the energy released from the combustion of 1 kg of methane (natural
gas) is only around 5 × 107 J.
At the time, the results from the neutron bombardment experiments appeared to
have no direct application, until it was discovered that during the fission process,
extra neutrons are released — in other words, when the 235 U splits, two daugh-
ter nuclei are produced with some surplus neutrons as well. This led to the pos-
sibility of a chain reaction taking place, in which one fission would give rise to
two or three extra neutrons, which could then go on to split two or three more
uranium atoms, which would release even more neutrons, and so on. The reac-
tion would increase exponentially. In practice, of course, matters are rather more
complicated.
June 27, 2013 12:32 9.75in x 6.5in An Atomic Empire b1572-ch02

Atomic Physics 11

The neutrons may escape from the lump of uranium before hitting another 235 U
nucleus, or they may be absorbed by a 238 U nucleus. If they escape faster than
they are being produced then the reaction fizzles out. When as many neutrons are
being produced as escaping (or being absorbed) then it is said that the lump has
reached criticality. Obviously, this needs a certain minimum size lump, or else the
neutrons will escape without hitting another nucleus on the way. This minimum size
is referred to as the critical mass.
The critical mass will depend on the probability of a neutron hitting a nucleus
and causing fusion as it passes through the atom. The nucleus is only a very small
fraction of the size of the atom. To a first approximation, an atom is around 10−10 m in
diameter; a nucleus is around 10−14 m. Hence the cross-sectional areas are 10−20 m2
and 10−28 m2 . On this (extremely simplistic) basis, a neutron would pass through
108 atoms before hitting a nucleus — or a distance of 108 × 10−10 m = 10−2 m
or 1 cm.

Figure 2.2. Apparent cross-sectional area of nucleus varies with neutron energy.

Unfortunately, matters are not that simple, as the graph in Figure 2.2 shows. The
cross-sectional area of the uranium nucleus seems to change with the energy of the
neutron. Slow neutrons have a much greater chance of colliding with a nucleus than
fast neutrons — a matter that becomes of considerable importance when designing
a reactor.
For bomb making, the trick is to convert a subcritical mass into a critical mass
as rapidly as possible. In a power station, the neutron flux — that is, the number
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12 An Atomic Empire

of neutrons — is governed by control rods, which are made of a neutron absorbing

material. Insert the rods into the reactor and the reaction dies down due to lack of
neutrons. The trick in the power station is to keep the rate of fission and thus the
energy released constant.
If it is hit by fast neutrons, 238 U will fission, but cannot sustain a chain reaction.
This is because the neutrons released lose energy in collisions and soon will not
have enough left for further fission. The behaviour of 238 U with slow neutrons is
very different. If the nucleus is hit by slow neutrons (the term is relative!) then
the neutron is absorbed, converting the nucleus to 239 U. This decays fairly rapidly
(half-life a little more than 23 minutes) to 239 Np, which decays (half-life 2.4 days)
in turn to 239 Pu. 239 Pu is relatively stable, with a half-life of more than 24,000 years,
and is also fissile. 239 Pu is preferable to 235 U in bombs, which is why much of the
early British work on reactors was aimed at plutonium production.
As mentioned, only 0.7% of natural uranium is 235 U. This means that although
reactors can be made with natural uranium, they tend to be large and cumbersome
as a consequence. It is better to enrich the uranium — in other words, increase the
proportion of 235 U. This is not an easy business.
Isotopes of a different element have identical chemical properties. The only way
to separate them is to find some physical process that is affected by the mass of
the molecule. One of these is diffusion — the rate at which gases diffuse through a
membrane of extremely small holes depends on their speed, which in turn depends
on their mass. At the same temperature, the mean speed of gas molecules is inversely
dependant on the square root of its mass. Thus a molecule four times as heavy would
diffuse at half the rate.
It is very rare to find compounds of metals that can be vaporised easily, but it
happens that uranium hexafluoride, UF6 , sublimes (i.e., turns directly from solid to
gas) at 56.5◦ C at atmospheric pressure. The 235 U hexafluoride has a molar mass of
349; the 238 U hexafluoride a molar mass of 352. The lighter one diffuses faster by a
√
factor of (352/349) = 1.0043.
This tiny separation factor means that the process has to be repeated again and
again, gradually increasing the amount of 235 U each time. This is usually done with
a cascading process, whereby the enriched fraction is fed to a further stage, and the
depleted fraction fed back into the cascade lower down. Gaseous diffusion plants
are large and highly energy intensive. Britain’s gaseous diffusion plant was situated
at Capenhurst in Cheshire, in what was then Europe’s largest industrial building,
1,200 m long and 150 m wide. The plant consisted of a cascade of 4,800 stage units
connected by 1,800 km of process gas pipe work of over half a metre in diameter,
employing almost 4,000 personnel.
Diffusion is now an obsolete technology, with variations on the centrifuge tech-
nique being the most commonly used today.
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Atomic Physics 13

Figure 2.3. The cascade process used in gaseous diffusion.

Nuclear Reactors

In the early days, a nuclear reactor was often referred to as a ‘pile’, deriving from
the name given to the very first reactor built in a squash court under the West Stands
of Stagg Field Stadium in the middle of Chicago, which achieved criticality on
2 December 1942. The reactor was built by ‘piling up’ graphite and uranium until
the combination became critical or divergent. Hence the reactor was described as a
‘pile’, and the name stuck, although it has become obsolete today.
In the pile, uranium atoms are being fissioned and producing more neutrons,
which go on to split more uranium atoms and so on, but some of these neutrons will
be lost in various ways: they may escape from the reactor or they may be absorbed
by materials within the reactor, such as the control rods. If the rate of loss is greater
than the rate of creation, the number of neutrons drops and the reaction will die
away. The reactor is then convergent or subcritical. If the rate of creation and loss
are the same, the reactor is critical. If the rate of creation is greater than the rate
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14 An Atomic Empire

of loss, the number of neutrons will increase: the reactor has gone past critical and
becomes supercritical and the reaction is now divergent. In such a situation, the
activity will continue to increase exponentially, and the doubling time is a measure
of the increasing activity; the doubling time being, not surprisingly, the time it takes
for the activity to double.
One feature important to the control of a reactor is at which point the neutrons are
produced. Most occur directly from the fission of the uranium or plutonium, and these
are called prompt neutrons. Some neutrons are released a little time later from the
decay products, perhaps a few seconds later, and these are called delayed neutrons.
The delayed neutrons make the reactor easier to control, since without the delayed
neutrons, a divergent reactor would increase in reactivity far too rapidly to control.
Apart from nuclear fuel, a reactor also needs control rods (or some other means)
to regulate its activity, and some means of getting rid of the heat generated by the
fission reactions. Most designs of reactors have a moderator.
A moderator is a material which will slow the energetic neutrons released from
fission. As we have seen, slow neutrons have a better chance of splitting a 235 U
nucleus. There are certain designs of reactors which will work without a moderator,
but the great advantage of slowing down the neutrons is that it is then possible to
use natural uranium as the reactor fuel. If the neutrons are faster, then the fuel has
to be considerably enriched in 235 U — an expensive process.
The neutrons released by the fission of the 235 U collide with the nucleus of the
atoms of the moderator, and will lose some kinetic energy in the collision. This is
most effective with light nuclei. The fraction of the neutron’s kinetic energy that will
be lost to the other nucleus is given by 4 M·m/(M + m)2 , where M is the mass of the
nucleus and m the mass of the neutron. There is also a further requirement for the
atoms of the moderator — that the neutron will bounce off the nucleus and not be
absorbed by it. Very slow neutrons are sometimes referred to as ‘thermal neutrons’—
in other words, having the same energy as a particle at ambient temperature. This is
3 kT/2 (k being Boltzmann’s constant, T being the absolute temperature), or around
0.03 eV at room temperature, whereas a fission neutron will typically have an energy
in the region of 1 MeV.
Hydrogen in the form of water can be used as a moderator, but absorbs a sig-
nificant number of neutrons, and so light water reactors need enriched uranium to
work. ‘Heavy water’ can be used instead — this is water in which the hydrogen
atoms have been replaced with the isotope deuterium, which has one proton and one
neutron. Heavy water is a very effective moderator, but has the drawback that it is
extremely expensive, since separating the deuterium present in natural hydrogen is
highly energy intensive.
Beryllium would make an effective moderator, and was also suggested for the
canning material for fuel elements, but it is likewise extremely expensive and very
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Atomic Physics 15

poisonous. The use of beryllium demands tremendous care. From the metallurgical
point of view, beryllium turned out to be unsuitable as a canning material, and
stainless steel was used in its stead. The next element in the periodic table is boron,
but boron is a very good absorber of neutrons — so much so that it is used in control
rods and safety devices in reactors.
The only other practical moderator is carbon in the form of graphite. One of the
problems of using graphite as a moderator is making sure it has no boron impuri-
ties. The German wartime atomic programme used graphite with enough boron as
impurity to render it useless, and as a consequence, had to use heavy water as a mod-
erator — heavy water being much more scarce and expensive to produce. Norwegian
hydroelectric power was used to produce the heavy water, leading to a long campaign
of sabotage by the Norwegians and the Allies, delaying the programme further.
The next problem is how to get rid of the heat produced. As mentioned, the
fission process releases a great deal of energy, which will appear in various forms,
but mostly as heat. This is almost the only use for fission, either in a bomb or in a
reactor. In a bomb, the heat is produced as quickly as possible, but not so in a reactor.
One of the points of a reactor is that the rate of energy release can be controlled.
This heat has to be removed from the core of the reactor — the core being the part
of the reactor containing the fissile material. This can be done by circulating a fluid
through the core. Here again, choices are limited. For example, the fluid must not
be an absorber of neutrons, and it also needs good heat transfer characteristics if it
is to remove the heat effectively.
As far as gases are concerned, helium would be ideal, and has been used in high
temperature gas reactors. Hydrogen would be less useful, since it absorbs neutrons,
as well as being explosive in air. The only other gas which has been used is carbon
dioxide, particularly in the United Kingdom, although the idea of a steam-cooled
reactor was also considered. This is not quite such a bizarre idea as it sounds, since
steam is a gas like any other, but preventing corrosion might well have presented
difficulties.
An obvious liquid coolant is water. Indeed there are many water-cooled reactors
of various designs. There are two potential drawbacks. One is that water absorbs
neutrons, the other is that heated water can easily vaporise into steam. The steam
will not be nearly as effective a coolant and so the reactor will overheat. There are
various other related problems and the design of water-cooled reactors has to allow
for these difficulties.
The other possibility is a liquid metal. Mercury was used in an experimental
reactor in America, but the use of mercury poses some obvious hazards. A lead
bismuth alloy is a possibility, since it has a low melting point (having the coolant
freeze in the reactor is not a good move) but bismuth absorbs neutrons and decays
to become radioactive polonium. The only other feasible option is to use sodium
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16 An Atomic Empire

or a sodium–potassium alloy. This too has some obvious disadvantages, given the
reactivity of these two metals.
The problem becomes much more acute in a fast reactor, where there is no mod-
erator to slow down the neutrons. This means the core is far smaller, and megawatts
of heat may be generated in very small volumes. In these reactors, liquid metals are
the only viable option — the Dounreay Fast Reactor used sodium–potassium alloy
and the Prototype Fast Reactor used liquid sodium.
The heat produced is used to generate steam exactly as in a conventional power
station (gas turbines were suggested for some high-temperature designs, but the
idea has never been followed through). The amount of electricity generated depends
on the thermodynamic efficiency of the design, which in turn is governed by the
temperature of the steam produced. The advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs) were
particularly efficient, producing steam at a temperature of 565◦ C. The magnox sta-
tions had a thermal efficiency of around 30%, the AGRs around 42%.
Thus the output of a reactor can be described in terms of the heat produced
(thermal or Th) or of the electricity generated (E). The latter is the more useful figure.

Fuel Elements

Often what may appear to be the most mundane parts of a design turn out to be
the most important. Fuel elements or fuel rods are such an example. The story
of the evolution of the gas-cooled reactor is as much as anything the story of the
development of the fuel element. The fuel in reactors is almost always uranium

Figure 2.4. Examples of some early fuel rods. These would contain uranium metal in an aluminium
casing. The fins were for cooling.
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Atomic Physics 17

(which may or may not be enriched), sometimes in the form of the oxide but also
as the metal. Plutonium is a possible fuel but has not been used very much except
in some fast reactors.
One of the first jobs to be set into motion when the UK atomic programme began
was the production of uranium metal from its ore, and an old wartime factory at
Springfields near Preston, in Lancashire, was converted for the purpose. The steps
in the production of fuel rods are shown in the graphic in Figure 2.5.

Figure 2.5. Fuel element production at Springfields, near Preston, Lancashire.

The fuel element has to perform a variety of jobs. First and foremost, the container
or can must enclose the fuel so that no volatile fission products leak out to pollute
the coolant. Some fission products are solid, so they are not a problem with a gas-
cooled reactor, although they certainly would be with a water-cooled reactor. The
most important gaseous fission products are 131 I and 135 Xe. Design of devices that
will detect any leaking fission products is an important part of reactor design.
Secondly, and probably equally importantly, it must not be a neutron absorber,
which limits the choice of material very considerably. Thirdly, and particularly in a
gas-cooled reactor, it must be able to withstand very high temperatures. Fourthly, it
should not be affected by intense neutron bombardment. Fifthly, there must be good
heat transfer between the fuel, the container, and the coolant which flows through the
reactor. Sixthly, it must be chemically compatible with the fuel and the coolant — in
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18 An Atomic Empire

other words, not corrode in the coolant and not react or alloy with the fuel. There
may well be other problems too — for example, the material and the uranium metal
may expand at different rates as they are heated up, creating stresses in the fuel rod.
There was a further requirement in the case of the air-cooled reactors, which is
that air should not be able to leak into the can, since the uranium would oxidise and
particles of uranium oxide might well be released into the airflow and be carried
away to the outside.
All this is reflected in the designs of the various British gas-cooled reactors.
Graphite low energy experimental pile (GLEEP) was a low power, low temperature
reactor, and the bars of uranium were given a thin coating of aluminium metal
which was sufficient to contain the fission products. British experimental pile ‘0’
(BEPO) and the Windscale piles ran at higher temperatures, and the uranium was
put into aluminium cans. To prevent any chemical reaction between the two metals,
the uranium was coated with graphite before canning. The can was also filled with
helium gas, chosen in part for its good thermal conductivity, and the cans were also
finned to help remove the heat.
Aluminium was not the best choice, since it did absorb neutrons to some extent.
A better solution turned out to be an alloy of magnesium, which went under the name
of magnox. Magnox (MAGnesium Non-OXidising) was an alloy of magnesium with
aluminium (0.7–0.9%) and beryllium (0.002–0.3%). This has a melting point of
around 647◦ C, and burns in damp carbon dioxide above about 600◦ C. The highest
practicable temperature for magnox fuel elements is around 400◦ C. Despite an
incident in the Chapelcross reactor in May 1967, magnox has had a very good
safety record. The first cartridges were tested in the Windscale piles then used in the
Calder Hall reactor in 1956; the last magnox power station is scheduled to close in
2014. Thus the system has been in successful use for more than half a century.
Zirconium has also proved to be suitable for canning highly enriched uranium in
water-cooled reactors, being one of the few materials that does not absorb neutrons,
has a high melting point and does not corrode in very hot water. One problem is that
it is found in conjunction with hafnium, which is very similar chemically (they are
in the same vertical group in the periodic table), but hafnium is a very good neutron
absorber and has to be removed from the zirconium before it can be used. It melts
at 1,855◦ C, so using it at high temperatures is not a problem.
Like aluminium, zirconium metal is coated with an oxide layer which is chemi-
cally very inert. To improve its corrosion properties, it is usually alloyed with other
metals, and these are known generically as zircaloys. Zircaloy 2, for example, con-
tains 1.2–1.7% tin.
There were problems with using metallic uranium as a fuel at high temperatures.
The first is that uranium exists in various allotropic forms — that is, there are
several possible physical forms of the metal, which are stable in various temperature
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Atomic Physics 19

Figure 2.6. A fuel rod failure, probably caused by different expansions of the uranium and the can.

regions. The transition from the alpha phase to the beta occurs at 660◦ C, and there
is a change of volume with the change in phase. The problem is that the fuel will be
at a much higher temperature than the gas or coolant, and this fixes an upper limit
to the fuel element temperature. The alternative is then to use uranium oxide, UO2 .
This can be made into ceramic pellets, but has the drawback that the oxide is not a
good conductor of heat, and is much less dense. This meant the fuel elements tended
to be made from relatively long thin pins, and in the AGR, these pins were grouped
together to make one complete unit.
The magnox reactors, which used natural uranium, produced plutonium as a
by-product. The plutonium could be separated from the used fuel, and originally it
was intended that it would be burned up in the fast reactors. The plutonium oxide
would be mixed with uranium oxide to form a fuel described as MOX — mixed
oxide. In the event, the commercial fast reactors were never built, although the steam
generating heavy water reactor (SGHWR) at Winfrith was able to use the MOX fuel.
As a consequence, there are large stockpiles of plutonium at the reprocessing plant at
Sellafield. Plutonium in this form is not suitable for atomic weapons since it would
have much too high a concentration of the 240 isotope.
The first British power reactors were the air-cooled Windscale piles which were
intended to produce plutonium for the first British atom bombs. This led to what was
described as PIPPA, an acronym with several possible origins, the most useful being
plutonium and industrial power producing. The PIPPA design was built at Calder
Hall, and improved versions for generating electricity were built as the magnox
design. The next step up from magnox was the AGR. These were all cooled with
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20 An Atomic Empire

carbon dioxide. The next step along the line was the high-temperature reactor (HTR)
or high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGCR) which used helium as the cooling
gas. No commercial versions were built in Britain, although a small prototype known
as DRAGON was built as part of an international effort.
The alternative to gas-cooled reactors was water-cooled reactors. A successful
heavy water power reactor, the steam-cooled heavy water reactor (SCHWR) was
built at Winfrith and the system was once in the running for a commercial power
station. Harwell studied the possibility of light water reactors, but these were aban-
doned. The two main designs of light water reactors are the boiling water reactor
(BWR) and the pressurised water reactor (PWR). These were the designs which
originated in America and have since been sold widely throughout the world. There
was considerable controversy from the 1960s onwards as to whether the UK should
adopt these designs. The last power reactor built in the UK, Sizewell B, was a PWR
to an American design. Any future power stations will almost certainly be variants
on the PWR or BWR.
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Chapter 3

People and Places

There were very many competent and dedicated people working as part of the UK
atomic energy programme, and it is impossible to mention all of them. It may be
invidious to concentrate on a few selected individuals, but there are those who need
mention either for the roles they performed, or because they were genuinely men of
outstanding calibre (and in this context ‘men’ is the correct word to use: very few
women were involved in public life in the Britain of the 1950s and 60s, and even
today engineering is very much a male-dominated profession).
The atomic energy programme originally began its life in 1945 as a department
of the Ministry of Supply. This had been created in 1939 to coordinate the supply
of military equipment to the Armed Forces, and since the early programme was in
effect entirely military, this made sense, not least from the logistical point of view.
Lord Portal was appointed Controller of the new department with the directive
to produce plutonium as soon as was possible. Portal had been made Commander
in Chief of Bomber Command in April 1940, then Chief of the Air Staff in October
1940. Unfortunately, Portal was both exhausted from the war and had a poor technical
grasp of the details of plutonium production. Although Portal was nominally in
charge, in effect all the decisions were taken by the triumvirate of Hinton, Cockcroft
and Penney. When Portal retired in 1951, he was replaced by General Morgan.
Unfortunately, there were two General Morgans in the Army, and it is widely thought
that the ‘wrong Morgan’was chosen. Neither Portal nor Morgan made a great impact
on the programme.1
When atomic energy was moved out of the Ministry of Supply to become an
independent organisation, the AEA, it was headed by a Chairman. The first two
were Edwin Plowden and Roger Makins, two of the class of administrators thrown
up by the war. They were followed by William Penney.

Cockcroft, Hinton and Penney

The outstanding success of the early atomic programme can be put down to many
factors, but certainly one was the leadership provided by three men: John Cockcroft,

21
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22 An Atomic Empire

Christopher Hinton and William Penney. Each had extremely able assistants, but
there is no doubt the programme would have not achieved anything near as much as
it did, in the time that it did, without these three. (General Morgan referred to them
as the ‘bold bad barons’.)
In some respects, their task was made both easier and more difficult by having
to start completely from scratch. Easier, because they were able to stamp their own
vision on the programme at the outset — it is much more difficult to make a name
for yourself when taking over an organisation which is already running smoothly.
More difficult, because there were no guidelines — all were breaking new ground,
with absolutely no pre-existing infrastructure.
All three had come from what might have been described in that period as ‘humble
beginnings’. They were all educated at state secondary schools rather than public
schools. Entrance to university was paid for by scholarships. They had all proved
themselves as scientists and administrators during the war, which had been a forcing
ground for many able scientific administrators who would go onto civilian work
afterwards — Sir Bernard Lovell, creator of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, being
a typical example.

Figure 3.1. John Cockcroft.

John Cockcroft was born in Todmorden, Yorkshire, where his father had inher-
ited a family business in dire financial straits. He was educated at a local church
school then Todmorden Elementary School, moving on to Todmorden Secondary
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People and Places 23

School, before winning a County Scholarship to Manchester University.2 Cockcroft

moved from Manchester to Cambridge, where he worked with Rutherford at the
Cavendish Laboratory, and collaborated with Walton on a high voltage apparatus
for accelerating positive ions. In his words:
At last we obtained a high energy proton beam . . . we directed it onto a lithium
target and at once observed, with a zinc sulphide screen, the bright scintillations
which were obviously due to particle emission from the lithium.3

The reaction they had achieved was: 7 3 Li + 1 1 H = 4 2 He + 4 2 He

This was the first ever artificial nuclear transformation: Cockcroft and Walton
would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work in 1951.
Whilst at Cambridge, Cockcroft also began to show his talents as an administra-
tor, both as Junior Bursar in St John’s College and in the construction of the Mond
Laboratory. At the outset of war, he moved into work on radar, as did so many other
British scientists at the time, but was also a member of the military application of
uranium detonation (MAUD) committee, which met to consider Peierls and Frisch’s
memorandum on atomic explosions. In 1944, he took over the atomic energy pro-
gramme in Canada, and was responsible for the building of the NRX heavy water
reactor at Chalk River, but came back to Britain in 1945 to head the new atomic
establishment to be built in Britain.
He had been recommended by Sir James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron,
and leader of the British mission to Los Alamos. Chadwick said of Cockcroft:
He has many virtues which would contribute to the smooth running of the estab-
lishment . . . and he would keep his hand on all the strings. In common with most
scientists he also has many faults and these we must recognise from the beginning
so that we can supplement him by a suitable choice of assistants. For example his
knowledge is wide but it is not at all profound; his views are of a rather dull every-
day hue. On the other hand his temperament is so equable and his patience and
persistence so inexhaustible that we can put in lively and relatively irresponsible
men who have the real feeling for research without fear of upsetting the balance.4

Cockcroft was responsible for the choice of Harwell for the new research estab-
lishment, and was instrumental in building it up into a major centre for nuclear
research.5 When the AEA was created, he became one of the full-time technical
members responsible for research.
It seems that at times he could be a somewhat remote figure: describing the
progress on a high-temperature reactor, one writer said that he ‘had a strong interest
in the project, giving it far more attention than was usual in one so distant from his
staff’.6
Basil Schonland replaced him as Director of Harwell in 1958, and he resigned as
a full-time member of the Authority in 1959, becoming the first Master of Churchill
College, Cambridge. He died in 1967.
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24 An Atomic Empire

Figure 3.2. Christopher Hinton.

Christopher Hinton was born on 12 May 1901 in the school house of the village of
Tisbury, Wiltshire, where his father was headmaster of the boys’ school. He attended
the elementary school in Chippenham before moving on to the town secondary
school in 1913. He left school in 1917, and unable to afford university, became
an apprentice first in Kilmarnock, then the Great Western Railway Company in
Swindon.
He attended night school at the local technical college, and won first the Great
Western Chairman’s Prize for the best apprentice of the year, then the WH Allen
scholarship awarded by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers to Trinity College,
Cambridge in 1923.7 He took the Tripos in two years rather than three. He was one
of the nine people awarded Firsts in his year, and spent his third year on research.
Despite winning the Second Yates Prize and a Trinity Senior Scholarship in 1926,
he left Cambridge for Brunner Mond in Northwich, Cheshire. He became Deputy
Chief Engineer at 27 and Chief Engineer at 29.
After the outbreak of war he became Assistant Director of Ordnance Factory
Construction, and in 1943 the Deputy Director General of the Explosives Filling
Factories, which at its peak employed around 150,000 people. In mid-1945, Sir
Wallace Akers, who had been in charge of tube alloys (the cover name given to the
atomic energy programme during the war), invited him to take charge of the industrial
organisation which would be built to produce plutonium. Hinton specified that he
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People and Places 25

should be given full responsibility for the design, construction and operation of the
factories, and also for the industrial applications of atomic energy.
AsAssistant Controller ofAtomic Energy his salary was £2,500 — a considerable
drop from his wartime salary, although more than the salaries of Cockcroft and
Penney. His first task was to find a site for the production piles, whose design had
hardly even been started. In some frustration, he wrote a paper outlining how the
site might be run, and Appendix Two of the report reads rather strangely to modern
eyes:

POLICY IN REGARD TO EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN

Men working on the factory will mainly reside in the Township, many of them
will have wives and families. The houses there are likely to be of small modern
types and will not provide full-time housewifery work for wives and certainly not
for daughters. It is therefore highly desirable that work for as many women as
possible should be found in the Factory.
In the American plants women are employed in process buildings where there
is a radiation hazard (e.g. on monitoring work in the pile building). This is con-
sidered inadvisable as an initial step and it is not proposed that women should be
employed in process or other buildings where there are minor risks of exposure to
mild radiation in the ordinary course of routine duties. This excludes them from
Process buildings, laboratories, laundries etc in the Pile and Separation Groups.
It is, however, proposed to employ them in other buildings (canteen, offices
stores etc) on these groups. It is probable that, if there is a serious accident on
process plant, many or all the operatives in the Group where the accident occurs
will be seriously harmed and in the case of serious exposure it does not seem to
be important whether the casualty is male or female . . .
A rough analysis of the organisation charts suggests that out of a total payroll
of about 1,050 approximately 200 jobs are suitable for women. Of these however
about 40 are specialist jobs involving long periods of training (e.g. nurses). It
is thought that the remaining 160 jobs provide enough female employment for
the relatives of male employees. If this does not prove to be the case it will be
necessary to make arrangements to employ women in light unskilled jobs (such
as tradesmen’s mates) or (by relaxation) on machine shop work in the Service
Group.
No marriage bar must operate against employment of women.8

It is not entirely clear from the context quite what ‘by relaxation’ implies. One
can hardly imagine anything being written in that vein today: the social attitudes of
the 1940s are now very alien, showing that the past is indeed ‘another country’.
Opinions of Hinton’s time heading the industrial group at Risley are mixed. There
is no doubt he was given great autonomy and little or no oversight. He involved
himself in almost every part of the project. The achievement of building the piles
and producing plutonium in the limited time available, not to mention the many
other tasks given to the Industrial Group, was extraordinary.
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26 An Atomic Empire

He was universally respected, but not always liked, and some felt his manner to
be counterproductive. Gethin Davey, the General Manager at Windscale, writing to
the historian Margaret Gowing, had this to say:

Hinton alone had the complete fascinating picture and he had to supply the enthu-
siasm, inspiration, drive and sense of urgency, and I know of no other man who
could have taken the programme to completion in the allotted time . . . but I doubt
if all the acrimony and bad feeling which he engendered were necessary . . .
On another occasion Hinton entered the Conference Room, sat down and said,
“Having completed my inspection I see no point in holding a progress meeting
because clearly there has been no progress during the last month”.
This will give some idea of the atmosphere which was created at these meet-
ings. No time could be wasted with praise. Those portions of the work which
were going reasonably well were not referred to and the whole of the meeting was
devoted to discussing in considerable detail the reasons for unsatisfactory qual-
ity or failure to keep a programme date. Gradually the atmosphere both in these
meetings and on the job became worse . . . Undoubtedly the situation was anything
but satisfactory but, what was worse, the morale of MOW [Ministry of Works]
personnel had reached a very low ebb. The probability is that the vituperous com-
ments and metaphorical beating about the head had reached the psychological
point where they ceased to be effective.9

All of this may have been true, but building Windscale and producing plutonium
in such a timely fashion was still an extremely impressive performance by Hinton
and his team.
It is also true that there was considerable rivalry between the research establish-
ment at Harwell and the production division at Risley. This began at the very top.
Charles Rennie was the first Director of the DRAGON research programme, and a
history of the programme says of him:

During the early Fifties he had the delicate job of smoothing relations between
Risley and Harwell at a time when Sir John Cockcroft’s and Sir Christopher
Hinton’s mutual antagonism was at its height.10

Hinton left the Atomic Energy Authority just two months before the Windscale
fire to become the first Chairman of the new CEGB. His time there was less suc-
cessful. It is also curious to note that at that time the CEGB began expressing a
preference not for the British gas-cooled reactor design, but American pressurised
water reactors. This was to be a row that would linger on for many years after Hinton.
As will be seen in Chapter 11, his time as Chairman of the CEGB was not
without controversy either: his apparent high-handedness concerning the allocation
of a major contract caused the Minister for Science, Quintin Hogg, to write:

What on earth is Hinton thinking about? . . . He cannot just call off a contract for
the construction of a nuclear power station at the present state of play without
creating first-class political and economic chaos.11
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People and Places 27

It was also notable, and rather extraordinary, that, during his tenure at the CEGB,
relations between the AEA and the CEGB were extremely poor, causing Hogg to
write:
This is very serious. It is damaging to the public service if two public bodies
cannot cooperate . . . . You had better come and talk to me about this and what I
ought to do . . .You must tell me also what is really behind this.12

He retired from the CEGB in 1964 and in 1965 he was created a life peer as
Baron Hinton of Bankside. He was active in retirement, being Chancellor of the
University of Bath from 1966 to 1980, and died in 1983 at the age of 82.
By the mid-1970s, the British nuclear programme was in some disarray, and an
article appeared in the New Scientist magazine in October 1976, written by Hinton,
and entitled ‘Two Decades of Nuclear Confusion.’ At the conclusion of the article,
he bemoans the cumbersome decision making process, and finishes by saying,
Design by consensus of opinion between six different organisations is unlikely
to lead to triumphant success. There must be one single competent engineer (it
is an engineering job) who is ultimately responsible. He must stand or fall by
his results; by whether his project is completed within the estimate and operate
successfully on the programmed date.13

One wonders whether, like de Gaulle a little earlier, he hoped to be called back to
lead the programme, running it not by committee, but as the autocrat he always was.

Figure 3.3. William Penney.

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28 An Atomic Empire

William Penney was born in Gibraltar, where his father was a sergeant major
in the Army. He finished his schooling at Sheerness Junior Technical College, and
after leaving took a job as a laboratory assistant, being paid 10 shillings (roughly
50p today) a week. When he was 18, he won a scholarship to study mathematics at
the Royal College of Science, part of Imperial College London.14
Penney was engaged in scientific research at Cambridge and London in the 1930s.
He was called up in 1940 and worked on the blast effects due to bombing, but was
soon transferred to the British team who went to Los Alamos. Again he worked on
blast effects, calculating the height at which the bomb should be detonated in order to
achieve maximum destruction, and was also involved in the choice of targets. He was
to have been an observer of the Hiroshima bomb, but was prevented by the American
Air Force. Together with Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, he was in the aircraft
which observed the Nagasaki bomb, and visited Nagasaki subsequently to investi-
gate the blast effects. He also observed the 1946 atomic weapons trials at BikiniAtoll.
On his return to Britain, he would have preferred to have returned to academic
life, but instead accepted the post of Chief Superintendent of Armament Research
(CSAR) at Fort Halstead in Kent; part of the Ministry of Supply. He began the design
of the first British atomic weapon in 1947, and it was apparent that Fort Halstead
would not be adequate for the facilities that would be needed. The project moved to
a new site: Aldermaston in Berkshire; again, another redundant RAF station.
During the 1950s, Penney would be involved not only in the fission device, but
also in the testing of nuclear weapons in Australia, the design of new warheads, and
the development and testing of the fusion weapon, as well as responsible for the
report on the enquiry into the fire at Windscale. He was the Chairman of the AEA
from 1964 until 1967, when he retired. He then became Rector of Imperial College
London at a time when the student troubles of the late 1960s were at their height.
This was not an easy time for Penney. He retired in 1973.
In 1985, the Australian government set up a Royal Commission on the British
nuclear tests of the 1950s. Australian opinion had moved from full support in the
1950s to outright opposition in the 1980s, and Penney, as a witness, faced consid-
erable hostile questioning.
Although Penney had been created a life peer in 1967, he played little part in the
House of Lords. He died in 1991.
The most extraordinary aspect, from a modern point of view, of the jobs these
men undertook was the salaries that were on offer. Hinton’s salary was £2,500 a
year, a good deal less than he had been receiving at Imperial Chemical Industries
(ICI). Cockcroft had this to say about his appointment to Harwell:
My salary was to be £2000 per annum — not overgenerous considering that my
pre-war University emoluments have been about £1500 per annum and that there
had been at least a twofold inflation since then . . . salaries were reviewed in 1946
and my salary was then increased to £2400.15
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People and Places 29

Penney’s salary for his first four years was £1,900, and both Cockcroft and Penney
could have returned to academic life on salaries at least equal to these, and would
have lived in more congenial surroundings. Indeed, Penney was in great demand by
the Americans, and could have demanded a salary far in excess of that which he was
being paid in Britain.
For comparison, a permanent secretary in the Civil Service (the top post in a
government ministry) would earn £3,500 a year, the Chief Scientist in the Ministry
of Supply earned £3,000 a year, the Director of the National Physical Laboratory
£2,250 a year, and the post of Chief Draughtsman £800–950 a year.16
These figures show that not only were they poorly paid; they also illustrate the
inflation that has occurred since the 1940s. Sixty years later, salaries near the top of
the Civil Service are of the order of £150,000 a year — roughly 50 fold greater.
But the talent in the atomic energy programme was not confined to these three
men. A variety of different talents were needed. These were very large programmes,
and needed capable administrators, scientists and engineers. Penney himself was a
better scientist than administrator. It became apparent in the mid-1950s that someone
needed to be drafted in to take on the role of administrator from Penney, who was
desperately overworked. This was done by Sir William Cook, who became Penney’s
deputy, and directed a good deal of work on the British fusion weapon. After leaving
Aldermaston he became the Authority member for engineering and production,
replacing Hinton.
Atomic energy also attracted a large part of the scientific talent of 1950s
Britain. Looking at the list of those who worked in high positions at Harwell and
Risley, it is noticeable how many of them were elected Fellows of the Royal Society.
Many of these also became involved in the work on controlled nuclear fusion,
which moved to Culham in the late 1950s, and where much research is still being
carried out.

Creation of the Atomic Energy Authority

Putting the atomic energy programme within the Ministry of Supply had advantages
and disadvantages. One of the major advantages was that the department could call
upon the services of the Ministry of Works and other parts of the Civil Service
administration. One of the apparent disadvantages was that the pay scales would be
fixed to Civil Service levels, and thus might not be attractive to people of calibre,
who could earn much more in industry.
In 1952, the Conservatives won the general election and Winston Churchill
formed the new government. He was not interested in the minutiae of administration.
One of his principal advisers was Lord Cherwell, one-time professor at Oxford, who
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30 An Atomic Empire

felt very strongly that the Civil Service was not the place for atomic energy, as the
following passage from his speech in the House of Lords demonstrates:
The manufacture of atomic weapons is quite unlike the manufacture of any other
weapon. Research of the most recondite kind, such as measuring the cross-sections
of nuclei under bombardment by neutrons of various velocities; development
of methods to shoot together the sub-critical parts of the bomb and make them
detonate; production of fissile material involving large-scale separation of isotopes
or extraction of traces of new elements from mixtures so radioactive you dare not
approach them — all these aspects interact upon one another and are so closely
intermingled that it is an undertaking of quite a novel kind.
The government quite rightly decided the project should be unified and welded
together. The mistake was in handing it over to the civil service. If every decision
and every plan, or change of plan, has to go through all the inter-departmental
committees and obtain Treasury sanction, if every appointment approved by estab-
lishment officers, interminable delays are inevitable. What is needed is some much
more flexible organisation, freed from the trammels and restrictions which are
bound to hem in any sub-department of a Ministry. Naturally, it would be under
government control. Indeed, in my view, considering the importance and urgency
the project, it should be responsible to the head of the Government, for he alone
could settle quickly any difficulties which might arise with any department, and
he alone cut red tape. Only in this way can we get quick decisions and the right
men. Rapid progress can only be expected if the people in charge are allowed a
reasonably free hand. Only men used to tackling large industrial developments
can successfully handle operations of this nature.
But industrialists of this sort, accustomed to taking decisions and responsibil-
ity, cannot be fitted into the Civil Service machine. The Civil Service find them
singularly indigestible; and they, for their part, except in wartime, would be very
unwilling themselves to be swallowed by the Civil Service. If the project had been
entrusted to some flexible organisation, freed from the inevitable restrictions of a
Government Department, it would have been much easier to induce men experi-
enced in large industrial undertakings to take a leading part in the work; and, given
a reasonable freedom of action in making plans, in making contracts, engaging
staff and so on, they would, I’m sure, have produced for us atomic bombs at least as
fast as the Russians. This difficulty does not arise only in the top ranks; it extends
all down the line, and rightly or wrongly, many good engineers and scientists do
not like the idea of joining the Civil Service. They know they will be less inde-
pendent than in industry, and that their work prescribed for them and regulated by
the administrative civil servants who often know little about the subject and yet
enjoy a much higher status. For this reason alone it is very hard to get and keep
the right sort of man. In this country, unhappily, high-grade technologists all too
scarce — there are more jobs than men.17

Cherwell got his way, and a new organisation was set up: the United Kingdom
Atomic Energy Authority,18 which came into being in January 1954, under the
chairmanship of Sir Edwin Plowden. Plowden and his successor Roger Makins were
representative of the administrators which emerged from the war. In the 1950s, men
such as these ran large parts of Britain, not as government ministers or civil servants
but as appointees. Although they nominally answered to ministers, the convention
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People and Places 31

was that they should be left to run their organisations as they saw fit with little or
no oversight.

Figure 3.4. Visit of Georgy Malenkov, Soviet politician, to Harwell in April 1956. Left to right:
Georgy Malenkov, Sir John Cockcroft and Sir Edwin Plowden, Chairman of the AEA. (Image courtesy
of NDA and copyright NDA.)

Prior to becoming Chairman of the new Authority, Plowden had been a senior
Treasury civil servant. After leaving the AEA, Plowden remained in great demand
by government and Whitehall. Part of his obituary in The Telegraph reads:

Thus in 1959 he led a committee of inquiry into the Treasury’s control of public
expenditure. Its report laid emphasis on the importance of long-term planning
rather than short-term expedience, and resulted in a wholesale reorganisation of
the Treasury.
Shortly afterwards it was the turn of the Foreign Office to come under Plow-
den’s scrutiny. His committee’s report, published in 1964, recommended the
merger of the Foreign and Commonwealth offices. It also advocated that diplomats
should be more closely concerned with commerce.
In 1965 another Plowden committee investigated the future of the British
aircraft industry. The committee advised that the government should acquire a
majority shareholding in the British Aircraft Corporation and in the airframe
elements of Hawker Siddeley.
In 1975 Plowden headed an inquiry which proposed that the 13 electricity
boards should be placed under direct control of the Electricity Council. And in
1982 a salaries review under his chairmanship embarrassed the Thatcher admin-
istration, which was trying to hold down costs in the public sector, by propos-
ing large pay rises for civil servants, senior officers in the armed forces, and
judges.19
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32 An Atomic Empire

Makins was also a senior Whitehall figure. He had been Ambassador to the USA
and Joint Permanent Secretary at the Treasury before being appointed to the chair
of the AEA. Makins was succeeded by William Penney.
It was not only the AEA that had such freedom of action: as part of the post-
war nationalisation programme, organisations such as the National Coal Board,
British Rail, the British Electrical Authority (later to become the CEGB) and the
Gas Board were set up as independent authorities. In theory, they were answerable
to particular ministers, so that the Chairman of the National Coal Board would be
answerable to the Minister of Power, for example. In practice, they were virtually
autonomous. It was unknown for the Chairman of such bodies to be sacked or
to resign. In modern parlance, these organisations might be described as ‘super
quangos’.
The first annual report of the new AEA is addressed to the Marquess of Salisbury
in his capacity as Lord President of the Council then, in the mid-1950s, reports
are addressed to the Prime Minister himself. By 1960, the minister responsible
had changed to the Minister of Science, who was Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham.20
Subsequently the AEA reported to the Minister of Technology, a newly created post
in the Wilson government, and after the abolition of the Ministry of Technology by
the Heath government, to the Secretary of State for the Department for Trade and
Industry (DTI).
The size of the AEA can be gauged by the number of staff employed: according
to the seventh annual report for 1960–1961, the AEA employed 40,840 staff.21 If
sub-contractors and commercial firms were included, the number would be far more.
The capital account for that year amounted to £481 million.
The atomic energy programme in all its different forms underwent many different
organisational changes over the years, but structurally, it can be broken down, fairly
approximately, into three basic areas.22
One was the weapons’ side, which was initially based at Fort Halstead in Kent,
before moving to Aldermaston. There were some outposts: the warhead manufacture
took place at the Royal Ordnance Factory at Burghfield, and there was another
Royal Ordnance Factory in Cardiff. Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast was used
for environmental testing and explosives testing for nuclear weapons, although no
fissile material was involved.
The second area was the major research and development centre, based at the
Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell.23 This too expanded with various
offshoots: the reactor division was moved to Winfrith in Dorset. As well as many
research reactors, Winfrith would also be home to the high-temperature reactor
DRAGON project and the steam generating heavy water reactor (SGHWR).
Controlled thermonuclear fusion work, including the ZETA experiment, was
centred at Harwell until the late 1950s. Again, space restrictions at Harwell meant
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People and Places 33

that the work had to be relocated, and after consideration of Winfrith, the nearby
site of Culham was chosen.24
The third part of the organisation was the industrial and production work, centred
at Risley in Cheshire, again with various outposts for different functions.25 The
factory at Springfields near Preston in Lancashire produced uranium hexafluoride
for the diffusion plant, and manufactured uranium metal from the ore for use in
fuel elements. It would also manufacture the fuel elements for all the commercial
power stations, as well as the magnox stations built in Italy and Japan. The diffusion
plant itself was sited at Capenhurst in Cheshire. There was also a Reactor Materials
Laboratory at Culcheth, Warrington, in Cheshire.
The production plant at Windscale, designed for the production of plutonium fell
under the aegis of the Industrial Group.26 In addition to the two initial piles, the four
reactors at Calder Hall were also designed to produce weapons grade plutonium, and
a further power station similar to Calder Hall was built at Chapelcross in Scotland.
Finally, of course, there was the London office — never officially referred to as
the headquarters, but which acted as such.

Harwell

Cockcroft was offered the post of the directorship of the new research establishment
late in 1945. As with many post-war research establishments, a surplus airfield (of
which there were many) was the obvious choice for the site, as it had a large open
spaces, large hangars, accommodation and services. He and some of his colleagues
visited a variety of RAF bases, looking for a site which would be not too far from
London and the University towns of Oxford and Cambridge. The choice fell on Har-
well, not far from Abingdon, then in Berkshire, but after the 1974 local government
reorganisation, it was transferred to Oxfordshire.
It was handed over, slightly reluctantly, by the RAF in January 1946, whilst
Cockroft was still in Canada. He described his first visit to the new establishment
thus:27
I visited the Harwell site on a stormy day, the rain coming down at a typical angle
of 45◦ , at the end of January 1946, and inspected the existing buildings on the site.
One of the aircraft hangars was suitable to house GLEEP and nuclear physics; a
second BEPO and the engineering laboratory; a third could house the cyclotron and
the fourth the main workshop. The blocks were suitable for conversion to house
laboratories including a “warm” radioactive laboratory; and analytic chemistry
laboratory; a radiochemical laboratory; a metallurgical laboratory. The officers
and sergeants messes were to be converted to staff hostels; a hundred prefab
houses were to be built on the site as rapidly as possible to be followed later
by a further hundred; the Ministry of Works also agreed to build one hundred
permanent houses in Abingdon and I looked at several alternative attractive sites.
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34 An Atomic Empire

Figure 3.5. Nikita Krushschev and Nikolai Bulganin visit Harwell in April 1956. Nikita Krushchev
was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikolai Bulganin (far right) the
Soviet Premier. (Image courtesy of NDA and copyright NDA.)

Initial progress was slow, and Cockcroft relates how in May, Professor Peierls
wrote from Birmingham to Chadwick, who was still in Washington, expressing his
disquiet on the lack of progress. He spoke of ‘the incredible inefficiency and red
tape in the Ministry of Supply’.
Peierls (as quoted by Cockcroft) went on:
Oliphant and I visited Harwell this week and there is practically nothing going
on there. No construction work has progressed or even started. Skinner has an
uphill job fighting petty officials over petty regulations. . . What I am particularly
concerned about is that before the decision was taken to place the project under
the Ministry of Supply it was our general impression that if the project were
to come under an existing Ministry it would have a special organisation set up
for it which would make use of the priority and financial arrangements of the
Ministry but within the organisation it would have a completely independent
structure.28

Conditions in post-war Britain were difficult, and matters were made worse
by some of the exceptional bad weather, which in 1946–1947 brought much of
Britain to a standstill, with frequent power cuts due to lack of fuel. Cockcroft goes
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People and Places 35

on to say:
The Ministry of Works were greatly handicapped by the severe winter of 1946/7
especially when snow came down through the open roof of the BEPO hangar.
The construction workers were housed in a nearby housing estate at Kingston
Bagpuize complained of low pay, which meant not enough overtime, poor food,
poor accommodation. The small amount of overtime work was actually due to a
trades union complaint that we had been infringing an agreement to limit overtime
to “work of an urgent character”. I was asked by the Ministry of Works to speak
to the workers from a platform temporarily rigged up in the BEPO hangar. I told
them about the importance and urgency of our programme and as a result of this
plea agreement was reached to work 10 hours a day whereupon our labour troubles
disappeared.

Living conditions at Harwell in the late 1940s were on the primitive side. Britain
was rebuilding its infrastructure after the war, and both fuel and food were heavily
rationed. To house the many staff needed, 200 ‘pre-fabs’ were built. This was pre-
fabricated housing put up as a temporary post-war measure to ease the housing
situation, and around 160,000 were built nationally. They were very much intended
as a temporary expedient, with a life expectancy of five to ten years, although some
still survive today.
One of our most difficult problems was to provide reasonable meals for our staff.
Our first canteen was housed in a black painted Nissen hut appropriately named
“the Black Beetle”. Long queues used to form in the open during the winter
months and I joined them from time to time to see how palatable or otherwise the
food was so that I could provide personal experience to add to official urgings for
improvements. We did not however achieve satisfactory meals until we were able
to take over the original NAAFI building which was first used for technical work.29

Figure 3.6. Hugh Gaitskell, Labour Party leader, and Aneurin Bevan visiting Harwell in January
1959. (Image courtesy of NDA and copyright NDA.)
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36 An Atomic Empire

Cockcroft goes on to describe the construction of the first British reactors:

The erection of GLEEP went on rapidly thanks to Watson Munroe’s New Zealand
drive and forceful language. Graphite was machined at Harwell and since we did
not have sufficient uranium metal available a mixture of UO2 and uranium metal
fuel elements were loaded and the reactor diverged in October, 1947.
In parallel with work on GLEEP, design and construction of the BEPO reactor
went on rapidly. A good deal of preparatory work had been carried on by the
“graphite group” in Canada. The production of high purity graphite had been
established at Welland and over 800 tons of the BEPO graphite was shipped
across the Atlantic in due course.
As early as April, 1945, the graphite group had calculated the basic lattice,
dimensions and overall dimensions and predicted that criticality would be achieved
when 28 tons of uranium metal was loaded. The actual figure turned out to be
30 tons.30

Harwell was a research establishment, as opposed to Risley, which housed

the Industrial Group. There was obviously some tension between the two
establishments, which was partly a matter of rivalry and partly a difference of ethos
and approach. In writing the history of the Dragon project, the author describes
Harwell thus:
At Harwell the spirit was one of adventure where systems were promoted as much
for their scientific interest as for any convincing market reason. For example, the
metallurgical division under Finniston was promoting the liquid metal fuelled
reactor — the metallurgists’ reactor; the Chemistry Division under Robert Spence
was promoting the homogenous aqueous reactor — the chemists’ system. Risley
was making a determined bid to take over the fast reactor work . . . 31

And then later:

Nevertheless progress had been sufficiently encouraging for the Authority to form
a High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor Research Committee to study the exper-
iment, briefly called HUGO, which with Sir John Cockcroft in the chair brought
together the top people from Harwell and Risley. Sir Leonard Owen, Director of
Engineering and deputy to Hinton, led the Northern team looking more like an
opposition than a collaboration.

Whilst the author might have been somewhat partial in his judgements, there does
seem to have been considerable tension at times between the two establishments and
their outlooks. As will be seen in the chapter on PIPPA, the first gas-cooled design,
there was strong opposition to the project from Hinton, who preferred the fast reactor
design and remained distinctly dismissive of the gas-cooled reactor. From the earlier
sections of this chapter, it can be seen that Hinton was a man of strong views, and
perhaps was inclined to ride roughshod over those who disagreed with him.
There is another interesting memo written by an official in the Department of
Trade and Industry in 1971, when he was touring the Authority’s establishments
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People and Places 37

prior to producing a report on the reactor programme. He visited Risley and spoke
to RV Moore.32
Mr Moore spoke to me about the history of the AEA Reactor Group which needed
to be understood before one could sensibly look at the present set-up. He went
back to the era of rivalry between Hinton and Cockcroft which had led to immense
duplication and proliferation of research and development facilities.33

Figure 3.7. Major UK AEA sites.

In the 1950s, there was a tremendous amount of fundamental research to be

done into atomic energy, and both Harwell and Risley were at the forefront of
this work. This can bring problems of its own — what to do with a large research
organisation when the technology has become mature. A very prescient letter was
written to Cockroft in September 1958 by Franz Mandl, who was leaving Harwell
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38 An Atomic Empire

and moving to the Physics Department of Manchester University. The letter was
originally written in the context of the proposed removal of the thermonuclear work
at Harwell to Winfrith, which was strongly opposed by many of those working on
fusion. Mandl comments:

As far as Harwell is concerned, the removal of the reactor and CTR [Controlled
Thermonuclear Research] projects to Winfrith leaves Harwell without any major
projects such as are essential to a research establishment if it is to flourish. Apart
from the Rutherford laboratory, which must not be counted as part of Harwell,
there would be left at Harwell a small amount of pure research work but primarily
Harwell will consist of “ancillary service divisions”. As regards the pure research,
the justification of Harwell never has and never could come from this. Rather, the
small amount of pure research done here has been justified as being stimulating
to the place generally, etc. . . . The general outlook for Harwell then is extremely
black: one might say that the establishment has an 80% chance of stagnating
utterly in the next few years. (An allied major problem, I believe, has never been
faced up to, is the question of what to do with an establishment when the task
which it was set up is completed, e.g. it has been solved or the project, for one
reason or another, abandoned. I believe that an establishment should under these
circumstances be dissolved. The general practice has been to let such a place
decay slowly, doing less and less work of any significance, absorbing scientists,
technicians, equipment and money. Examples of such places are easy to think
of.) It has been suggested that this leaves Harwell free to tackle new projects
arising out of brilliant ideas as yet not conceived. Frankly I consider this quite
unrealistic. When the new brainwaves come along there is time enough to set up
a new organisation of just the right type to deal with the new problems. To have a
huge machinery ticking over, all the time getting bigger and rustier, in case a new
development is around the corner, strikes me as a strange procedure.34

At the top of the letter, is a handwritten comment ‘I could have written this myself
some time ago. JDC’.
Mandl had a very good point. What was to become of Harwell when its time was
up? One option, taken up in the mid-1960s, was to diversify into non-nuclear work.
This might have kept Harwell busy, but the question arises: why should Harwell
in particular do this work when there are many other establishments which could
do it as well — as Mandl points out in his letter? Mandl also goes on to ask what
should be done with an establishment when its task has been finished. Too many
institutions have lingered on after their day is done.
It was not only insiders who noticed the decline in morale at Harwell. An editorial
of 1959 in the journal Nuclear Engineering International had this to say:

The flux of people from Harwell reflects not financial inadequacy but inadequacy
of purpose in the establishment, a feeling of frustration with the somewhat over-
bearing administration and a consciousness of being divorced from the mainstream
of atomic energy development. This is a far cry from the days of the late forties
when Harwell was the most glamorous research establishment in Europe and
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People and Places 39

where the mere name conjured up the most dynamic development programme of
the century.35

The editorial also made two further points. One was that salaries at Harwell were
good by comparison with the outside world and certainly in comparison with the
universities. The second was that much of the work had been moved away from
Harwell with the creation of the establishment at Winfrith and with the removal
of the work on controlled thermonuclear fusion going to Culham. It also went on
to say:
Whatever decision is taken by theAuthority as to the future of Harwell this decision
must be taken soon, or the standard of morale will be beyond recall.

By the 1980s, the relevance of Harwell and also of Winfrith was becoming smaller
and smaller. There were no new reactor systems to be investigated. There was very
little research and development left to be done. With the order for a pressurised water
reactor at Sizewell B, the programme of gas-cooled reactors which for so long had
been the backbone of development work at Harwell and elsewhere was effectively
dead. The rationale for Harwell had finally disappeared. The last reactors closed in
1990. Since then, the facilities have been gradually decommissioned and the site is
now being cleared. Harwell was a world-ranking establishment in the 1950s, and
should be remembered in that context.

Dounreay

The experimental fast breeder reactor was considered to be something of a potential

hazard, and a remote site was needed in case of accident. As mentioned above,
the site chosen was Dounreay, on the northern coast of Caithness, in the Scottish
Highlands. Two fast reactors would be built there: one which would be known as the
Dounreay fast reactor (DFR), and the other being the prototype fast reactor (PFR).
In a sense the DFR was the prototype; the second reactor was intended as a prototype
for a commercial fast reactor which never materialised.
The fast breeder reactor had been in the government programme for some time
before a firm decision was taken. A memorandum by the Marquess of Salisbury, who
was at that time the Lord President of the Council, described the programme thus:
Of the three elements of the civil programme approved in 1952, therefore, only
the fast breeder reactor remains as a purely civil project. This reactor was planned
in 1952 to operate at a gross rating of 200 MW with a useful power output of
50 MW. Since then a great deal of research work has been done on the project
and difficulties have been encountered. Greater knowledge can only be obtained
by building and operating a full scale fast reactor. It was thought, however, that
it would be undesirable to make the reactor as large as was originally proposed,
and it is now prepared that it should have a gross rating of 60 MW. In the first
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SOURCE BOOK

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A SOURCE BOOK FOR
MEDIÆVAL HISTORY
SELECTED DOCUMENTS ILLUSTRATING
THE HISTORY OF EUROPE IN
THE MIDDLE AGE

BY

OLIVER J. THATCHER, Ph.D.

AND

EDGAR HOLMES McNEAL, Ph.D.

PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY IN THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON

Copyright, 1905, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Printed In the United States of America

PREFACE
The use of original sources in the teaching of mediæval history is
still hampered by the scarcity of material adapted to the needs of
the student. This situation is sufficient excuse for the publication of a
new book of translations of important mediæval documents, if such
a book does more than reedit old material—if it presents, along with
the usual and familiar sources, documents not elsewhere translated
or brings together documents not otherwise easily accessible. We
believe the present work does that, and that it also makes the use of
this material more practicable by giving fuller notes and explanations
than has usually been attempted.

Our purpose in general has been to present material touching only

what may be called the most important matters (persons, events,
movements, institutions, and conditions) of the whole mediæval
period. We have not tried to make a complete source-book for the
period, but only to offer in usable form illustrative material which
may be of service to both teacher and student in general or
information courses. Each document is meant to illustrate or illumine
one particular thing. While it may throw light on many other things,
the teacher should be warned not to attempt to deduce from these
few documents the whole history and life of the Middle Age.

We are fully aware that in the choice of documents we shall not

please all. Many of the documents here given are clearly essential
and must be found in such a book as we have tried to make.
Concerning all such there can be no question. As to the others, there
are hundreds of documents which would serve our purpose quite as
well as those we have used, perhaps even better. In making our
selections we have been guided by a great variety of considerations
which it would be useless to enumerate. While another would have
made a different selection, we believe that the documents which we
present really illustrate the matter in question, and therefore will be
found satisfactory. With this we shall be quite content. The necessity
of selection has also led us to omit the political history of France and
England. We felt that we could properly leave out English
documents, because there are already several excellent collections of
English sources, such as those of Lee, Colby, Adams, and Stephens,
etc. In regard to France we were in doubt for some time, but the
desire to keep the size of the book within certain limits at length
prevailed. We hope, however, to atone for this omission by
publishing soon a small collection of documents relating exclusively
to France.

It will be observed that we have made use chiefly of documents,

quoting from chronicles only when it seemed absolutely necessary.
An exception to this general principle is found in section I, where a
larger use of chronicles was rendered necessary by the lack of
documentary sources for much of the period covered; but it is
perhaps unnecessary to apologize for presenting selections from the
important histories of Tacitus, Gregory, Einhard, and Widukind. In
the matter of form (translation, omissions, arrangements, notes,
etc.), we were guided by considerations of the purpose of the book.
The style of most of the documents in the original is involved,
obscure, bombastic, and repetitious. A faithful rendition into English
would often be quite unintelligible. We have endeavored to make a
clear and readable translation, but always to give the correct
meaning. If we have failed in the latter it is not for want of constant
effort. We have not hesitated to omit phrases and clauses, often of a
parenthetical nature, the presence of which in the translation would
only render the passage obscure and obstruct the thought. As a rule
we have given the full text of the body of the document, but we
have generally omitted the first and last paragraphs, the former
containing usually titles and pious generalities, and the latter being
composed of lists of witnesses, etc. We have given a sufficient
number of the documents in full to illustrate these features of
mediæval diplomatics. All but the most trivial omissions in the text
(which are matters rather of form of translation) are indicated thus:
... Insertions in the text to explain the meaning of phrases are
inclosed in brackets [ ]. Quotations from the Bible are regularly given
in the words of the Authorized Version, but where the Latin (taken
from the Vulgate) differs in any essential manner, we have
sometimes translated the passage literally.

Within each section the documents are arranged in chronological

order, except in a few cases where the topical arrangement seemed
necessary. We believe that the explanatory notes in the form of
introductions and foot-notes will be found of service; they are by no
means exhaustive, but are intended to explain the setting and
importance of the document and the difficult or obscure passages it
may contain. The reference to the work or the collection in which
the original is found is given after the title of practically every
document; the meaning of the references will be plain from the
accompanying bibliography. The original of nearly all the documents
is in Latin; some few are in Greek, Old French, or German, and in
such cases the language of the original is indicated.

It is impossible, of course, to give explicit directions as to the use of

the book, other than the very obvious methods of requiring the
student to read and analyze the documents assigned in connection
with the lesson in the text-book, and of making clear to him the
relation of the document to the event. It may be possible also for
the teacher to give the student some notion of the meaning of
"historical method"; e.g., the necessity of making allowance for the
ignorance or the bias of the author in chronicles, or the way in which
a knowledge of institutions is deduced from incidental references in
documents. Suggestions of both sorts will be found in the
introduction and notes. The teacher should insist on the use of such
helps as are found in the book: notes, cross-references, glossary,
etc. Groups of documents can be used to advantage in topical work:
assigned topics worked up from authorities can be illustrated by
documents selected from the book; e.g., imperial elections, papal
elections, the Normans in Sicily, history of the Austrian dominions,
Germans and Slavs on the eastern frontier, relations of the emperors
and the popes before the investiture strife, etc.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page

Section I. The Germans and the Empire to 1073 1–81

1. Selections from the Germania of Tacitus, ca. 100 2
2. Procopius, Vandal war 11
3. Procopius, Gothic war 12
4. The Salic law, ca. 500 14
5. Selections from Gregory of Tours 26
6. The coronation of Pippin, 751 37
7. Einhard’s Life of Karl the Great 38
8. The imperial coronation of Karl the Great, 800 48
9. General capitulary about the missi, 802 48
10. Selections from the Monk of St. Gall 51
11. Letter of Karl the Great to Baugulf, 787 55
12. Letter of Karl about the sermons of Paul the Deacon 56
Recognition of Karl by the emperors at Constantinople,
13. 57
812
14. Letter of Karl to emperor Michael I, 813 58
15. Letter to Ludwig the Pious about a comet, 837 59
16. The Strassburg oaths, 842 60
17. The treaty of Verdun, 843. Annales Bertiniani 62
18. The treaty of Verdun. Regino 63
19. The treaty of Meersen, 870 64
20. Invasion of the Northmen, end of the ninth century 65
21. Invasion of the Hungarians, ca. 950 65
22. Dissolution of the empire. Regino 66
23. The coronation of Arnulf, 896. Regino 69
24. Rise of the tribal duchies in Germany, ca. 900. Saxony 69
25. Rise of the tribal duchies. Suabia 70
26. Henry I and the Saxon cities 71
27. The election of Otto I, 936 72
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page

28. Otto I and the Hungarians, 955 75

29. The imperial coronation of Otto I, 962 78
The acquisition of Burgundy by the empire, 1018–32.
30. 79
Thietmar of Merseburg
31. The acquisition of Burgundy. Wipo, Life of Conrad II 79
32. Henry III and the eastern frontier, 1040–43 80
82–
Section II. The Papacy to the Accession of Gregory VII, 1073
131
Legislation concerning the election of bishops, fourth
33. 83
to ninth centuries
34. Pope to be chosen from the cardinal clergy 84
35. The Petrine theory as stated by Leo I, 440–461 85
36. The emperor gives the pope secular authority, 554 86
Letter from the church at Rome to the emperor at
37. 87
Constantinople, ca. 650
Letter from the church at Rome to the exarch of
38. 89
Ravenna, ca. 600
39. Gregory I sends missionaries to the English, 596. Bede 92
40. The oath of Boniface to Gregory II, 723 93
41. Letter of Gregory II to emperor Leo III, 726 or 727 95
42. Gregory III excommunicates iconoclasts, 731 101
43. Letter of Gregory III to Karl Martel, 739 101
44. Promise of Pippin to Stephen II, 753, 754 102
45. Donation of Pippin, 756 104
46. Promise of Karl to Adrian I, 774 105
47. Letter of Karl to Leo III, 796 107
48. Karl exercises authority in Rome, 800 108
49. Oath of Leo III before Karl, 800 108
Oath of the Romans to Ludwig the Pious and Lothar,
50. 109
824
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page

Letter of Ludwig II to Basil, emperor at

51. 110
Constantinople, 871
Papal elections to be held in the presence of the
52. 113
emperor’s representatives, 898
53. Oath of Otto I to John XII, 961 114
Otto I confirms the pope in the possession of his
54. 115
lands, 962
Leo VIII grants the emperor the right to choose popes,
55. 118
963
56. Letter of Sylvester II to Stephen of Hungary, 1000 119
57. Henry III deposes and creates popes, 1048 121
58. Oath of Robert Guiscard to Nicholas II, 1059 124
59. Papal election decree of Nicholas II, 1059 126
Section III. The Struggle between the Empire and the Papacy, 132–
1073–1250 259
60. Prohibition of simony and marriage of the clergy, 1074 134
61. Simony and celibacy; Roman council, 1074 134
62. Celibacy, 1074 135
63. Celibacy, ninth general council in the Lateran, 1123 135
64. Prohibition of lay investiture, 1078 136
65. Dictatus papæ, ca. 1090 136
66. Letter of Gregory VII commending his legates, 1074 139
67. Oath of the patriarch of Aquileia to Gregory VII, 1079 140
68. Oath of Richard of Capua to Gregory VII, 1073 140
Letter of Gregory VII to the princes wishing to
69. 142
reconquer Spain, 1073
Letter of Gregory VII to Wratislav, duke of Bohemia,
70. 143
1073
71. Letter of Gregory VII to Sancho, king of Aragon, 1074 143
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page
Letter of Gregory VII to Solomon, king of Hungary,
72. 144
1074
Letter of Gregory VII to Demetrius, king of Russia,
73. 145
1075
74. Letter of Gregory VII to Henry IV, 1075 146
75. Deposition of Gregory VII by Henry IV, 1076 151
76. Letter of the bishops of Germany to Gregory VII, 1076 153
First deposition and excommunication of Henry IV by
77. 155
Gregory VII, 1076
78. Agreement at Oppenheim, 1076 156
79. Edict annulling the decrees against Gregory VII, 1076 157
Letter of Gregory VII concerning the penance of Henry
80. 157
IV at Canossa, 1077
81. Oath of Henry IV 160
82. Countess Matilda gives her lands to the church, 1102 160
83. First privilege of Paschal II to Henry V, 1111 161
84. Second privilege of Paschal II to Henry V, 1111 163
85. Concordat of Worms, 1122. Promise of Calixtus II 164
86. Concordat of Worms. Promise of Henry V 165
87. Election notice, 1125 166
88. Anaclete II gives title of king to Roger of Sicily, 1130 168
89. Coronation oath of Lothar II, 1133 169
Innocent II grants the lands of Countess Matilda to
90. 170
Lothar II, 1133
91. Letter of Bernard of Clairvaux to Lothar II, 1134 171
92. Letter of Bernard of Clairvaux to Conrad III, 1140 172
93. Letter of Conrad III to John Comnenus, 1142 173
94. Letter of Wibald, abbot of Stablo, to Eugene III, 1150 174
95. Letter of Frederick I to Eugene III, 1152 176
96. Answer of Eugene III, 1152 178
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page

97. Treaty of Constance, 1153 178

98. Stirrup episode, 1155 180
99. Treaty of Adrian IV and William of Sicily, 1156 181
100. Letter of Adrian IV to Frederick I, 1157 183
101. Manifesto of Frederick I, 1157 186
102. Letter of Adrian IV to Frederick I, 1158 187
103. Definition of regalia, 1158 188
104. Letter of Eberhard, bishop of Bamberg, 1159 190
Letter of Alexander III in regard to disputed papal
105. 192
election of 1159
106. Letter of Victor IV, 1159 194
107. Account given by Gerhoh of Reichersberg, ca. 1160 196
108. Preliminary treaty of Anagni, 1176 196
109. Peace of Constance, 1183 199
110. Formation of the duchy of Austria, 1156 202
111. The bishop of Würzburg becomes a duke, 1168 203
112. Decree of Gelnhausen, 1180 205
113. Papal election decree of Alexander III, 1179 207
114. Innocent III to Acerbius, 1198 208
Innocent III grants the pallium to the archbishop of
115. 208
Trnova, 1201
116. Innocent III to the archbishop of Auch, 1198 209
Innocent III commands all in authority to aid his
117. 210
legates, 1198
118. Innocent III to the king of Aragon, 1206 211
119. Innocent III to the French bishops, 1198 211
120. Innocent III forbids violence to the Jews, 1199 212
121. Innocent III to the archbishop of Rouen, 1198 213
Innocent III forbids laymen to demand tithes from the
122. 213
clergy, 1198
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page
123. Oath of the prefect of Rome to Innocent III, 1198 214
124. Oath of John of Ceccano to Innocent III, 1201 215
125. Innocent III to the archbishop of Messina, 1203 216
126. Innocent III to the English barons, 1206 217
127. Innocent III to Peter of Aragon, 1211 218
Innocent III grants the title of king to the duke of
128. 218
Bohemia, 1204
129. Innocent III to the English barons, 1216 219
Innocent III decides the disputed election of Frederick,
130. 220
Philip of Suabia, and Otto, 1201
Treaty between Philip of Suabia and Philip II of France,
131. 227
1198
132. Alliance between Otto IV and John of England, 1202 228
133. Concessions of Philip of Suabia to Innocent III, 1203 228
134. Promise of Frederick II to Innocent III, 1213 230
135. Promise of Frederick II to resign Sicily, 1216 232
Concessions of Frederick II to the ecclesiastical
136. 233
princes, 1220
Decision of the diet concerning new tolls and mints,
137. 236
1220
Frederick II gives a charter to the patriarch of Aquileia,
138. 237
1220
139. Statute of Frederick II in favor of the princes, 1231–32 238
140. Treaty of San Germano, 1230. Preliminary agreement 240
141. Papal stipulations in treaty of San Germano 242
142. Letter of Gregory IX about the emperor’s visit, 1230 244
143. Papal charges and imperial defence, 1238 245
144. Excommunication of Frederick II, 1239 254
145. Current stories about Frederick II. Matthew of Paris 256
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page

260–
Section IV. The Empire, 1250–1500
308
146. Diet of Nürnberg, 1274 260
The German princes confirm Rudolf’s surrender of
147. 263
Italy, 1278–79
148. Revocation of grants of imperial lands, 1281 265
149. Electoral "letter of consent," 1282 265
150. Letter of Rudolf to Edward I of England, 1283 266
151. Decree against counterfeiters, 1285 267
152. The beginning of the Swiss confederation, 1290 267
152
Edict of Rudolf, in regard to Schwyz, 1291 269
a.
Concessions of Adolf of Nassau to the archbishop of
153. 270
Cologne, 1292
The archbishop of Mainz confirmed as archchancellor
154. 276
of Germany, 1298
155. Declaration of the election of Henry VII, 1308 277
156. Supplying of the office of archchancellor of Italy, 1310 278
157. The law "Licet juris," 1338 279
158. The diet of Coblenz, 1338. Chronicle of Flanders 281
159. The diet of Coblenz. Chronicle of Henry Knyghton 282
160. The Golden Bull of Charles IV, 1356 283
160 Complaint of the cities of Brandenburg to Sigismund,
306
a. 1411
160 Sigismund orders the people to receive Frederick of
307
b. Hohenzollern as governor, 1412
309–
Section V. The Church, 1250–1500
340
161. Bull of Nicholas III condemning heretics, 1280 309
162. Bull "Clericis laicos" of Boniface VIII, 1298 311
163. Boniface VIII announces the jubilee year, 1300 313
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page

164. The bull "Unam sanctam" of Boniface VIII, 1302 314

165. The conclusions of Marsilius of Padua, 1324 317
166. Condemnation of Marsilius of Padua, 1327 324
Beginning of the schism; manifesto of the revolting
167. 325
cardinals, 1378
168. The University of Paris and the schism, 1393 326
Council of Pisa declares itself competent to try popes,
169. 327
1409
170. Oath of the cardinals, council of Pisa, 1409 328
171. Council of Constance claims supreme authority, 1415 328
172. Reforms demanded by the council of Constance, 1417 329
Concerning general councils, council of Constance,
173. 331
1417
174. Bull "Execrabilis" of Pius II, 1459 332
William III of Saxony forbids appeals to foreign courts,
175. 333
1446
176. Establishment of the university of Avignon, 1303 334
Popular dissatisfaction with the wealth of the church,
177. 336
ca. 1480
178. Complaints of the Germans against the pope, 1510 336
179. Abuses in the sale of indulgences, 1512 338
341–
Section VI. Feudalism
387
180. Form for the creation of an "antrustio" by the king 342
181. Form for suspending lawsuits 343
182. Form for commendation 343
183. Form for undertaking lawsuits 344
184. Form for gift of land to a church 345
185. Form for precarial letter 346
186. Form for precarial letter 347
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page
187. Form for precarial letter 347
Form for gift of land to be received back and held in
188. 348
perpetuity for a fixed rent
189. Treaty of Andelot, 587 348
190. Precept of Chlothar II, 584–628 350
191. Grant of immunity to a monastery, 673 351
192. Form for grant of immunity to a monastery 352
193. Form for grant of immunity to a secular person 352
194. Grant of immunity to a secular person, 815 353
195. Edict of Chlothar II, 614 355
196. Capitulary of Kiersy, 877 355
197. Capitulary of Lestinnes, 743 357
198. Capitulary of Aquitaine, 768 357
199. Capitulary of Heristal, 779 358
200. General capitulary to the missi, 802 358
201. Capitulary to the missi, 806 358
202. Capitulary of 807 359
203. General capitulary to the missi, 805 359
204. Capitulary of 811 359
205. Capitulary of Worms, 829 360
206. Capitulary of Aachen, 801–813 360
207. Agreement of Lothar, Ludwig, and Charles, 847 360
208. Capitulary of Bologna, 811 361
209. Homage 363
210. Homage 364
211. Homage 364
212. Homage 364
213. Homage 364
214. Homage of Edward III to Philip VI, 1329 365
215. Feudal aids 367
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page
216. Feudal aids 367
217. Feudal aids, etc 367
Homage of the count of Champagne to the duke of
218. 368
Burgundy, 1143
219. Homage of the count of Champagne to Philip II, 1198 369
Homage of the count of Champagne to the duke of
220. 371
Burgundy, 1200
221. Letter of Blanche of Champagne to Philip II, 1201 371
222. Letter of Philip II to Blanche 372
Homage of the count of Champagne to the bishop of
223. 372
Langres, 1214
Homage of the count of Champagne to the bishop of
224. 373
Châlons, 1214.
Homage of the count of Champagne to the abbot of
225. 373
St. Denis, 1226
226. List of the fiefs of the count of Champagne, ca. 1172 374
227. Sum of the knights of the count of Champagne 375
Extent of the domain lands of the count of
228. 377
Champagne, ca. 1215
229. Feudal law of Conrad II, 1037 383
230. Feudal law of Frederick I for Italy, 1158 385
388–
Section VII. Courts, Judicial Processes, and the Peace
431
231. Sachsenspiegel 391
Frederick II appoints a justiciar and a court secretary,
232. 398
1235
233. Peace of Eger, 1389 399
234. Ordeal by hot water 401
235. Ordeal by hot iron 404
236. Ordeal by cold water 406
237. Ordeal by cold water 408
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page

238. Ordeal by the barley bread 409

239. Ordeal by bread and cheese 410
240. Peace of God, 989 412
241. Peace of God, 990 412
242. Truce of God, 1035–41 414
243. Truce of God, ca. 1041 416
244. Truce of God, 1063 417
245. Peace of the land, Henry IV, 1103 419
246. Peace of the land for Elsass, 1085–1103 419
247. Decree of Frederick I concerning the peace, 1156 422
248. Peace of the land for Italy, Frederick I, 1158 425
249. Perpetual peace of the land, Maximilian I, 1495 427
250. Establishment of a supreme court, 1495 430
432–
Section VIII. Monasticism
509
251. The rule of St. Benedict, ca. 530 432
252. Oath of the Benedictines 485
253. Monk’s vow 485
254. Monk’s vow 485
255. Monk’s vow 486
256. Monk’s vow 486
257. Written profession of a monk 486
258. Ceremony of receiving a monk into the monastery 488
259. Offering of a child to the monastery 489
260. Offering of a child to the monastery 489
261. Commendatory letter 489
262. Commendatory letter 490
263. General letter 490
264. Letter of dismissal 490
265. Rule of St. Chrodegang, ca. 744 491
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page

265
Origin of the Templars, 1119 492
a.
Anastasius IV grants privileges to the Knights of St.
266. 494
John, 1154
Innocent III to the bishops of France; simony in the
267. 496
monasteries, 1211
Innocent III grants the use of the mitre to the abbot
268. 497
of Marseilles, 1204
269. Rule of St. Francis, 1223 498
270. Testament of St. Francis, 1220 504
Innocent IV grants friars permission to ride on
271. 508
horseback, 1250
272. Alexander IV condemns attacks on the friars, 1256 508
273. John XXII condemns the theses of John of Poilly, 1320 509
510–
Section IX. The Crusades
544
274. Origen, Exhortation to martyrdom, 235 510
275. Origen, Commentary on Numbers 511
Leo IV (847–855); indulgences for fighting the
276. 511
heathen
277. John II; indulgences for fighting the heathen, 878 512
278. Gregory VII calls for a crusade, 1074 512
Speech of Urban II at the council of Clermont, 1095.
279. 513
Fulcher of Chartres
280. Speech of Urban II. Robert the Monk 518
Truce of God and indulgences proclaimed at the
281. 521
council of Clermont
282. Ekkehard of Aura, Hierosolimita; the first crusade 522
283. Anonymi Gesta Francorum, 1097–99 523
284. Eugene III announces a crusade, 1145 526
285. Otto of St. Blasien; the third crusade, 1189–90 529
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page
Innocent III forbids the Venetians to traffic with the
286. 535
Mohammedans, 1198
Innocent III takes the king of the Danes under his
287. 537
protection, 1210
288. Innocent III announces a crusade, 1215 537
Section X. Social Classes and Cities in Germany –612
Otto III forbids the unfree classes to attempt to free
289. 545
themselves, ca. 1000
290. Henry I frees a serf, 926 546
291. Henry III frees a female serf, 1050 547
292. Recovery of fugitive serfs, 1224 548
293. Rank of children born of mixed marriages, 1282 549
294. Frederick II confers nobility, ca. 1240 549
Charles IV confers nobility on a "doctor of both laws,"
295. 550
1360
296. Law of the family of the bishop of Worms, 1023 551
Charter of the ministerials of the archbishop of
297. 563
Cologne, 1154
The bishop of Hamburg grants a charter to colonists,
298. 572
1106
299. Privilege of Frederick I for the Jews, 1157 573
The bishop of Speyer grants a charter to the Jews,
300. 577
1084
Lothar II grants a market to the monastery of Prüm,
301. 579
861
Otto I grants a market to the archbishop of Hamburg,
302. 580
965
303. Otto III grants a market to count Berthold, 999 581
Merchants cannot be compelled to come to a market,
304. 581
1236
 TABLE OF CONTENTS page
305. Market courts to be independent of local courts, 1218 582
Otto I grants jurisdiction over a town to the abbots of
306. 582
New Corvey, 940
307. The ban-mile, 1237 583
308. Citizens of Cologne expel their archbishop, 1074 584
309. People of Cologne rebel against their archbishop, 1074 585
Confirmation of the "immediateness" of the citizens of
310. 586
Speyer, 1267
311. Summons to an imperial city to attend a diet, 1338 587
312. Grant of municipal freedom to a town, 1201 587
Extension of the corporate limits of the city of
313. 588
Brunswick, 1269
Decision of the diet about city councils in cathedral
314. 589
towns, 1218
315. Frederick II forbids municipal freedom, 1231–32 590
316. Breslau adopts the charter of Magdeburg, 1261 592
The Schoeffen of Magdeburg give decisions for Culm,
317. 602
1338
318. Establishment of the Rhine league, 1254 604
319. Peace established by the Rhine league, 1254 606
320. Agreement between Hamburg and Lübeck, ca. 1230 609
321. Agreement between Hamburg and Lübeck, 1241 610
322. Lübeck, Rostock, and Wismar proscribe pirates, 1259 610
323. Decrees of the Hanseatic league, 1260–64 611
324. Decrees of the Hanseatic league, 1265 612
Henry II grants Cologne merchants privileges in
325. 612
London, 1157
Bibliography 613

Glossary 615
A SOURCE BOOK FOR
MEDIÆVAL HISTORY
 I. THE GERMANS AND THE
EMPIRE TO 1073

The documents in this section are intended to illustrate the

history of the Germans from the period before the migrations
to the beginning of the struggle between the empire and the
papacy, 1073. The historical development of this period
resulted in the formation of the Holy Roman Empire, as the
form of government for western Europe. The civilization of
the Middle Age was in the main the result of the union of
Roman and German elements. This union was brought about
by the invasion of the Roman empire by the tribes of German
blood that lay along and back of the frontier of the empire. It
is important, therefore, to understand the character of the
German race and institutions, which are illustrated by nos. 1
to 4. The leaders and organizers of the Germans after the
settlement were the Franks, who under the Merovingian and
Carolingian lines of rulers united the German tribes and
bound them together in one great state. This movement is
shown in nos. 5 to 14. In this development the life of Karl the
Great (nos. 7 to 14) is of especial importance, because of the
permanent result of much of his work, particularly his
organization of the government (nos. 7 to 9), and his
founding of the empire by the union of Italy and Germany
(nos. 8, 13, and 14). The dissolution of his vast empire,
 resulting in the formation of France as a separate state, and
in the appearance of the feudal states, is shown in nos. 15 to
22. In the rest of the documents the history of Germany and
Italy, the real members of the empire, is followed. Of this the
important features are: the continued connection of Germany
with Italy (nos. 23 and 29), resulting in the restoration of the
empire by Otto I; the feudal organization of Germany (nos.
24, 25, and 27); and the increase of the German territory
toward the east (nos. 26, 28, 32). This brings the history
down to the accession of Henry IV, with whom begins the
long conflict between the empire and papacy which is treated
in section III.

1. Selections from the Germania of Tacitus, ca. 100

A.D.
The Germania of the Roman historian Tacitus (54–119 A.D.) is
a treatise on the manners, customs, and institutions of the
Germans of his time. It is one of the most valuable sources of
knowledge of the condition of the Germans before the
migrations. These sources are mainly of two kinds: the
accounts of contemporary writers, chiefly Roman authors;
and the documentary sources of the period of the tribal
kingdoms, particularly the tribal laws, such as the laws of the
Salic Franks (see no. 4), Burgundians, Anglo-Saxons, etc. It
will be evident to the student that the sources of both kinds
fall short of realizing the needs of historical trustworthiness:
the first kind, because the Roman authors were describing
institutions and customs which they knew only superficially or
from a prejudiced point of view; the second, because the
laws and documents of the tribal period reflect a stage of
development which had changed considerably from the
primitive stage. Conclusions in regard to the conditions of the
Germans in the early period are based on the careful criticism
 of each single document and on a comparison of each with all
the others. Some indication of this method is suggested in the
notes to nos. 1 and 4. Even at best the results are subject to
uncertainty. The Germania of Tacitus is the clearest and most
complete of the sources of the first type, but it is not free
from obscurity. Since there are numerous editions of it, we
have not thought it necessary to refer to any particular one.

5. The land [inhabited by the Germans] varies somewhat in

character from one part to another, but in general it is covered with
forests and swamps, and is more rainy on the side toward Gaul and
bleaker toward Noricum and Pannonia. It is moderately fertile, but
not suited to the growing of fruit trees; it supports great numbers of
cattle, of small size, however.

6. Iron is not abundant, as appears from the character of the

weapons of the inhabitants; for they rarely use swords or the larger
spears; instead they carry darts with small, narrow heads, which
they call frameæ. But these are so sharp and so easily handled that
they are used in fighting equally well at a distance and at close
quarters.... The number of warriors is definitely fixed, one hundred
coming from each district, and the warriors are known by that name
[i.e., hundred]; so that what was originally a number has come to be
a name and a title.{1}

7. Kings are chosen for their noble birth;{2} military leaders for their
valor. But the authority of the king is not absolute, and the war-
leaders command rather by example than by orders, winning the
respect and the obedience of their troops by being always in the
front of the battle.... These troops are not made up of bodies of men
chosen indiscriminately, but are arranged by families and kindreds,
which is an added incentive for bravery in battle. So, also, the cries
of the women and the wailing of children, who are taken along to
battle, encourage the men to resistance.
8. It is said that on more than one occasion broken and fleeing ranks
have been turned back to the fight by the prayers of the women,
who fear captivity above everything else.... They believe that women
are specially gifted by the gods, and do not disdain to take council
with them and heed their advice.

11. [In the assemblies of the tribe,] minor affairs are discussed by
the chiefs, but the whole tribe decides questions of general
importance. These things, however, are generally first discussed by
the chiefs before being referred to the tribe. They meet, except in
the case of a sudden emergency, at certain fixed times, at the new
or the full moon, for they regard these as auspicious days for
undertakings. They reckon the time by nights, instead of by days, as
we do.... One evil result arising from their liberty is the fact that they
never all come together at the time set, but consume two or three
days in assembling. When the assembly is ready, they sit down, all
under arms. Silence is proclaimed by the priest, who has here the
authority to enforce it. The king or the leader speaks first, and then
others in order, as age, or rank, or reputation in war, or eloquence
may give them the right. The speakers depend rather upon
persuasion than upon commands. If the speech is displeasing to the
multitude, they reject it with murmurs; if it is pleasing, they applaud
by clashing their weapons together, which is the kind of applause
most highly esteemed.{3}

12. Criminals are also tried at these assemblies, and the sentence of
death may be decreed. They have different kinds of punishments for
different crimes; traitors and deserters are hanged on trees, cowards
and base criminals are sunk in the swamps or bogs, under wicker
hurdles.... There are penalties also for the lighter crimes, for which
the offenders are fined in horses or cattle. Part of the fine goes to
the king or the state, and part to the person injured or to his
relatives. In this assembly they also choose leaders to administer the
law in the districts and villages of the tribe, each of them being
assigned a hundred companions from the tribe to act as counsellors
and supporters.{4}
13. They go armed all the time, but no one is permitted to wear
arms until he has satisfied the tribe of his fitness to do so. Then, at
the general assembly, the youth is given a shield and a sword by his
chief or his father or one of his relatives. This is the token of
manhood, as the receiving of the toga is with us. Youths are
sometimes given the position of chiefs because of their noble rank or
the merits of their ancestors; they are attached to more mature and
experienced chiefs, and think it no shame to be ranked as
companions. The companions have different ranks in the company,
according to the opinion of the chief; there is a great rivalry among
the companions for first place with the chief, as there is among the
chiefs for the possession of the largest and bravest band of
followers. It is a source of dignity and of power to be surrounded by
a large body of young warriors, who sustain the rank of the chief in
peace and defend him in war. The fame of such a chief and his band
is not confined to their own tribe, but is known among foreign
peoples; they are sought out and honored with gifts in order to
secure their alliance, for the reputation of such a band may decide a
whole war.

14. In battle it is shameful for the chief to allow any one of his
followers to excel him in courage, and for the followers not to equal
their chief in deeds of valor. But the greatest shame of all, and one
that renders a man forever infamous, is to return alive from the fight
in which his chief has fallen. It is a sacred obligation of the followers
to defend and protect their chief and add to his fame by their
bravery, for the chief fights for victory and the companions for the
chief. If their own tribe is at peace, young noble chiefs take part in
the wars of other tribes, because they despise the peaceful life.
Moreover, glory is to be gained only among perils, and a chief can
maintain a band only by war, for the companions expect to receive
their war-horse and arms from the leader, ... and the means of
liberality are best obtained from the booty of war.{5}

16. The Germans do not dwell in cities, and do not build their
houses close together. They dwell apart and separate, where a
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