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ENGLISH INDUSTRIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES

ENGLISH INDUSTRIES
OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Being an Introduction to the Industrial History
of Medieval England

BY

L. F. SALZMANN B.A. F.S.A.

AUTHOR OF 'MEDIEVAL BYWAYS'

LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
1913

PREFACE

The title of this book indicates at once its aim and its limitations.
It makes no pretence to be a complete history of the early industrial
life of England, but at the same time it does claim to be an
introduction to the study of that subject. It is my hope, and indeed
my belief, that from it the general reader, equipped with interest in
the history of his country rather than with technical knowledge, will
obtain something more than a bare outline of industrial conditions in
pre-Elizabethan days. The student who is anxious to go more deeply
into the subjects here treated may use this book as a road map and the
footnotes as finger-posts to guide him to the heights of completer
knowledge.

From the nature of my subject it was inevitable that the book should
be full of technicalities, figures, and statistics, but it has been my
endeavour to render the technicalities intelligible, and to prevent
the significance of the statistics being obscured by an excess of
detail. The scheme which I have adopted is to treat the leading
medieval industries one by one, showing as far as possible their chief
centres, their chronological development, the conditions and the
methods of working. With the disposal of the finished products through
intermediaries, merchants, or shopkeepers, I have not concerned myself,
deeming such matters rather to belong to the realms of trade and
commerce than of industry; and for this same reason, and also because
it has been dealt with by other writers, I have not dealt with the
great source of England's wealth—wool. Agriculture, also, and fishing I
have excluded from my definition of industry. A more culpable omission,
which I think calls for a word of explanation, is shown in the case
of building. This, however, is not omitted by an oversight, nor yet
through any desire to save myself trouble. I had collected a great
mass of material for an intended section on the Building Industry,
but after careful consideration I came to the conclusion that the
material available was so exceedingly technical, and the obscurity of
the details so greatly in excess of their value when elucidated, as to
render such a section rather a weariness and a stumbling-block to the
student than a help. The subjects treated in the several sections are
thoroughly representative, if not completely exhaustive, of English
industrial life, and a general survey of the subject is contained in
my last chapter, where I have outlined as broadly as possible the
general principles that governed the Control of Industry—the typical
regulations made by, or for, the craftsmen in the interest of the
employer, the workman, or the consumer. This last section might, of
course, easily have been extended to cover more pages than this whole
volume, but it is questionable whether multiplicity of detail tends to
ease of assimilation. A single typical instance of a prevalent custom
or regulation is as significant as a list of a dozen local variations,
and far easier to remember. A rule is more easily remembered by
one example than by a score, and with such a wealth of material as
exists the risk of obscurity is greater from amplification than from
concentration.

As to defining what is meant by the medieval period, it is not easy to
lay down any hard and fast rule, for the change from old methods or
conditions to new, which practically constitutes the division between
the medieval and the modern periods, occurred at a different date in
each industry. The crucial point in gunfounding was the invention of
solid boring in the time of Henry VIII.; in the cloth industry it was
the introduction of the 'new draperies' by Protestant refugees in
the reign of Elizabeth; for iron mining it was the adoption of pit
coal for smelting in the seventeenth century; for coal mining, the
application of steam power to solve the problems of drainage at great
depths early in the eighteenth century. Yet, taking one thing with
another, the sixteenth century may be considered to be the period of
transition. The rise of the capitalist and the monopolist, the social
revolution of the Reformation, with the abolition of the monastic
houses and the beginnings of the Poor-Law system constituted a new
era for the working classes even when unaccompanied by any startling
change in methods or mechanical media. Moreover, from the middle of
the sixteenth century documents and records relating to industrial
matters become more numerous and more accessible, and this is therefore
the usual starting-point for those who write upon these subjects. For
these reasons my accounts of the various selected industries will be
found to end at such dates within the sixteenth century as have seemed
convenient, though I have not slavishly refrained from taking out of
the seventeenth century occasional details applicable to the earlier
period.

Such, then, are the lines upon which I have built my book. If any
critic considers that the subject should have been dealt with on
another plan, he is at liberty to prove his contention by so treating
it himself.

As to the sources from which my information is taken: I believe
that every statement will be found to be buttressed by at least
one reference, and I may add that the reference is invariably to
the actual source from which I obtained my information. Of printed
sources much the most valuable have been the series of articles on
local industries printed in the _Victoria County Histories_, those
on mining and kindred subjects by Mr. C. H. Vellacott being of
exceptional importance. In very few cases have I found any published
history of any industry dealing at all fully with the early period:
the one conspicuous exception was Mr. G. Randall Lewis's book on _The
Stannaries_, second to which may be put Mr. Galloway's _Annals of Coal
Mining_. The various volumes of municipal records published by, or with
the consent of, the public-spirited authorities of some of our ancient
boroughs, notably those of Norwich, Bristol, Coventry, and Leicester,
have been of great value to me, as have Mr. Riley's _Memorials of
London_ and his editions of the _Liber Albus_ and _Liber Custumarum_.
To such other printed works as I have drawn upon, acknowledgment is
made in the footnotes, but so far as possible I have made use of
unpublished manuscript material at the British Museum and still more at
the Record Office. Needless to say, I collected far more material than
it was possible to use, and I can only hope that my selection has been
wise, as it certainly was careful, and that I have not overlooked or
omitted any evidence of essential importance. It had originally been my
intention to compile a series of transcripts of industrial records on
lines similar to the _Documents relatifs à l'Industrie_ of M. Fagniez,
but the enormous mass of material available for such a work, coupled
with the fact that in England such original research has to be carried
out at the sole expense of the unfortunate researcher, put an end to
the project, and deprived this work of what would have been a valuable,
if formidable, companion volume.

CONTENTS

CHAP.      PAGE

I. MINING—COAL      1

II.   "    IRON      20

III.  "    LEAD AND SILVER      38

IV.   "    TIN      62

V. QUARRYING—STONE, MARBLE, ALABASTER, CHALK      76

VI. METAL-WORKING      92

VII. POTTERY—TILES, BRICKS      114

VIII. CLOTHMAKING      133

IX. LEATHER WORKING      171

X. BREWING—ALE, BEER, CIDER      184

XI. THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY      200

INDEX      241

CHAPTER I

MINING—COAL

Coal is so intimately connected with all that is essentially
modern—machinery, steam, and the black pall that overhangs our great
towns and manufacturing districts—that it comes almost as a surprise
to find it in use in Britain at the beginning of the Christian era.
Yet excavation has proved beyond all doubt that coal was used by the
Romans, ashes and stores of the unburnt mineral being found all along
the Wall, at Lanchester and Ebchester in Durham,[1] at Wroxeter[2]
in Shropshire and elsewhere. For the most part it appears to have
been used for working iron, but it was possibly also used for heating
hypocausts, and there seems good reason to believe that it formed the
fuel of the sacred fire in the temple of Minerva at Bath, as Solinus,
writing about the end of the third century, comments on the 'stony
balls' which were left as ashes by this sacred fire.[3] That such coal
as was used by the Romans was obtained from outcrops, where the seams
came to the surface, is more than probable. There appears to be no
certain evidence of any regular mining at this period.

With the departure of the Romans from Britain coal went out of use, and
no trace of its employment can be found prior to the Norman Conquest,
or indeed for more than a century after that date. It was not until
quite the end of the twelfth century that coal was rediscovered,
and the history of its use in England may be said for all practical
purposes to begin with the reign of Henry III. (1216). In the 'Boldon
Book'[4] survey of the see of Durham, compiled in 1183, there are
several references to smiths who were bound to make ploughshares
and to 'find the coal' therefor, but unfortunately the Latin word
_invenire_ bears the same double meaning as its English equivalent 'to
find,' and may imply either discovery or simple provision. In view of
the fact that the word used for coal (_carbonem_) in this passage is
unqualified, and that _carbo_, as also the English 'cole,' practically
always implies charcoal, it would be unsafe to conclude that mineral
coal is here referred to. The latter is almost invariably given a
distinguishing adjective, appearing as earth coal, subterranean coal,
stone coal, quarry coal, etc., but far most frequently as 'sea coal.'
The origin of this term may perhaps be indicated by a passage in a
sixteenth-century account of the salt works in the county of Durham:[5]
'As the tide comes in it bringeth a small wash sea coal which is
employed to the making of salt and the fuel of the poor fisher towns
adjoining.' It is most probable that the first coal used was that thus
washed up by the sea and such as could be quarried from the face of
the cliffs where the seams were exposed by the action of the waves.
The term was next applied, for convenience, to similar coal obtained
inland, and as an export trade grew up it acquired the secondary
significance of sea-borne coal.

No references to purchases of sea coal occur in the Pipe Rolls of Henry
II., nor, so far as I am aware, in those of Richard I. and John, but it
would seem that its existence was known before the end of the twelfth
century, as Alexander Neckam in his treatise, _De Naturis Rerum_,[6]
has a curious and puzzling section, '_De Carbone_,' at the beginning
of his discourse on minerals, parts of which seem applicable to sea
coal, though other parts appear to refer to charcoal. So far as can be
gathered, he considered sea coal to be charcoal found in the earth;
he comments on the extreme durability of coal and its resistance to
the effects of wet and the lapse of time, and makes the interesting
statement that when men were setting up boundary stones they dug in
below them a quantity of coal, and that in the event of a dispute as
to the position of the stone in later years the presence of this coal
was the determining factor. Whether there is any corroborative evidence
of this alleged custom I have not been able to ascertain, but it is
at least a proof that mineral coal was known, though evidently not
extensively used for fuel at this period. Coal was apparently worked
in Scotland about 1200,[7] and it would seem that about a quarter of a
century later it was being imported into London, as a mention of Sea
Coal Lane, just outside the walls of the city, near Ludgate, occurs in
1228.[8] As property in this lane belonged to William 'de Plessetis,'
it is probable that the coal was brought from Plessey, near Blyth, in
which neighbourhood the monks of Newminster were given the right to
take coal along the shore about 1236.[9] The monks also obtained leave
from Nicholas de Aketon about the same time to take sea coals in his
wood of Middlewood for use at their forge of Stretton, near Alnwick.
It may be remarked that at this time, and for the greater part of the
next three centuries, the use of coal was restricted to iron-working
and lime-burning, the absence of chimneys rendering it unsuitable for
fuel in ordinary living rooms. So particularly was it associated with
lime-burning that we find Sea Coal Lane also known as Lime-burners
Lane, and references in building accounts to purchases of sea coal for
the burning of lime are innumerable.

It is in 1243 that we get our first dated reference to an actual
coal working. In that year Ralf, son of Roger Wlger, was recorded
to have been drowned 'in a delf of sea coals' (_in fossato carbonum
maris_).[10] The use of the word _fossatum_ is interesting, as clearly
indicating an 'open cast working,' that is to say, a comparatively
shallow trench carried along the seam where it comes close to the
surface, a step intermediate between the mere quarrying of outcrop
and the sinking of regular pits. An indication of the spread of coal
mining is to be found in one of the articles of inquiry for the Forest
Assize of 1244, which relates to 'sea coal found within the forest,
and whether any one has taken money for the digging of the same.'[11]
It is probable that special reference was intended to the Forest of
Dean, coal being worked about this time at Blakeney, Stainton, and
Abinghall; from the last named place a penny on every horse-load of
coal was paid to the Constable of St. Briavels, as warden of the
Forest.[12] By 1255 the issues of the Forest of Dean included payments
for digging sea coals, and customs on all sea coal brought down the
Severn.[13] Some of this latter may have been quarried in Shropshire,
as about 1260 Walter de Clifford licensed Sir John de Halston to dig
for coals in the forest of Clee,[14] and there are other indications of
the early exploitation of the Shropshire coal-field. The Midland field
of Derbyshire and Notts was also working, coal being got in Duffield
Frith in 1257,[15] the year in which Queen Eleanor was driven from
Nottingham Castle by the unpleasant fumes of the sea coal used in the
busy town below,[16] a singularly early instance of the smoke nuisance
which we are apt to consider a modern evil. Half a century later, in
1307, the growing use of coal by lime-burners in London became so
great a nuisance that its use was rigorously prohibited, but whether
successfully may be questioned.[17]

By the end of the thirteenth century it would seem that practically
all the English coal-fields were being worked to some extent. In
Northumberland so numerous were the diggings round Newcastle that
it was dangerous to approach the town in the dark, and the monks of
Tynemouth also were making good use of their mineral wealth;[18] in
Yorkshire coal was being got at Shippen at least as early as 1262,[19]
and in Warwickshire and at Chilvers Coton in 1275.[20] The small
Somerset field near Stratton on Fosse and the Staffordshire coal
measures may be possible exceptions, but in the latter county coal was
dug at Bradley in 1315 and at Amblecote during the reign of Edward
III.[21] The diggings were still for the most part open-cast works, but
pits were beginning to come in. These 'bell pits,' of which numbers
remained until recently in the neighbourhood of Leeds,[22] at Oldham in
Lancashire,[23] and elsewhere, were narrow shafts sunk down to the coal
and then enlarged at the bottom, and widened as far as was safe—and
sometimes farther, if we may judge from a number of instances in
Derbyshire in which miners were killed by the fall of their pits.[24]
When as much coal as could safely be removed had been obtained, the
pit was abandoned and a fresh pit sunk as near to it as possible. As a
rule the old pit had to be filled up, and at Nuneaton we find this very
properly enforced by the bailiff in 1343,[25] and at later dates. Open
coal delfs were a source of considerable danger to men and animals,
especially when water had accumulated in them, and a number of cattle
were drowned at Morley in Derbyshire in 1372,[26] while it was probably
in an abandoned working at Wingerworth that a beggar woman, Maud
Webster, was killed in 1313 by a mass of soil falling on her as she
was picking up coal.[27] From the pits the coal was raised in corves,
or large baskets, and as early as 1291 we have a case of a man being
killed at Denby in a 'colpyt' by one of these loaded corves falling
upon his head.[28]

A case of some interest is recorded in Derbyshire in 1322, when Emma,
daughter of William Culhare, while drawing water from the 'colepyt' at
Morley was killed by 'le Damp,' _i.e._ choke damp.[29] This is one of
the very few early references to choke damp, or 'stithe,' as it was
often called, and the case is also interesting because, as water from a
coal pit could hardly be good for either drinking or washing purposes,
she must have been engaged in draining the pit, and this suggests a
pit of rather exceptional dimensions. A more certain indication of a
considerable depth having been attained is given forty years later in
the case of another pit at Morley Park, said to have been drowned, or
flooded, 'for lack of a gutter.'[30] This may only refer to a surface
drain, but there is abundant proof that regular drainage by watergates,
soughs, or adits had already come into use, and that coal-mining had
reached the 'pit and adit' stage. In this system of working, the
water, always the most troublesome enemy of the miner, was drawn off
by a subterranean drain leading from the bottom of the pit. It need
hardly be pointed out that the system was only practicable on fairly
high ground, where the bottom of the pit was above the level of free
drainage: in such a case a horizontal gallery, or adit, could be
driven from a suitable point on the face of the hill slightly below
the bottom of the pit to strike the latter, and a wooden sough,[31] or
drain, of which the sections were known in Warwickshire as 'dearns,'
could be laid to carry the water from the pit to a convenient point
of discharge. In 1354 the monks of Durham, when obtaining a lease of
coal mines in Ferry, had leave to place pits and watergates where
suitable,[32] and ten years later a lease of a mine at Gateshead
stipulated for provision of timber for the pits and water-gate.[33]
During the next century a certain number of pits were sunk in lower
ground, or to a greater depth, below the level of free drainage, and in
1486 we find the monks of Finchale, active exploiters of the northern
coal measures, erecting a pump worked by horse power at Moorhouse,[34]
but it is not until the second half of the sixteenth century, nearly
at the end of the medieval period, that we find such pumps, 'gins,' or
baling engines, and similar machines in common use.

Piecing together information afforded by scattered entries, we can
obtain some idea of the working of a coal pit about the end of the
fifteenth century. After the overseer, or a body of miners, had
inspected the ground and chosen a likely place, a space was marked out,
and a small sum distributed among the workers as earnest money. The
pit was then sunk at such charge as might be agreed upon: at Heworth
in 1376 the charge was six shillings the fathom,[35] at Griff in 1603
six shillings the ell.[36] A small 'reward' was paid when the vein
of coal was struck, the pit was then cleaned up and timbered, and a
water-gate or adit driven to afford drainage and ventilation. Over the
mouth of the pit was erected a thatched 'hovel' with wattled sides to
keep the wind and rain from the pit, and in this was a windlass for
raising the corves. The workmen consisted of hewers, who cut the coal,
and bearers who carried it to the bottom of the pit and filled the
corves: they were under the control of the 'viewer,' whose duty it was
'to see under the ground that the work was orderly wrought,' and the
'overman,' who had 'to see such work as come up at every pit to be for
the coal owner's profit.'[37] Their wages do not appear to have been
much, if at all, above those of the ordinary labourer or unskilled
artisan. Owing no doubt to the comparatively late rise of the industry
and the simplicity of the work, no refining or skilled manipulation
being required as in the case of metallic ores, the coal miners
never acquired the privileged position of the 'free miners' of Dean,
Derbyshire, Cumberland, and Cornwall.[38] The work was not attractive,
and the supply of labour seems occasionally to have run dry. So
much was this the case after the Black Death in 1350 and the second
epidemic of 1366 that the lessees of the great mines at Whickham and
Gateshead had to resort to forced labour, and obtained leave to impress
workmen.[39] Much later, about 1580, the Winlaton pits were hampered
by lack of workmen and the owners, having sent into Scotland for
more hands with little success, had to hire women and even then were
short-handed, to say nothing of being troubled with incompetent men who
for their negligence and false work had to be 'laid in the stocks,' and
even 'expulsed oute of their worke.'[40]

The question of mineral rights as regards coal is complicated by the
variety of local customs. In some cases, as at Bolsover,[41] the
manorial tenants had the right to dig sea coal in the waste and forest
land for their own use; but it was probably usual to charge a fee for
licence to dig, and this was clearly the practice at Wakefield.[42] So
far as copyhold lands were concerned the lord of the manor, or his
farmer, appears as a rule to have had the power to dig without paying
the tenant compensation. This was certainly being done at Houghton,
in Yorkshire, and in the adjacent manor of Kipax in 1578, and the
undoubted injury to the copyholders was held to be counterbalanced by
the advantage to the neighbourhood of a cheap supply of coal.[43] The
uncertainty of the law and the conflicting claims of ground landlords,
tenants, and prospectors led to a plentiful crop of legal actions. For
the most part these were actions for trespass in digging coal without
leave, occasionally complicated by counter appeals.[44] In the first
half of the sixteenth century, for instance, Nicholas Strelley, being
impleaded for trespass by Sir John Willoughby, set forth that he had a
pit in Strelley from which he obtained much coal, to the advantage of
the neighbourhood and of 'the schyres of Leicestre and Lincoln, being
very baren and scarce contres of all maner of fuell'; and no doubt,
though he omitted to say so, to his own advantage; now, owing to the
deepness of the mine and the amount of water, the old pit could only be
worked if a sough or drain were constructed at an unreasonable expense;
he had therefore dug a fresh pit on the borders of Strelly close to
Sir John's manor of Wollaton, purposing to use an old sough running
through Sir John's ground. Sir John had promptly blocked the sough
with a 'counter-mure' and brought actions for trespass, and Nicholas
Strelley, much aggrieved, invoked the aid of the Star Chamber.[45]
The same court was also invoked a few years later by William Bolles,
who complained that by the procurement of Sir William Hussey certain
persons came to Newthorpe Mere in Gresley and 'most cruelly and
maliciously cutt in peaces brake and caste downe dyvers frames of
tymbre made upon and in one pitte made and sonken to gett cooles, and
cutt in peaces dyvers greate ropes loomes and tooles apperteyninge to
the said woorke at the said pitte,' the offenders being unidentified
as the outrage took place 'in the night tyme when every good trew and
faithful subjecte ought to take their reste.'[46]

Presuming an undisputed title, the owner of coal measures could exploit
them in a variety of ways. He might work them himself; the outlay would
be small, provided extensive drainage operations were not required,
for wages, as we have said, were low and the equipment of the mine,
consisting of a few picks, iron bars or wedges, wooden shovels shod
with iron and baskets, buckets, and ropes, inexpensive, and there was
a steady sale for the coal, though the price of coal varied so greatly
and was so much affected by cost of carriage that it is not possible
to give even an approximate average value for the medieval period; the
question being further complicated by the extraordinary variety of
measure employed. Coal is quoted in terms of the 'hundredweight,' the
'quarter' (valued at Colchester in 1296 at 6d.),[47] the 'seam' (or
horse-load), the 'load,' which may be either horse or wain load, the
'scope,' which appears to be equivalent to the 'corf,' or basket, the
'roke' or 'rowe,' the 'rod' or 'perch' (a measure apparently peculiar
to Warwickshire),[48] the 'butress' and the 'three-quarters' (of a
buttress), and most commonly in the Tyne district by the 'fother,'
'chalder,' or 'chaldron' and 'ten,' and also by the 'keel' or barge
load. Where the owner did not work the coals himself he could either
issue annual licences to dig coal or lease the mines for a term of
years.[49] The earliest leases give a vague general permission to dig
coal wherever found within the lands in question, but it soon became
usual to limit the output either by fixing the maximum amount to be
taken in one day, or more usually in early leases by restricting the
number of workmen to be employed. In 1326 Hugh of Scheynton granted to
Adam Peyeson land at Benthall with all quarries of sea coal, employing
four labourers to dig the same, and as many as he chose to carry the
coals to the Severn.[50] Slightly before this date we find that payment
was made at Belper according to the number of picks employed, the
royalty on one pick in 1315 being over £4.[51] In 1380 the prior of
Beauvale in leasing a mine of sea coal at Newthorpe to Robert Pascayl
and seven other partners,[52] stipulated that they should have only got
two men in the pit, a viewer (_servaunt de south la terre_), and three
men above ground. The lessees of a pit at Trillesden in 1447 were 'to
work and win coal every day overable [_i.e._ working day] with three
picks and ilk pick to win every day 60 scopes,'[53] and at Nuneaton,
in 1553, the lessees were not to employ more than six workmen at the
time.[54] In this latter case there was a further stipulation that the
pits when exhausted should be filled up with 'yearthe and slecke,'
while at Trillesden the pit was to be worked workmanlike and the miners
were to 'save the field standing,' pointing to a fairly elaborate
system of galleries and pillars liable to subsidence if not properly
planned.[55] But the most important lease was that of five mines in
Whickham, made in 1356 by Bishop Hatfield of Durham to Sir Thomas Gray
and the Rector of Whickham for the enormous rent of 500 marks (£333,
6s. 8d.).[56] In this case the lessees were limited to one keel (about
twenty tons) daily from each mine; but on the other hand the bishop
agreed never to take their workmen away, and not to open any fresh pits
in the district, and not to sell the coal from his existing pits at
Gateshead to ships. A century later Sir William Eure leased some of the
most important Durham coal mines, his daily output being restricted to
340 corves at Raly, 300 at Toftes, 600 at Hartkeld, and 20 at any other
mines, with the right of making up from one mine any deficiency in
another, and also of making up any deficiency caused by delays due to
'styth' or choke-damp, which appears to have been so troublesome in the
hot season as to cause a complete suspension of work. Under this lease
Sir William obtained at Raly in one week of 1460, some 1800 corves,
each of 2½ bushels, making rather over 140 chalders, paying 5d. a day
to each of the three hewers, the three barrowmen, who brought the coal
to the foot of the shaft, and the four drawers who raised and banked
it.[57]

In the Whickham lease of 1356 it will be noticed that the bishop
undertook not to allow coals from his own pits to be exported by sea.
The sea-borne trade in coals from Newcastle and the Tyne was obtaining
considerable dimensions; ten years later, in 1366, a large purchase of
coal was made at Winlaton for the king's works at Windsor. The sheriff
of Northumberland accounted for £165, 5s. 2d. expended on the purchase
and carriage to London of 576 chalder of coals, reckoning by the
'great hundred' of six score, so that there were actually shipped 676
chalder, but of this 86 chalder had to be written off, partly through
some being jettisoned during a sudden storm at sea, and partly because
the London chalder was much bigger than that used in Northumberland,
the difference amounting to about five per cent.[58] The chalder,
or chaldron, seems to have been originally about eighteen to twenty
hundredweight, and from early times twenty of these made the load of a
keel, or coal barge, but in order to evade the export duty of 2d. on
every keel, or at least to compensate for it, it became the practice
to build keels of twenty-two or twenty-three chalder burden. This was
forbidden in 1385,[59] but the prohibition being evaded, an Act was
passed in 1421[60] by which the actual capacity of each keel had to
be marked upon it. This in turn was evaded by a rapid increase in the
size of the chalder, until by the time of Elizabeth it had doubled
its original weight, and the 'ten' (chalder) was the equivalent of
the keel of twenty tons.[61] Returning to the fourteenth century,
the customs accounts of the port of Newcastle[62] show that between
Michaelmas 1377 and Michaelmas 1378 as much as 7338 chalder of coal,
valued at 2s. the chalder, was exported to foreign countries. For the
most part this went to the Low Countries—Sluys, Bremerhaven, Flushing,
and Dunkirk being amongst the ports mentioned, though in a number of
cases ships of 'Lumbardye' occur, the average quantity taken by each
vessel being a little less than fifty chalder. Of the home trade for
this period no record is obtainable, and it is not until the time
of Elizabeth that we can compare the exports to home and foreign
ports. For the seven years 1591-7, the amount sent abroad was 95,558
chalder, rising from 10,000 in 1591 to 18,000 in 1593, and then falling
gradually back to 10,000, while the home trade amounted to 418,200
chalder, increasing steadily from 45,700 up to over 70,000.[63] The
supremacy of Newcastle is shown by a comparison of the amounts of coal
exported to foreign countries from the chief English ports in 1592.[64]
Newcastle comes first with 12,635 chalder, then Bristol with 580, Wales
with 464, and Liverpool with 448.

The expansion of the home trade noticed in the returns for 1591-7
is borne out by an abundance of corroborative evidence, and may be
largely attributed to the great increase at this period in the use of
chimneys. Practically the chimney was an Elizabethan invention so far
as the smaller houses were concerned, and 'the multitude of chimnies
lately erected' was one of the changes most remarked upon by Harrison's
old friends at the time that he wrote his _Description of England_,
published in 1577. The reign of Elizabeth, therefore, when the rapid
increase in the demand for house coal, coupled with a rise in the
price, resulted in a rapid expansion of the industry in all parts of
the country, marks the end of the medieval period of coal mining and
the initiation of a new epoch with which we are not concerned.

CHAPTER II

MINING—IRON

Iron has been worked in Britain from the earliest historical times,
and flint implements have been found at Stainton-in-Furness and at
Battle in Sussex in positions suggesting that ironworks existed in
those places at the end of the Stone Age.[65] Julius Cæsar relates
that iron was produced along the coast of Britain, but only in small
quantities, its rarity causing it to be considered as a precious metal,
so that iron bars were current among the natives as money. The coming
of the Romans soon changed this. They were not slow to see the value
of the island's mineral wealth and to turn it to account. Ironworks
sprang up all over the country: at Maresfield in Sussex they were
apparently in full swing by the time of Vespasian (died A.D. 79), and
in the neighbourhood of Battle fifty years later. Even more important
were the workings in the West, on the banks of the Wye and in the
Forest of Dean. Near Coleford have been found remains of Roman mines
with shallow shafts and adits, while round Whitchurch, Goodrich, and
Redbrook are enormous deposits of 'cinders,' or slag, dating from
the same period.[66] Ariconium, near Ross, was a city of smiths and
forgemen; and Bath (Aquae Sulis) is often said to have had a 'collegium
fabricensium,' or gild of smiths, as one of its members, Julius
Vitalis, armourer of the 20th Legion, dying after nine years' service,
was given a public funeral here by his gild; but it seems more probable
that the seat of the gild was at Chester, and that Julius had come to
Bath for his health.[67]

It is a most remarkable fact that although abundant circumstantial
evidence of the Roman exploitation of British iron exists in the shape
of coins and other relics found upon the site of the works, there is
practically no trace of any such working during the Saxon period until
shortly before the Conquest. The furnaces must have been still in blast
when the Saxons landed; they were a warlike race, possessing a full
appreciation of iron and something of the Scandinavian admiration for
smithcraft, yet there is hardly a trace of their having worked iron
in this country. Few, if any, objects definitely assignable to this
period have been found upon the site of iron works, and documentary
evidence is almost non-existent. There is a charter of Oswy, King of
Kent, given in 689, by which he grants to the abbey of St. Peter of
Canterbury land at Liminge 'in which there is known to be a mine of
iron';[68] and there is the legend that about 700 A.D. Alcester, in
Warwickshire, was the centre of busy ironworks, peopled with smiths,
who, for their hardness of heart in refusing to listen to St. Egwin,
and endeavouring to drown his voice by beating on their anvils, were
swallowed up by the earth;[69] but the rest is silence, until we come
to the time of Edward the Confessor. The Domesday Survey shows that
in the time of the Confessor, Gloucester rendered as part of its
farm 36 dicres of iron, probably in the form of horseshoes, and 100
rods suitable for making bolts for the king's ships,[70] while from
Pucklechurch in the same country came yearly 90 'blooms' of iron.[71]
The same Survey mentions that there were six smiths in Hereford,
each of whom had yearly to make for the king 120 horseshoes, and it
also refers to iron mines on the borders of Cheshire, in Sussex and
elsewhere.

During the twelfth century the industry appears to have expanded. In
the North, at Egremont, we read of the grant of an iron mine to the
monks of St. Bees,[72] and at Denby a similar grant was made about
1180 by William FitzOsbert to the abbey of Byland.[73] In Derbyshire,
towards the end of the century, Sir Walter de Abbetoft gave to the
monks of Louth Park wood at Birley in Brampton and two smithies, namely
one bloomery and one forge, with the right to take beech and elm for
fuel.[74] But it was in the south-west that the greatest development
took place. During the whole of this century the Forest of Dean was the
centre of the iron industry, and played the part that Birmingham has
played in more recent times. All through the reign of Henry II. the
accounts of the sheriffs of Gloucester[75] tell of a constant output
of iron, both rough and manufactured, iron bars, nails, pickaxes, and
hammers sent to Woodstock, Winchester, and Brill, where the king was
carrying out extensive building operations, horseshoes supplied to the
army, arrows and other warlike materials despatched to France, spades,
pickaxes, and other miners' tools provided for the Irish expedition
of 1172, iron bought for the Crusade which Henry projected, but did
not live to perform, and 50,000 horseshoes made for the actual Crusade
of Richard I. Throughout the thirteenth century the Forest of Dean
retained its practical monopoly of the English iron trade, so far at
least as the southern counties were concerned, and during the whole of
that time members of the family of Malemort were employed at a forge
near the castle of St. Briavels turning out enormous stores of bolts
for cross-bows and other war material.[76] But a rival was now growing
up in the Weald of Sussex and Kent. As early as 1254 the sheriff of
Sussex had been called upon to provide 30,000 horseshoes and 60,000
nails, presumably of local manufacture,[77] and in 1275 Master Henry
of Lewes, who had been the king's chief smith for the past twenty
years,[78] purchased 406 iron rods (_kiville_) 'in the Weald' for £16,
17s. 11d.,[79] while a year or two later he obtained another 75 rods
from the same source and paid £4, 3s. 4d. 'to a certain smith in the
Weald for 100 iron rods.'[80]

The Wealden works had the advantage, a great advantage in the case
of so heavy a material as iron, of nearness to London, and soon
obtained a footing in the London markets with the imported Spanish
iron at the expense of Gloucestershire, which at the beginning of
the reign of Henry III. had been sending its iron to Westminster and
into Sussex.[81] It must not be imagined that the northern counties
were neglecting their mineral wealth all this time; they were on the
contrary very active, and were exploiting their iron with vigour and
success. On the lands of Peter de Brus in Cleveland in 1271 there
were five small forges each valued at 10s., and two larger worth £4
each:[82] these sums may not sound very imposing, but it must be borne
in mind that the best land in that district was then worth only 1s. an
acre. Twenty years later the forges belonging to Furness Abbey yielded
a profit of £6, 13s. 4d., as compared with a profit on flocks and herds
of only £3, 11s. 3d., and it is probable that the Abbey had at least
forty forges then working on their lands.[83] The great quantity of
iron obtained at Furness, also, formed the most valuable part of the
booty carried off by the Scots in their raid in 1316.[84] But the large
production of iron in the northern counties was absorbed by their own
local requirements, and this was still more the case with the smaller
quantities smelted in Northamptonshire and Rutland. Derbyshire must
have been another important centre, for as early as 1257 four or five
forges in the Belper ward of Duffield Frith were yielding about £10
each yearly, and in 1314 two forges in Belper accounted for £63, 6s.
8d. in thirty-four weeks, and there was a third, yielding nearly £7,
10s. for only eleven weeks' work,[85] but there is nothing to show
that Derbyshire iron was ever sent south, and from the middle of the
fourteenth century such English iron as was used in London was almost
entirely drawn from the Weald.

In order to understand how Sussex and Kent, where no iron has been
worked for the last hundred years, came to be the centres of a great
iron industry in medieval times, it must be borne in mind that charcoal
was the only fuel used for iron working[86] until Dud Dudley discovered
a method of using pit coal, about 1620, a date which may be considered
to mark the end of the medieval period in iron mining. The earliest
and most primitive method of smelting iron was by setting a hearth
of wood and charcoal on a wind-swept hill or in some other draughty
position, heaping upon it alternate layers of ore and charcoal, and
covering the whole with clay, to retain the heat, leaving vents at
the base for the wind to enter and the iron to come out.[87] A slight
advance on this substituted a short cylindrical furnace of stone for
the containing layer of clay, and an ingenious device for increasing
the draught was used by the Romans at Lanchester, in Durham, where two
narrow tunnels were made on the side of a hill, with wide mouths facing
to the west, the quarter from which the wind blows most frequently in
this valley, tapering to a narrow bore at the hearth.[88] Even under
the most favourable conditions such a furnace would reduce a very small
percentage of the ore to metal,[89] and the use of an auxiliary blast,
produced by bellows, must have been resorted to at a quite early date.
Prior to the fifteenth century such bellows were almost invariably
worked by hand, or rather by foot, for the blowers stood upon the
bellows, holding on to a bar, but during the fifteenth century water
power was introduced in many parts of the country, and the bellows
were driven by water-wheels. Such was apparently the case in Weardale
in 1408,[90] probably in the Forest of Dean about the same date, and
clearly in Derbyshire by the end of the century.[91]

In several early charters granting mineral rights to Furness Abbey,
mention is made of the privilege of using water from the grantor's
streams; but where particulars are given, as in the case of the charter
of Hugh de Moresby made in 1270, the water is always stated to be for
the washing of the ore, and not for power.[92] The ore, or 'mine,' to
use the more common medieval term, was sometimes dug on the 'open-cast'
system, but more usually by a series of bell or beehive pits.[93] It
was then roughly cleansed by washing on a coarse sieve, and was next
subjected to a preliminary burning, or 'elyng,'[94] as it was termed at
the Tudeley forge in the fourteenth century.[95] The burnt ore was then
broken and carried to the furnace. In the sixteenth century this was a
building in the shape of a truncated cone, about twenty-four feet in
diameter, and not more than thirty feet high, in the base of which was
a cupped, or bowl-shaped, hearth of sandstone, and such we may assume
the earlier furnaces also to have been. Alternate charges of mine and
charcoal were fed into the furnace from the top, the iron settling
down into the bowl of the hearth, from which it was taken as a lump or
'bloom.' From the sixteenth century, when by the use of a more powerful
blast a higher temperature was obtainable and cast iron was produced,
the molten iron was drawn off from time to time through a vent at the
bottom of the hearth into a bed of sand. In Sussex and Gloucestershire
it seems to have been usual to form in the sand one large oblong
depression in the direct course of the flow of the iron with a number
of smaller depressions at right angles to the first, the large mass of
iron thus moulded being known as a 'sow,' and the smaller blocks as
'pigs.'

There were in the earlier periods of the industry a very large number
of smelting hearths, consisting practically of an ordinary blacksmith's
forge with a cup-shaped hearth, or crucible, in the bottom of which the
imperfectly molten iron accumulated. Such were the itinerant forges
(_fabricæ errantes_) in the Forest of Dean, of which there were as
many as sixty in blast at the end of the thirteenth century.[96] The
buildings attached to such a forge would naturally be merely temporary
sheds, such as were referred to by the Earl of Richmond in 1281, when
he gave leave to the monks of Jervaux to cut wood in his forest to
smelt iron and to make two small sheds (_logias_) 'without nail, bolt,
or wall,' so that if the smelters moved to another place (as these
itinerant forges did when the ore or the fuel became exhausted) they
should pull down the sheds and erect others.[97] In this instance the
grant of two sheds may imply two smelting-houses, but it seems more
probable that one was the 'bloomery,' or smelting forge, and the other
the smithy, which invariably accompanied the bloomery.[98] With this
simple type of forge the product was a lump of malleable iron, which
was purified by hammering and worked up at the smithy, but the pig
iron produced by the larger high blast furnace required more elaborate
treatment. The sow was carried from the furnace to the forge, 'finery'
or 'strynghearth,' where it was heated on an open hearth and reduced
by the sledge, or by the water-hammer[99] when available, to a large
ingot or 'bloom.'[100] The latter was, as a rule, reheated, divided
and worked into bars, the completion of which was usually carried out
in the seventeenth century at a third hearth, the 'chafery,' but this
appears to have been an elaboration of post-medieval date. The sows
naturally varied in size according to the capacity of the furnace, and
this, it may be observed, was much greater at the end of a 'blowing'
than at the beginning, owing to the fire eating away the hearth,
especially if too large a proportion of intractable 'hot' ore were
used;[101] but the blooms were made of standard weight. At the same
time the weight of the bloom, though constant in any given district,
varied in different parts of the country. In Weardale it seems to have
been about two hundredweight, being composed of fifteen stones, each
of thirteen pounds;[102] and in Furness it was about the same weight,
but contained fourteen stones of fourteen pounds.[103] On the other
hand, we find blooms selling at the Kentish ironworks of Tudeley for
3s. 4d. in the reign of Edward III.,[104] when iron bought for repairs
to Leeds Castle cost about 7s. the hundredweight,[105] which, allowing
for cost of carriage, agrees fairly well with the three quarters of
a hundredweight attributed to the Sussex bloom in the seventeenth
century.[106] As regards the price of iron, it was always high during
the medieval period, but naturally varied with conditions of demand
and supply, cost of carriage, and the quality of the iron. To take
a late instance: in Staffordshire in 1583, 'coldshear,' or brittle
iron, fetched only £9 the ton when tough iron fetched £12.[107] In
Sussex[108] in 1539 iron sold on the spot for from £5 to £7 the ton,
allowing a profit of 20s. the ton, and ten years later £8 at the forge
and about £9, 5s. in London, the cost of carriage to London being 9s.
the ton.[109]

The number of workmen employed at the different works naturally
varied, but the surveyor of the iron mills in Ashdown Forest in 1539
laid down the rule:[110] 'That to melt the sowes in ij forges or
fynories there must be iiij persones, and at the forge to melt the
blomes there must be ij persones. So are there at every forge ij
persones wherof the oone holdeth the work at the hamo^r and the second
kepeth the work hot. M^d that oone man cannot kepe the hamo^r bicause
the work must be kept in such hete that they may not shifte handes.'

At the Bedburn forge in 1408,[111] there were a 'blomer' or 'smythman,'
a smith and a foreman, as well as a 'colier' or charcoal burner. The
blomer was paid 6d. for every bloom smelted, of which the average
production was six in a week, the largest output recorded in any week
being ten blooms. For working up the bloom at the forge, the smith
received 6d. and an extra penny for cutting it up into bars, while
the foreman, who in spite of his name does not seem to have had any
staff of workmen under him, received 2d. a bloom when he assisted at
the smelting, and 3d. at the reworking. Such additional labour as was
required was supplied by the wives of the smith and foreman, who did
odd jobs, breaking up the ore, attending to the bellows, or helping
their husbands, earning wages paid at first on a vague but rather
high scale, but falling afterwards to the settled rate of a halfpenny
a bloom. An allowance of one penny a week was made for ale for the
workmen; and a similar munificent allowance was made 'for drink for the
four blowers' at Tudeley in 1353.[112] At this Tudeley forge in 1333,
the workmen were paid in kind, receiving every seventh bloom,[113] a
payment roughly equivalent to 6d. a bloom, but by 1353 this system had
been dropped, and they were paid from 7½d. to 9½d. a bloom. In addition
to the 'seventh bloom,' we find mention in 1333 of a customary payment
to the 'Forblouweris'[114] of 2¼d. a bloom, and in the 1353 account we
find 'rewards' paid to the master blower and three other blowers; no
other workmen are mentioned by name, and as the whole process of making
the blooms is here referred to as 'blowyng' we may probably assume that
the staff of these Kentish works consisted of four men. The Sussex iron
mills at Sheffield in Fletching in 1549 employed one hammerman and
his assistant,[115] two fyners and their two servants, a founder, and
a filler,[116] the business of the latter being to keep the furnace
charged. Here the founder was paid 8s., and the filler 6s. for each
'foundye,' or working week of six days, and the hammerman and fyners
received between them 13s. 4d. a ton, about three tons being produced
each 'foundye.'

In addition to the actual ironworkers every forge afforded employment
to a number of charcoal-burners and miners. For the most part these
latter, as was the case with the coal miners, ranked as ordinary
labourers, but in the Forest of Dean they formed a close corporation
of 'free miners,' possessing an organisation and privileges of
considerable importance and antiquity.[117] So far as can be judged the
customs of the free miners were traditional, based on prescription,
recognised as early as the time of Henry III., and officially confirmed
by Edward I. By these customs the right of mining was restricted to the
free miners resident within the bounds of the Forest, and they had also
control of the export of the iron ore, all persons carrying the same
down the Severn being bound to pay dues to the miners under penalty
of forfeiture of their boat. The free miners had also the right of
digging anywhere within the Forest, except in gardens, orchards, and
curtilages; the lord of the soil, who might be the king or a private
landowner, being entitled to a share as a member of the fellowship,
almost always consisting of four 'verns' or partners. Besides the
right thus to open a mine the miners had a claim to access thereto
from the highway, and to timber for their works. In return, the king
received from every miner who raised three loads of ore in a week one
penny, which was collected by the 'gaveller' every Tuesday 'between
Mattens and Masse,' and he had also the right to certain quantities of
'law-ore' from the different mines every week, for which the miners
were paid at the rate of a penny a load, and if he was working an
itinerant forge they were bound to supply ore therefor at the same
rate, and finally there was a royal export duty of a halfpenny on every
load of ore taken out of the Forest.[118]

The right of mining within the forest was restricted, as we have
already said, to the resident free miners, and they might only employ
the labour of their own family or apprentices. These rights to their
mines, or shares therein, were definite, and could be bequeathed by
will; and in order to prevent trespass the rule was laid down that no
man should start a fresh working near that of another miner 'within so
much space that the miner may stand and cast ridding[119] and stones
so far from him with a bale, as the manner is.' When disputes arose
between the miners, they were settled at their own court, held every
three weeks at St. Briavels, under the presidency of the Constable,
appeals being made, if necessary, from the normal jury of twelve
miners to juries of twenty-four or forty-eight. These Mine Law Courts
continued to be held until the latter half of the eighteenth century;
but we are not here concerned with their later proceedings and constant
endeavours to maintain restrictions which had long passed out of date;
endeavours which seem to have resulted chiefly in promoting 'the
abominable sin of perjury,' so that it was found necessary to ordain
that any miner convicted thereof should be expelled and 'all the
working tooles and habitt burned before his face.' What those tools
and costume were in the fifteenth century, and until modern times, may
be seen on a brass in Newland Church, whereon is depicted a free miner
wearing a cap and leather breeches tied below the knee, with a wooden
mine-hod slung over his shoulder, carrying a small mattock in his right
hand, and holding a candlestick between his teeth.[120]

Although not so intimately connected with iron working as the smiths,
smelters and miners, the charcoal-burners were auxiliaries without whom
the industry could not have existed, and who in turn derived their
living largely from that industry. The amount of wood consumed by the
iron works was enormous. As an example we may take the case of the two
Sussex mills of Sheffield and Worth for 1547-9.[121] At Sheffield 6300
cords of wood were 'coled' for the furnace, and 6750 cords for the
forge; at Worth the amounts were respectively nearly 5900 and 2750
cords; the cords being 125 cubic feet, this represents an expenditure
of about 2,175,000 cubic feet of timber for these two works alone in
less than two years. Later, in 1580, it was stated that a beech tree
of one foot square 'at the stubbe' would make one and a half loads of
charcoal, and the ironworks at Monkswood, near Tintern, would require
600 such trees every year,[122] while some thirty years later Norden
referred to the fact that there were in Sussex alone about 140 forges
using two, three, or four loads of charcoal apiece daily. Acts were
passed in 1558, 1581, and 1585 regulating the cutting of wood for
furnaces and prohibiting the use of timber trees for charcoal, but
they were evaded, and the destruction of trees continued until in the
eighteenth century charcoal was supplanted by mineral coal, the first
successful use of which for iron smelting, by Dud Dudley in 1620,
marks, as we have said, the termination of the medieval period.

MINING—LEAD AND SILVER

The lead-mining industry in England is important and interesting from
its antiquity, the value of its produce, large quantities of silver
being obtained from this source during the medieval period, and the
organisation of its workers. Although lacking the completeness of
organisation which rendered the tinners of Cornwall and Devon almost
an independent race, the lead miners of Alston Moor, Derbyshire, and
the Mendips, the three great mining camps of England, were more highly
organised than the iron miners of Dean, who form the lowest class of
privileged 'free miners.'

The lead mines of Britain were worked by the Romans from the earliest
days of their occupation of the island, pigs of lead having been found
in the Mendips stamped with the titles of Britannicus (A.D. 44-48)
and Claudius (A.D. 49).[123] Mines of this period exist at Shelve and
Snailbeach in Shropshire and elsewhere, and smelting-hearths have been
found at Minsterley in the same county and at Matlock.[124] Nor was
the industry discontinued after the departure of the Romans. Lead mines
at Wirksworth in Derbyshire were leased by the Abbess of Repton to a
certain Duke Humbert in 835,[125] and a 'leadgedelf' at Penpark Hole
in Gloucestershire is mentioned in 882,[126] though that county was
not a great centre of lead production at a later date. In the time of
Edward the Confessor the Derbyshire mines of Bakewell, Ashford, and
Hope yielded £30, besides five wainloads of lead, but in 1086 their
yearly value had fallen, for some reason, to £10, 6s. Besides these
three mines Domesday Book alludes to others at Wirksworth, Metesford,
and Crich.[127]

During the twelfth century the output of lead was considerable. The
'mines of Carlisle,' that is to say of Alston Moor, on the borders of
Cumberland, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, occur on the Pipe Roll of
1130, and were farmed during the reign of Henry II.[128] at an average
rent of £100; during the same reign large quantities of lead from
Derbyshire were carried across to Boston and shipped to London and the
Continent: the Shropshire mines were also active, one hundred and ten
loads of lead being sent down to Amesbury in 1181 alone. King Stephen
granted to the Bishop of Durham certain mines in Weardale, probably
of silver-bearing lead, as the non-precious minerals already belonged
to the bishopric, and during the vacancy of the see of Durham in
1196 considerable issues of silver were accounted for.[129] A similar
grant of lead mines in Somerset was made to Bishop Reginald of Bath by
Richard I.[130] How soon the three great mining camps acquired their
privileges and organisation cannot be definitely stated: some of the
regulations seem to have been traditional from very early times, even
in the case of the Mendip mines, of which the laws were largely based
upon the Derbyshire code. So far as the northern mines are concerned,
we find Henry III. in 1235 confirming to the miners of Alston the
liberties and privileges 'which they used to have.'[131]

Of the regulations in force at Alston Moor[132] we have but few
details, but of the laws of Derbyshire[133] and the Mendips[134] we
have ample information. In each case there was a mine court, known
in Derbyshire as the 'berghmote' or 'barmote,' of which the ordinary
meetings were held every three weeks and special sessions twice a year,
at Easter and Michaelmas. The 'body of the court' consisted of twelve,
or in the 'great courts' twenty-four, miners of good standing and the
presiding officer was in Derbyshire the barmaster and in Somerset the
lead-reeve: at Alston[135] he appears as bailiff, 'king's serjeant,'
and steward. Associated with this official was the coroner:[136] the
two offices indeed seem to have been combined at Alston during the
thirteenth century as in 1279 complaint was made that the coroners of
the Scottish king's liberty of Tindale (that portion of the present
county of Northumberland which adjoins Alston Moor) were acting in
the mine 'where the serjeant of the mine appointed by the English
king ought to exercise the office of coroner in all things':[137] by
1356, however, it was the custom for the Alston miners to elect a
coroner separate from the bailiff or king's serjeant.[138] The exact
degree of independence possessed by these mine courts is difficult to
determine. During eyres in Cumberland it was customary to send special
justices to Alston to hold the pleas of the Crown. This was already an
old-established custom in 1246,[139] and we find that Robert de Vipont,
who about the beginning of the reign of Edward I. had formed a manor
out of what had been moor and waste, had usurped the right to try
thieves in his manor court, when they ought only to be tried in the
mine court.[140] Even in Derbyshire there was a tendency to use the
courts of the Duchy of Lancaster instead of, or to overrule, the mine
courts, at least in the sixteenth century.[141]

By the Derbyshire mine law a small trespass was punishable by a fine
of 2d., but if this was not paid at once the fine was doubled each
successive day until it reached the sum of 5s. 4d. This same sum of 5s.
4d. (doubled in a similar way up to 100s.) was the fine for bloodshed,
or for the offence of encroaching upon another man's claim underground.
For a thrice-repeated theft of ore the offender's hand was pinned
with a knife to the uprights of his windlass, and if he succeeded in
getting free he had to forswear the mine for ever. A similarly savage
and primitive measure of justice was meted out to the Mendip miner who
stole lead worth 13½d.: his property was forfeited, and the bailiff was
to bring him 'where hys howse or wore [_i.e._ ore] hys, hys work and
towlls with all instruments belongyng to that occupacyon and then put
hym in hys howss or working place and set fyer yn all together about
hym—banyshe hym from that occupacyon for ever by fore the face of all
the myners there.' Both methods of punishment are clearly of early
origin, and it seems probable that they originally involved the death
of the thief, though a later and more humane generation connived at his
escape while retaining the ancient form of punishment. If the burnt
thief did not dread the fire, but returned and stole again, he was
handed over to the sheriff's officers and committed to prison, being
no longer one of the privileged community. It is worth noting that the
great mining camp on the borders of Cornwall and Devon, though not
apparently possessing any mine court, had, as we might expect, certain
control over the excesses of the miners, as in 1302 there was made 'a
pit in the mine by way of prison to frighten (_ad terrorem_) evildoers
and bad workmen.'[142] The Devon miner, as we have just said, had no
code of laws or privileges; at Alston the code applied only to the
miners actually living in the collection of 'shiels,' or huts on the
Moor; in Derbyshire the full system of regulations was confined to the
royal 'field,' though a few private owners of mining fields established
barmotes on similar lines;[143] but the customs of the Mendips appear
to have applied throughout the district, whoever might be lord of the
soil.

By mining law the miner had the right to prospect anywhere except in
churchyards, gardens, orchards, and highways; on the Mendips, however,
he had first to go through the formality of asking leave of the
lord of the soil, or of his lead-reeve, who could not refuse their
permission; he might then pitch where he pleased and break ground
as he thought best. In Derbyshire, when the prospector had struck a
promising 'rake' or vein, he cut a cross in the ground and went to the
barmaster, who came and staked out the claim into 'meers,' each being
four perches of twenty-four feet: the first two meers were given to
the finder, the third to the king, as lord of the soil, and the others
to those miners who first demanded them. Within three days the owner
of a meer must set up a 'stow,'[144] a wooden frame with two uprights
joined by a bar or spindle placed at the top of the shaft, and serving
as a windlass. If the claim was not then worked, the barmaster nicked
the spindle, and if this were done three times, and the claim was still
unworked, it was declared forfeit and granted to the first applicant.
The regulations in use on the Mendip field were rather different. There
the pitches or claims, instead of being of one standard size, were
decided by the throw of the 'hack' or small pick, weighing 3 lbs. 14
oz. 'Every man when he doth begyn hys pyt, otherwyse callyd a grouff,
shaull have hys haks throw ij weys after the rake,[145] so that he
do stand to the gyrdyl or wast in the gruff'; while this decided the
limits of the pitch along the line of the vein the pitcher had always
eighteen feet on either side of his 'grooffe or gribbe.' The hack,
however, was not thrown unless another party wished to pitch in the
neighbourhood; in that case the newcomer, or 'younger pitcher,' could
demand that the hack be thrown by the 'elder pitcher' and his partners,
'when they have their chine, rake or course,' that is to say, when they
have struck the vein. The lead-reeve then proffered the hack to one
of the elder pitchers, and if they failed to throw it within fourteen
days the younger pitcher had the throw.[146] The rules for reserving a
claim were probably founded on those in use in Derbyshire. 'The first
pytcher in any grounde muste make yt perfecte wyth a caddel of tymber
and a payre of styllyngs within fowre and twentie howers next after
the pyching.' Although this was the strict law, custom seems to have
been content with the making of the 'caddel,' some sort of framework of
timber, the first day, and to have allowed a month for the 'styllyngs,'
or stow. If a claim lay unworked for four weeks, the lead-reeve caused
proclamation to be made, and if the old partners did not turn up within
fourteen days, it was forfeited.

Besides the right of prospecting where they chose, the miners had
right of access to the nearest high-road, and in Derbyshire if this
were refused them the barmaster and two assistants might walk abreast
with arms stretched out, and so mark out a way direct from the mines
to the road, even through growing corn. They were also privileged to
take timber from the neighbouring woods for use in the mines, and in
Cumberland, where fuel was scarce, they might even prevent the owners
of the woods from cutting them until they had obtained a sufficient
supply for the furnaces. Their proprietary rights in their mines were
recognised, and they could dispose of them, wholly or in part, without
licence. They might also take their ore to what 'myndry' they pleased,
to be smelted, and the only restriction upon the sale of the ore or
lead was that in some places the king, or other lord of the soil, had
'coup,' that is to say pre-emption, the right of buying the ore at the
market price before it was offered to any other purchaser, and in 1295
we find the Derbyshire miners paying 4d. a load in respect of 'coup'
for licence to sell to whom they pleased.[147]

The terms upon which the miners held their mines varied. On private
lands, when the owner did not work the mines himself by hired labour,
he usually bargained for some proportion, an eighth, a tenth, or
a thirteenth, of the produce. On the Mendips the lord of the soil
received the tenth part as 'lot'; on the royal field of Derbyshire the
king had the thirteenth, and at Alston the ninth dish of ore, the dish
in the latter case being 'as much ore as a strong man can lift from the
ground.'[148] At Alston the king had in addition the fifteenth penny
from the other eight dishes, but had to provide at his own expense a
man called 'the driver,' who understood how to separate the silver from
the lead.[149] This method of paying a proportion of the produce was
clearly the fairest to all concerned, for, as the Cumberland miners
said in 1278, though they knew that there was ore enough to last to
the end of time, no one could tell the yearly value of the mines, as
it depended upon the richness of the ore they struck,[150] and in
the same way when Robert de Thorp was made warden of the Devon mines
in 1308,[151] it was expressly stated that no definite sum was to be
demanded of him, because the silver-bearing ore, the refined lead,
and the reworked slag all had 'diversetez de bonntez et quantitez
de respouns.' In addition to the payment of lot ore, the miners had
to give tithes to the Church. In some cases these tithes originated
in a definite grant, more often they seem to have been regarded as
compensation for the tithes of crops which would otherwise have grown
on the ground taken by the mines; but the strangest reason for claiming
them was that lead was itself a titheable crop, because it 'grew and
renewed in the veins.'[152]

While many small mines were worked by parties of free miners under
these conditions, for their own profit, and at their own risk, there
must have been from very early times a large number of poor men who
worked for the king, the lord of the soil, or capitalist adventurers,
receiving wages either by piece or by time. The regulations for the
payment of these hired miners in the royal mines of Beer Alston, in
Devonshire, drawn up in 1297 are of considerable interest.[153]

'As to the piecework of the miners, those who can find ore in their
diggings shall receive for piecework as before, that is to say 5s.
for the load,[154] as well of black as of white ore, if the white
cannot reasonably be put lower. And those who are engaged in "dead"
[_i.e._ unremunerative] work, and cannot find ore in their diggings,
and yet work more, for some dead work is harder than (digging in) the
vein, shall be at wages (_a lour soutz_) until they reach the ore, so
that all piecework be undertaken by two or three gangs who divide the
profits between themselves, as well to those doing dead work as to the
others.'

That the price of 5s. a load was calculated to pay the miners for
their preliminary unproductive 'dead' work, may be gathered from the
fact that 'tithe ore,' that is to say the ore paid to the Church, was
bought back from the rector of Beer at 2s. the load, and a further 9d.
was deducted from this sum for washing the ore.[155] At the same time
it is clear that where the 'dead' work was exceptionally heavy or the
eventual yield small this system of payment would not work; and in 1323
we find that the 'dead work' of clearing, searching, and digging into
an old mine in Devon was paid at the rate of 3s. 4d. the fathom, and
that two gangs of six men were paid at the daily rate of 7d.-9d., about
1½d. a head, for searching for the vein and for piercing the hard rock
to follow up the vein in hope of finding a richer vein.[156]

By the Ordinance of 1297 wages were to be paid every Saturday, though
as a matter of fact we find that they were constantly falling into
arrears.

'All the ore of each week shall be measured before the Saturday and
carried to the boles or other places where it is to be smelted. And
knowledge shall be taken each Saturday or Sunday of the issues of each
week in all things. And the payments shall be made to the miners and
other workmen the same Saturday. And no miner shall remain in a market
town under colour of buying food, or in other manner after the ninth
hour on Sunday, without leave.'

Besides their wages the miners received such iron, steel, and ropes
as they required, free of charge, and had the use of a forge for the
repair of their tools.[157] At Beer, in 1297, there were three forges,
one for each of the three mines into which the field was divided,[158]
and each worked by a man and a boy. In addition to the smiths[159]
there would be, as auxiliaries, one or more candlemakers, carpenters,
charcoal-burners, and woodcutters. In many mines it was also necessary
to employ a number of hands in baling water out of the pits with
leathern bodges or buckets; during April 1323 an average of twenty
persons were so engaged at Beer Alston, and during one week the number
rose to forty-eight.[160] So greatly did the accumulation of water in
the pits interfere with work, that in early times the Devon mines were
closed down during the winter,[161] and it was not until about 1297
that means were found of dealing with this evil. About that date the
plan of draining the pits by means of 'avidods' or adits, that is to
say horizontal galleries driven from the bottom of the pits to a level
of free drainage on the surface, already in use in the tin mines, was
introduced into the lead mines. The ordinances of 1297 arranged for one
hundred tinners to work in 'avidods,' and the accounts of the working
of these mines for the same year show payments averaging £12, 10s.
to 'William Pepercorn and his partners,' and to six other gangs 'for
making avidods.'[162] It was probably in the following year that Walter
de Langton, Bishop of Chester, reported that the yield of the Beer mine
had been doubled by the new method of draining, as they could now work
as well in the winter as in the summer.[163]

The ore having been raised was broken up with a hammer, no mechanical
stamps being used apparently before the sixteenth century, if then,
though there is mention in 1302 of a machine (_ingenium_) for breaking
'black work' or slag.[164] It was then washed in 'buddles' or troughs,
with the aid of coarse sieves, women being frequently employed for
this process. The washed ore, separated as far as possible from stone
and other impurities, was then carried to the smelting furnace. The
commonest type of furnace was the 'bole,' a rough stone structure
like a limekiln, with an opening at the top, serving as a chimney,
and also for charging the furnace, and one or more vents at the base
for the blast. These boles were usually built in exposed and draughty
positions, and could only be used when the wind was favourable. At
an early date they were supplemented by 'slag-hearths' or furnaces
(_fornelli_) possessing an artificial blast and closely resembling
blacksmiths' forges. The bellows of these hearths were usually driven
by the feet of men or women, but a water mill was in use in Devon at
least as early as 1295,[165] and at Wolsingham, in Durham, in 1426
water power was used when available, the footblast being used during
dry seasons.[166] The fuel of the boles was brushwood, and that of
the hearths charcoal, with peat and, for the remelting of the lead,
sea-coal. In Devon mention is made of a third type of smelting house,
the 'hutte,' the nature of which is obscure. The huttes are usually
classed with the boles;[167] thus it was noted in 1297 that 'from each
load of black ore smelted at the huttes and boles there come 3½ feet of
silver-lead, each foot containing 70 lbs. of lead, each pound weighing
25s. sterling. And from a load of black ore smelted by the mill furnace
come 3 feet of silver-lead. And from a load of white ore smelted by
the furnace or elsewhere come 1½ feet of silver-lead. Moreover a pound
of lead made from black ore smelted by the boles and huttes and by
their furnaces yields 2 dwt. of silver; a pound of lead from black ore
smelted by the mill furnace yields 3 dwt. of silver; and a pound made
from white ore 1½ dwt.' In the same way the 'black work' or slag of
both boles and huttes were reworked at the furnaces.[168] A possible
hint is found in the fact that large quantities of refined lead had to
be put into the hutte when it was first lit,'as the huttes cannot burn
ore or smelt lead without the addition of sufficient melted lead at the
start to roast (_coquenda_) the ore in the lead so added.'[169] This
certainly suggests some sort of cupellation furnaces. Yet another type
of furnace was the 'turn-hearth' used in the Mendips; the construction
of this, again, is obscure, but it seems to have derived its name from
some portion of the hearth being movable and adjustable to changing
winds, while it would seem that the ordinary furnace could only be used
when the wind blew from a particular quarter.[170] There are references
in 1302 to a '_fornellus versatilis_' used in the Devon mines, and one
entry speaks of making the furnace 'upon the turning machine' (_super
ingenium versatile_).[171]

The bolers and furnacemen, who were paid about 12d. to 16d. a week,
their assistants receiving about half those amounts, having cast the
lead into pigs and stamped it, handed it over to the wardens of the
mine. The next process was the refining of the silver from the lead
by cupellation. When an alloy of silver and lead is melted on an open
hearth with free access of air, the lead is oxidized and, in the form
of litharge, can be removed either by skimming it off or by absorption
by the porous body of the hearth, leaving the silver in a more or less
pure form. By adding more lead and repeating the process the silver can
be further refined. In England it seems to have been usual to remove
the litharge by absorption; in the case of the Romano-British refinery
at Silchester,[172] the absorbent material used was bone ash, but in
the medieval refineries at the Devon mines charred 'tan turves,'[173]
or refuse blocks of oak bark from the tanneries, were used, and
probably the same material was used in Derbyshire, the southern mines
being largely worked by Derbyshire miners. A thick bed of this tan-ash
was made with a dished hollow in the middle, in which was placed the
fuel and the lead; the hearth was then fired and blast supplied from
the side: when the whole was melted the fire was raked aside and the
blast turned on to the upper surface of the molten metal, which was
thus rapidly oxidized and so refined.

But first, as soon as the mass of silver-lead was in a fluid state,
'before the ash has absorbed any of the lead, the lead is to be stirred
and mixed so that it is of equal quality throughout, and a quantity of
the lead amounting to about 6s. weight shall be taken out, and this
shall be divided into two parts, half being given to the refiner,
ticketed with his name, and the date and sealed by the wardens, and
the other half shall be assayed by the king's assayer in the presence
of the wardens and of the refiner, and the refiner shall answer for
the whole of that refining at the rate of the assay, as nearly as is
reasonable, having regard to the fact that there is greater waste and
loss in the big operation of refining than in the assay. And when the
silver has been fully refined it shall be given by the refiners to the
wardens for a tally (or receipt) of the weight, so that there shall
be neither suspicion nor deceit on either side.... And the lead that
remains in the ash after the refining shall be resmelted at a suitable
time.'[174] These ordinances of 1297, just quoted, arranged for there
being five skilled refiners at the Devon mines, and the account rolls
show that they received from 18d. to 2s. a week.

The silver seems to have been cast into plates or ingots varying from
ten to twenty pounds in weight and value (for the monetary pound was
simply the pound weight of standard silver). Its purity probably
varied, for while in 1296 the pound of refined silver was mixed with
14d. of alloy to bring it to the standard,[175] a few years later
silver weighing £132, 5s. was worth only £131, 13s. 7¼d. in coined
money,[176] and 370 lbs. of silver sent up from Martinstowe in 1294 had
to be further refined in London before it could be made into silver
vessels for the Countess of Barre.[177] In the case of the lead we
have the usual medieval complexity of weights. An early entry[178]
records that 'a carretate (or cartload) of lead of the Peak contains
24 fotinels, each of 70 lbs., and the fotinel contains 14 cuts[179] of
5 lbs. A carretate of London is larger by 420 lbs.' The London weight
appears to have gained the day, as a later entry gives 13½ lbs. to a
stone, 6 stones to a foot, and 30 feet (or 2430 lbs.) to a carretate
'according to the weight of the Peak.'[180] In Devon we find in 1297
carretates of 24 feet and 32 feet in use simultaneously, the foot being
70 lbs. here as in Derbyshire.[181]

In no other part of England had the lead-mining industry so continuous
a history of steady prosperity as in Derbyshire. The Devon mines
seem to have been richer and more productive during a short period,
but the half century, 1290-1340 practically covers the period of
their boom. During the five years, 1292-1297, these mines produced
£4046 of silver, and about £360 worth of lead; next year the silver
amounted to £1450. Then in April 1299 the king leased the mines to the
Friscobaldi, Italian merchants and money-lenders, with whom he had many
dealings.[182] They agreed to pay 13s. 4d. a load for the ore, but
after about a year, during which time they drew some 3600 loads of
ore,[183] they found that they were losing heavily, the ore not being
worth more than 10s. a load, and the costs of working being higher
than they had expected.[184] The mines, however, continued to yield
well when worked by the king for his own benefit, as much as £1773
of silver and £180 from lead being obtained in 1305: this, however,
seems to have been the highwater mark, the yield for 1347 being only
£70.[185] After this the mines were let to private adventurers from
time to time; but such records as we have do not suggest that many
fortunes were made from them: in 1426 the yield for the previous two
and a half years had been 39 ounces of silver,[186] for the year 1442
it was £17,[187] but for the six years, 1445-51, the average output
rose to 4000 ounces.[188] At the beginning of the boom, in 1295, it
was found necessary to recruit labour from the older lead-mining
districts, and commissioners were appointed to select miners for Devon
from Cheshire, Earl Warenne's liberty of Bromfield in Shropshire, the
Peak, Gloucester, Somerset, and Dorset.[189] The ordinances of 1297
stipulated for 150 miners from the Peak, and an equal number of local
men from Devon and Cornwall, though the accounts show that there were
that year 384 miners from the Peak, and 35 from Wales.[190] On the
other hand, in 1296, while we have over 300 miners coming from the
Peak, a twelve days' journey, we also find four picked men sent from
Devon to the king's court, and thence to Ireland to prospect on the
king's behalf.[191]

The prosperity of the Devon mines caused an increase of activity in
those of Somerset, where a number of fresh strikes were reported
during the early years of the fourteenth century, about one of which
an optimistic lead reeve wrote to the Bishop of Bath and Wells as
follows:[192]—

'Know, my lord, that your workmen have found a splendid mine[193] of
lead on the Mendips to the east of Priddy, and one that can be opened
up with no trouble, being only five or six feet below the ground. And
since these workmen are so often thieves, craftily separating the
silver from the lead, stealthily taking it away, and when they have
collected a quantity fleeing like thieves and deserting their work,
as has frequently happened in times past, therefore your bailiffs are
causing the ore to be carried to your court of Wookey where there is
a furnace built at which the workmen smelt the ore under supervision
of certain persons appointed by your steward. And as the steward,
bailiffs, and workmen consider that there is a great deal of silver
in the lead, on account of its whiteness and sonority, they beg that
you will send them as soon as possible a good and faithful workman
upon whom they can rely. I have seen the first piece of lead smelted
there, of great size and weight, which when it is struck rings almost
like silver, wherefore I agree with the others that if it is faithfully
worked the business should prove of immense value to yourself and to
the neighbourhood, and if a reliable workman is obtained I think that
it would be expedient to smelt the ore where it is dug, on account of
the labour of carrying so heavy material such a distance. The ore is in
grains like sand.'

There is no evidence that this mine fulfilled the sanguine expectations
of its discoverers, but about the same time, in 1314, we find Herman
de Alemannia and other adventurers working a mine in Brushford, near
Dulverton.[194] The Germans were for many centuries the most skilled
miners, and English mining owes much to their enterprise. As an
instance of their greater skill we may take the case of Thomas de
Alemaigne, silver finer,[195] who being out of work petitioned the king
to grant him the refuse and slag (_les aftirwas et les remisailles_)
thrown aside at the mines in Devonshire, which had been refined so
far as those at the mines could refine them: no one else would touch
them, so the king would get no gain unless he granted them to Thomas,
who was willing to pay 20s. a year for the right to rework them. This
same Thomas de Alemaigne was appointed in 1324 to dig, cleanse, and
examine the king's mines in Cumberland and Westmoreland.[196] Probably
these mines had not been worked for some time previous, as in 1292
the total issues of the Alston mines for the last fourteen years were
said to have been £4, 0s. 2d., possibly owing to the absence of fuel,
which is given as the reason for an iron mine there being worth only
15s. a year.[197] Later, in 1359, Tilman de Cologne was farming the
Alston mines, and in 1475, as a result apparently of a report by George
Willarby[198] that there were in the north of England three notable
mines, one containing 27 lbs. of silver to the fodder of lead with a
vein half a rod broad, another 18 lbs. with a vein five rods broad, and
the third 4 lbs. with a vein 1¼ rods broad, the mines of Blaunchlond in
Northumberland, Fletchers in Alston, Keswick in Cumberland, and also
the copper mine near Richmond, were granted for fifteen years to the
Duke of Gloucester, the Earl of Northumberland, William Goderswyk, and
John Marchall.[199] The two noblemen were presumably sleeping partners,
and appear to have abandoned the arrangement, as soon afterwards, in
1478, William Goderswyk, Henry Van Orel, Arnold van Anne, and Albert
Millyng of Cologne, and Dederic van Riswyk of England, received a
grant for ten years of all mines of gold, silver, copper, and lead in
Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, paying one-fifteenth of
the profits.[200]

Although gold is mentioned in this last entry and in a number of other
grants of mines in the fifteenth century, and though Galias de Lune
and his partners were licensed in 1462 to dig ores containing gold in
Gloucestershire and Somerset,[201] gold does not appear to have been
worked in paying quantities in England. In 1325 John de Wylwringword
was sent down to the mines of Devon and Cornwall to seek for gold:
he obtained from the Devon mines 22 dwt., of which he refined 3 dwt.
at Exeter; this yielded 2½ dwt. of pure gold.[202] The remainder was
sent up to the Exchequer and eventually refined at York; but this is
almost the only note we have of gold being found, though no doubt small
quantities were found from time to time in the Cornish stream tinworks.

In 1545 one St. Clere declared that certain gold called 'gold hoppes
and gold oore' in every stream tinwork in Devon and Cornwall was by
ignorance of the tinners molten with the tin, and so conveyed abroad;
certain persons were appointed to test his statement.[203]

CHAPTER IV

MINING—TIN

Tin mining claims an antiquity unsurpassed by any other industry in
this country, but with what degree of justice may well be doubted. The
claim of the western promontory of Britain, later known as Cornwall
and Devon, to be the Cassiterides or Tin Islands whence the Phœnicians
obtained their stores of that metal at least five hundred years before
the Christian era rests upon rather shadowy grounds.[204] Diodorus
Siculus, who wrote about B.C. 30, is the first writer definitely to
connect Britain with the tin trade, and his statements appear to be
based rather upon a doubtful understanding of earlier topographers than
upon actual knowledge. According to him the tin was produced in the
promontory of 'Bolerium' and brought to the island of 'Ictis,' whence
it was transported to Gaul. If 'Bolerium' is Cornwall, then there is no
reason to doubt that 'Ictis' is 'Insula Vectis,' or the Isle of Wight,
which was at that date still connected to the mainland by a narrow
ridge of rock, covered at highwater, but dry at low water, as 'Ictis'
is said to have been.[205] It is certainly strange, if an ancient
and well-established trade in tin really existed in Britain when the
Romans came over, that that race, with its keen eye for metallic
wealth, should have made no use of the tin mines of Cornwall. Yet
there is no reference to these mines in the literature of the period
of the Roman occupation, nor are there traces of anything approaching
an occupation of Cornwall by the Romans, who appear to have ignored
this corner of Britain completely. After the departure of the Romans,
and before the Saxons conquered this district, which did not happen
till the middle of the tenth century, there is some evidence of tin
being worked here, as Cornish tin is said to have been carried over to
France in the seventh century, and in a life of St. John of Alexandria,
who died in 616, there is a story of an Alexandrian galley coming to
Britain for tin.[206] That the Saxons worked the tin seems probable
from the discovery of Saxon remains in the St. Austell tin grounds and
elsewhere,[207] but the industry can hardly have been of any great
importance at the time of the Norman Conquest, as there is no reference
to it in the Domesday Survey.

While the history of tin mining in Britain prior to the middle of the
twelfth century is problematical, there is from that time onwards an
immense mass of material bearing upon the subject. This material has
been patiently examined by Mr. George Randall Lewis, and summarised in
his work on _The Stannaries_,[208] a book so full and complete that I
have saved myself much labour by basing this chapter almost entirely
upon it.

There are, as might be expected, many analogies between the mining
of tin and the mining of lead. The processes were very similar, and
the laws governing the workers had much in common, but it is in the
case of the Stannaries that we find the full development of the 'free
miner,' so far as England is concerned. Certain initial differences in
the methods employed are observable owing to the form in which tin is
obtained. Tin, like other metals, exists in veins or lodes embedded in
the rock at various depths; where these veins outcrop on the banks of
a stream they are broken up by the action of the water and climatic
variations, the resultant pile of stanniferous boulders being known as
'shode'; the waters of the stream constantly wear away small pieces of
the tin ore and carry it downwards until, owing to its heavy specific
gravity, the tin sinks, forming a deposit in the bed of the stream
which may sometimes be as much as twenty feet thick. It was this third
class of alluvial tin which was alone worked in prehistoric and early
medieval days. This might safely be assumed, but rather remarkable
confirmation is obtained from an account of tin worked for Edmund of
Cornwall in 1297. From this it appears that twenty-eight and a half
'foot-fates' of ore produced a thousand-weight (1200 lbs.) of 'white
tin,' the proportion corresponding pretty closely with those—three
'foot-fates' of ore to yield 105 lbs. of metal—given in the sixteenth
century by Thomas Beare for alluvial or 'stream' tin, which was far
richer than mine tin.[209] It cannot have been very long before the
miners realised that the stream tin was carried down by the water, and
started to search for its source. The 'shode,' or boulder tin, must
therefore have been worked almost as early as the alluvial deposits,
and the final stage was the working of the 'lode.' In this lode mining
the first workings were no doubt shallow trenches and confined to
places where the ore lay close to the surface; a somewhat greater
depth was obtained by 'shamelling,' the trench being carried down in
stages, a 'shamell' or platform being left at each stage at the height
to which the miner could throw his ore; finally came the deep shaft
with galleries. But here, as in all mining, the question of drainage
came in. Where the workings were quite shallow the water could be baled
out with wooden bowls, or a 'level,' or deep ditch, could be dug. For
greater depths the adit, or drainage gallery (see above, p. 50), was
available, and although Mr. Lewis[210] cannot find any instance of the
use of the adit in tin mining before the seventeenth century, it does
not seem reasonable to doubt that it was in use much earlier. Exactly
when pumps and other draining machines were introduced into the tin
mines is not clear, but probably they were little used during our
medieval period, when few of the mines were of any great depth.[211]

The primitive miner, when he had got his ore with the aid of his simple
tools, a wooden shovel and a pick, also in earliest times of wood,
but later of iron, constructed a rough hearth of stones on which he
kindled a fire. When it was burning strongly he cast in his ore and
afterwards collected the molten tin from the ashes. The next stage was
to construct a regular furnace, exactly similar in type to the boles
or furnaces used for lead-melting (see above, p. 51). These furnaces
were enclosed in a building, the 'blowing-house,' in early times a
rough thatched shanty, which was burnt from time to time to obtain
the metallic dust which had lodged in the thatch, but afterwards more
substantial. The cost of a 'melting howse' (80 feet by 20 feet) built
at Larian in Cornwall by Burcord Crangs, a German, in the time of Queen
Mary, was about £300, composed as follows:[212]—

  For the ryddyng, clensing and leveling of
  the ground for setting of the foundacon
  therof                                        £23  6 8

  For making foundacon of the walls and
  the poynyons of the meltyng howse             120  0 0

  For making of the audit[213] to build the
  fornas and meltyng chymney upon                30  0 0

  For tymbering and covering the howse
  with esclattes                                 50  0 0

  For dores, windows, locks, and barres           6  0 0

  The whele, exultree and the stampers           10  0 0

  For 4 paire of grete bellowes wt their
  geames and other necessaryes                   20  0 0

  For makyng of the Colehouse                    15  0 0

  For makyng of the Rostingehowse[214]           20  0 0

  For makyng of the lete and dyke comyng
  to the meltynghowse                            66  0 0

  For the hatt and the crane                     20  0 0

The lumps of ore were first broken up with hammers or in a mill;
the powdered ore was then washed to free it as far as possible from
earthy impurities. Sometimes this was done with a 'vanne,' or shovel,
the heavy ore remaining at the point of the shovel and the lighter
impurities being washed away. An elaborate process was also used, in
which the water containing the powdered ore was allowed to run over
pieces of turf, the metallic portion sinking and becoming entangled
in the fibres. The usual method, however, was by means of troughs
or 'buddles.' This washing was not only a necessary preliminary to
the smelting, but had an economic importance, as it was at the wash
that the ore was divided when a claim was worked by partners, and the
tribute or share due to the lord of the soil was apportioned; it was
also, towards the end of the medieval period, the only place where the
ore might be bought by dealers.[215] To prevent fraud it was therefore
enacted that due notice should be given of washes, and no secret
buddles should be used.

When we first get any details of tin-working, in 1198, it was usual
for the tin to be smelted twice, the first being a rough process
performed near the tinfield, but the second, or refining, being only
permitted at special places and in the presence of the officers of the
stannaries. The tin from the first smelting had to be stamped by the
royal officers within two weeks of smelting, a toll being paid to the
king at the same time of 2s. 6d. per thousand-weight in Devon, and of
5s. in Cornwall. Moreover, by the regulations of 1198, within thirteen
weeks the tin had to be resmelted and again stamped, this time paying
a tax of one mark.[216] The double smelting possibly ceased before the
end of the thirteenth century. In any case the fiscal arrangement was
altered, and in 1302, not long after the stannaries had reverted to
the Crown, after being in the hands of the Earls of Cornwall from 1231
to 1300, we find the stampage dues consolidated into a single coinage
duty. Under this system of coinage all the tin smelted had to be sent
to certain specified towns, those for Cornwall being Bodmin, Liskeard,
Lostwithiel, Helston, and Truro; and for Devon, Chagford, Tavistock,
Plympton, and Ashburton. Here the tin remained until the two yearly
visits of the coinage officials, at Michaelmas and Midsummer, when
each block, weighing roughly 200 to 300 lbs., was assayed, weighed,
and taxed: it was then stamped and might be sold. To prevent fraud
an elaborate system of marking was gradually introduced during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the use of private marks by
the owners of the blowing-houses was probably of much earlier origin.
The use of these marks was designed not only to protect the merchant,
but also to act as a check on smuggling, of which an immense amount
undoubtedly went on.[217]

One result of the coinage system, by which tin might not be sold until
stamped, and could only be stamped twice a year, was that the smaller
tin-workers inevitably fell into the hands of the capitalists. The
small independent tinner, with no reserve of capital to draw upon,
had almost always to pledge his tin in advance to the adventurers
and tin-dealers, and as a result he was often worse off with his
theoretical independence than he would have been as a recognised
wage-labourer. The wage work system must have been introduced into the
stannaries at quite an early period. Even in 1237 there are references
to servants who worked the mines for the tinners.[218] In 1342 certain
of the wealthier Cornish tinners endeavoured to force their poorer
brethren to work for them at a penny a day, when they had been working
tin worth 20d. or more daily, and it is said that Abraham the tinner in
1357 was actually employing three hundred persons on his works. Side
by side with these hired workmen were the independent tinners, working
either separately or, more usually in partnerships; but from the small
amounts which many of these tinners presented for coinage, Mr. Lewis
has concluded that they may have been only partly dependent upon their
mining.[219] There is, however, the complication that the small amounts
presented may in part have been due to their having sold their ore to
the larger dealers, but it is clear that some of the tinners did also
carry on farming.

While the economic position of the smaller tinners must often have
been little, if at all, superior to that of ordinary labourers, their
political position was remarkable. They constituted a state within
a state; the free miner 'paid taxes not as an Englishman, but as a
miner. His law was not the law of the realm, but that of his mine. He
obeyed the king only when his orders were communicated through the
warden of the mines, and even then so long only as he respected the
mining law. His courts were the mine courts, his parliament the mine
parliament.'[220] The tinner was a free man and could not be subjected
to the system of villeinage. He had the right of prospecting anywhere
within the two counties, except in churchyards, highways, and gardens,
and might 'bound' or stake out a claim by the simple process of cutting
shallow holes and making piles of turf at the four corners of his
claim, and such claim would be his absolute property provided that he
worked it (the exact amount of work necessary to retain a claim varied
in different places and at different periods). For his claim he paid
to the lord of the land, whether it were the king or a private lord,
a certain tribute of ore, usually the tenth or the fifteenth portion.
He had, moreover, the right to divert streams, either to obtain water
for washing his ore, or to enable him to dig in the bed of the stream,
and the important privilege of compelling landowners to sell him fuel
for his furnace. Further, he had his own courts, and was under the
sole jurisdiction of the warden-officers of the stannaries. Each
stannary, of which there were five in Cornwall and four in Devon,
had its own court, presided over by a steward, and no tinner might
plead or be impleaded outside his court, from which the appeal lay
to the warden, or in practice to the vice-warden. How and when these
privileges were obtained must remain a matter for speculation, but
they can be traced when William de Wrotham was appointed warden in
1198, and were definitely confirmed to the tinners by King John in
1201. By development, apparently, from the two yearly great courts
of the stannaries, arose the 'stannary parliaments.' The parliament
for Cornwall consisted of twenty-four members, six being nominated
by the mayor and council of each of the four towns of Lostwithiel,
Launceston, Truro, and Helston; that of Devon contained ninety-six
members, twenty-four from each of the stannaries. Those parliaments
were summoned, through the lord warden, by the Duke of Cornwall,
in whom the supreme control of the stannaries was vested from 1338
onwards, and had power not only to legislate for the stannaries, but
to veto any national legislation which infringed their privileges.
When the parliaments originated is not known, but they were certainly
established before the beginning of the sixteenth century, prior to
which date all records of their proceedings are lost.

With all these privileges, to which may be added exemption from
ordinary taxation and military service, though the tinners were
liable to be taxed separately and enrolled for service under their
own officers, it was natural that the exact definition of a tinner
should have given rise to much dispute. On the one hand, it was
argued that these exemptions and privileges applied only to working
tinners actually employed in getting ore; on the other, the tin
dealers, blowers, and owners of blowing-houses claimed to be included.
Eventually the larger definition was accepted, and, indeed, it was
almost entirely from the capitalist section of the industry that the
parliaments were elected, from the sixteenth century, if not earlier.

It is rather remarkable that when the stannaries first come into
evidence, in the reign of Henry II., the chief centre of production
appears to have been Devon rather than Cornwall.[221] So far as can be
estimated the output during this reign rose gradually from about 70
tons in 1156 to about 350 in 1171. Richard I., with his constant need
of money, reorganised the stannaries in 1198, and at the beginning of
John's reign the output was between 400 and 450 tons. The issue of
the charter to the stannaries in 1201 does not seem to have had any
immediate effect on the industry, but about ten years later there was
increased activity, the output rising in 1214 to 600 tons.[222] During
the early years of Henry III. the tin revenues were farmed out, and
no details are available either for these years, or from the period
1225-1300, during which time the stannaries were in the hands of the
Earls of Cornwall. Two things only are clear, that the total output
had fallen off, and that Cornwall had now far outstripped Devon. The
grant of a charter confirming the privileges of the stannaries in 1305
seems to have marked the beginning of a more prosperous era, and by
1337 the output had reached 700 tons. The Black Death, however, in 1350
put an end to this prosperity, and with the exception of a boom during
the reign of Henry IV. tinning did not recover until just at the end
of our medieval period. Even at its worst, however, the industry was a
source of considerable revenue, the coinage duties[223] never falling
below £1000, and amounting in 1337 and 1400 to over £3000, in addition
to which there were other smaller payments and perquisites.[224] The
royal privileges of pre-emption was also of value to needy kings who
frequently availed themselves of it to grant this pre-emption, or
virtual monopoly, to wealthy foreign merchants and other money-lenders
in return for substantial loans.

Before leaving the subject of the tin mines of Cornwall and Devon, it
is perhaps worth while noting that there is virtually no documentary
evidence of the working of the copper deposits of Cornwall prior to the
late sixteenth century, and it would seem that most of the copper used
in medieval England must have been imported.

CHAPTER V

QUARRYING—STONE, MARBLE, ALABASTER, CHALK

Stone-quarrying is an industry to which the references in medieval
records are more numerous than enlightening. It would be easy to fill
pages with a list of casual references to the working of quarries
in all parts of England, and after struggling through the list the
reader would know that stone was dug in quite a lot of places at
different times, which he might have assumed without the documentary
evidence. It is natural that when a castle, an abbey, a church, or
other stone building is to be erected the stone, whose cost lies mainly
in transport, should be obtained from the nearest possible source.
Founders of monasteries frequently made grants either of existing
quarries or of the right to dig stone for the monastic buildings, and
the discovery of a bed of suitable stone close to the site selected
for the Conqueror's votive abbey of Battle was so opportune as to be
deemed a miracle.[225] When a monastery was founded in a district where
stone could not be found, it was almost essential that its supplies
should be drawn if possible from some place from which the stone could
be carried by water, and it was no doubt the position of Barnack
between the Welland and the Nene that made its quarries so important
to the monks of the Fenland.[226] The abbeys of Peterborough, Ramsey,
Crowland, Bury St. Edmund and Sawtry all held quarries in Barnack and
quarrelled amongst themselves over their respective rights. The monks
of Sawtry, for instance, had made a canal for carrying stone to their
abbey by way of Wittlesea Mere by permission of the abbey of Ramsey, a
permission which they seem to have abused, as in 1192 orders were given
to block all their lodes except the main one leading to Sawtry, and
they had to promise to put up no buildings except one rest house for
the men on their stone barges.[227]

For York Minster[228] stone was brought from the quarries of
Thevesdale, Huddleston, and Tadcaster down the Wharfe, and from
Stapleton down the Aire into the Ouse, and so up to St. Leonard's
wharf, whence it was carried on sleds to the mason's yard. Westminster
and London were mainly supplied from Surrey, from the Reigate and
Chaldon quarries, and Kent, from the Maidstone district. The tough
'Kentish rag,' which was used by the Romans for the walls of London,
was much in demand for the rougher masonry,[229] and in a contract
for building a wharf by the Tower in 1389, it was stipulated that the
core of the walls should be of 'raggs,' and the facing of 'assheler
de Kent.'[230] The Reigate stone, on the other hand, was of superior
quality and more suited for fine work, and we find it constantly used
for images, carved niches, and window tracery.[231]

The most accessible stone not always being the most suitable for the
varying requirements of architecture, it was necessary to find other
stone possessing the desired qualities, and certain quarries at an
early date acquired renown. Setting aside the famous Norman quarries
of Caen, whose stone appears in greater or less quantities in hundreds
of buildings and of records, there are a number of English quarries
of more than local repute in medieval times. Such were the quarries
of Beer in Devonshire, from whose labyrinthine galleries stone was
carried to Rochester in 1367,[232] to St. Stephen's Westminster in
1362,[233] and elsewhere. The fine limestone, later known as Bath
Stone, was quarried to a large extent at Haslebury in Box in Wiltshire,
from which place it was sent in 1221 to the royal palace at Winchester
for the columns of the hall and for chimney hoods,[234] Richard Sired
receiving 23s. 4d. for cutting 105 blocks of stone in the quarry of
Hesalburi.[235] For these same works at Winchester much stone was
brought from the Hampshire quarry of Selebourne, and from the better
known quarries of the Isle of Wight, while a stone-cutter was sent to
procure material from the quarry of Corfe. This latter was no doubt
the same as the 'hard stone of Corfe,' bought for Westminster in
1278.[236] With Corfe and Purbeck is associated Portland stone, which
attained its greatest fame in the hands of Wren after the Fire of
London, but was already appreciated in the fourteenth century, when
it was used in Exeter Cathedral and at Westminster.[237] Further east
Sussex possessed a number of quarries of local importance,[238] and the
quarry of green sandstone at Eastbourne, from which the great Roman
walls of Pevensey and the medieval castle within them were alike built,
probably provided the '28 stones of Burne, worked for windows of the
vault under the chapel' at Shene in 1441.[239] Another Sussex quarry,
that of Fairlight, near Hastings, supplied large quantities of stone
for Rochester Castle in 1366 and 1367.[240] The list of stone brought
in the latter year at Rochester is of interest as showing the various
sources from which it was derived.[241] There were bought 55 tons of
Beer freestone at prices varying from 9s. to 10s. the ton,[242] 62 tons
of Caen stone at 9s., 45 tons of Stapleton freestone[243] at 8s., 44
tons of Reigate stone at 6s., 195 tons of freestone from Fairlight at
3s. 4d., 1850 tons of rag from Maidstone at 40s. the hundred tons, and
a large quantity[244] of worked stone from Boughton Mounchelsea.

The Kentish quarries seem to have been especially favoured for the
manufacture of the stone balls flung by the royal artillery, in early
days by mangonels, balistae, and other forms of catapults, and in later
days by guns. Thus in 1342 the sheriff of Kent accounted for £13, 10s.
spent on 300 stones dug in the quarry of Folkestone and drawn out of
the sea in various places, and afterwards cut and hewn into round
balls for the king's machines; one hundred weighing 600 lbs. each, and
the same number 500 lbs. and 400 lbs. respectively; and a further £7,
10s. for another 300 stone balls of various weights.[245] It is true
that some years earlier, in 1333, similar balls had been obtained in
Yorkshire, the sheriff buying 19 damlades[246] and 3 tons of stone
in the quarry of Tadcaster, and setting 37 masons to work, the result
being 606 stone balls weighing 9 damlades,[247] but casual references
point to Kent as the great centre of manufacture. In 1418 as many as
7000 such balls were ordered to be made at Maidstone and elsewhere, and
the Maidstone quarries were still turning out stone shot for bombards
during the early years of Henry VIII.[248]

So far we have been dealing with what may be called block stone, but
there were also in many parts of the country stones that from the
ease with which they could be split into thin slabs were suitable for
roofing purposes. How early, and to what extent the true slates of
Cornwall and Devon were worked it is difficult to say, but in 1296,
when certain buildings were put up for the miners at Martinestowe
23,000 'sclattes' were quarried at Birlond, and another 10,000 at
'Hassal.'[249] For the roofing of buildings at Restormel in Cornwall
in 1343 slates were employed, 19,500 being bought 'between Golant and
Fowey,' at 11d. the thousand, and 85,500 dug in the quarry of Bodmatgan
at a cost of 6d. the thousand.[250] So also in 1385, at Lostwithiel,
it is probable that the 'tiles,' of which 25,400 were bought 'in the
quarry' at 3s. 4d. the thousand were true slates.[251] But besides the
real slates, which in their modern uniformity of perfection render so
many towns hideous, there were many quarries of stone slates, of which
the most famous were at Collyweston in Northants.[252] The Collyweston
stone after being exposed to the influence of frost could easily be
split into thin slabs,[253] and seem to have been used for roofing
purposes as early as the times of the Romans. During the medieval
period there are numerous references to these Collyweston slates, and
about the end of the fourteenth century they seem to have fetched from
6s. to 8s. the thousand.[254] Other similar quarries of more than local
fame were situated round Horsham in Sussex,[255] and Horsham slates
continued in demand from early days until the diminished solidity
of house construction made a less weighty, and incidentally less
picturesque, material requisite for roofing.

The work of quarrying stone counted as unskilled labour, and the rate
of pay of quarriers is almost always that of the ordinary labourer. At
Martinstow in 1296, men 'breaking stone in the quarry' received 1½d. to
2d. a day, and women, always the cheapest form of labour, 1d. a day
for carrying the stones from the quarry.[256] The Windsor accounts for
1368 show quarriers at Bisham (Bustesham) receiving 3½d. a day, and
one, no doubt the foreman, 4d., while 65,000 blocks of stone were cut
at 'Colingle' at 10s. the thousand, and 3500 at Stoneden at 20s.[257]
Those employed upon shaping the rough blocks were naturally paid at
a higher rate, and in 1333, while the quarriers at Tadcaster were
paid 1s. 4d. a week, the masons employed there in making stone balls
earned 2s. 6d., and their foremen 3s. a week.[258] Often, however,
the payment was by piece work, and in the case of the stone wrought
at Boughton Monchelsea in 1366 for Rochester Castle, we have a list
of the rates of payment: 'rough ashlar' worked at 10s. the hundred,
'parpainassheler'—for mullions—cut to pattern 18s. the hundred, newel
pieces 12d. each, jambs 3d. the foot, 'scu' or bevelled stones 2d. the
foot, voussoirs (_vausur_) 5d. the foot, and so on.[259] The tools used
were of a simple nature; the inventory of tools at Stapleton quarry
in 1400[260] shows a number of iron wedges, iron rods, 'gavelokes' or
crowbars, iron hammers, 'pulyng axes,'[261] 'brocheaxes' and shovels.

So far we have been dealing with stone as a building material, but
there were two varieties of stone worked in England in medieval times
whose value was artistic rather than utilitarian. These were marble
and alabaster. PURBECK MARBLE,[262] a dark shell conglomerate capable
of receiving a very high polish, came into fashion towards the end
of the twelfth century, and continued in great demand for some two
hundred years. Not only was it used in 1205 at Chichester Cathedral,
but it would seem that some thirty years earlier it was sent to Dublin
and to Durham. All the evidence goes to show that the marble was not
only quarried at Purbeck, but worked into columns and carved upon
the spot, and it is probable that most, if not all, of the scores of
marble effigies which still remain in churches, such as the figures of
knights in the Temple Church and the tomb of King John at Worcester,
were carved by members of the Purbeck school[263] and usually at the
quarries, though in some cases it would seem that the carver was called
upon to do his work at the place where it was to be used, and under
the eye of his patron. But however much we may admire the execution
of these Purbeck effigies, we must not hastily assume that they bear
any particular resemblance to the persons whom they commemorate;
for although the Purbeck carvers were no doubt capable of executing
portrait sculpture, a large proportion of their work was undoubtedly
conventional. Thus in 1253 we find Henry III. ordering the sheriff of
Dorset to cause 'an image of a queen' to be cut in marble and carried
to the nunnery of Tarrant Keynston, there to be placed over the tomb of
his sister, the late Queen of Scots.[264]

Corfe was the great centre of the Purbeck marble industry. William of
Corfe who executed the tomb of 'Henry the King's son,' at Westminster
in 1273,[265] was probably William le Blund, brother of Robert le
Blund, also called Robert of Corfe, who supplied marble for the Eleanor
crosses at Waltham, Northampton, and Lincoln; and one Adam of Corfe
settled in London early in the fourteenth century, and died there
in 1331. This Adam 'the marbler' seems to have carried out several
large contracts, including the paving of St. Paul's, and in 1324
supplied great quantities of marble for the columns of St. Stephen's,
Westminster, at 6d. the foot.[266] The same price was paid in 1333 for
similar columns bought from Richard Canon,[267] one of a family which
for a century and a half played a prominent part as carvers and marble
merchants, particularly in connection with Exeter Cathedral.

By the sixteenth century, and probably for some time earlier, the
'Marblers and Stone Cutters of Purbeck' had formed themselves into
a company. By their rules the industry was restricted to freemen
of the company, and regulations were laid down as to the number of
apprentices that might be employed. These apprentices, in turn, could
become freemen at the end of seven years upon payment to the court
held at Corfe Castle on Shrove Tuesday of 6s. 8d. and the render of
a penny loaf and two pots of beer. The wives of freemen were also
allowed to join the company on payment of 1s., and in that case might
carry on the trade, with the assistance of an apprentice, after their
husband's death. At the time, however, that this company was formed,
it is probable that the greater part of their business was concerned
with building stone, as the marble had gone out of fashion and been
largely superseded by alabaster in the fifteenth century for sepulchral
monuments.

ALABASTER appears to have been dug in the neighbourhood of Tutbury
in very early times, some of the Norman mouldings of the west door of
Tutbury church being carved in this material.[268] It is in the same
neighbourhood, at Hanbury, that the earliest known sepulchral image
in alabaster is to be found: this dates from the early years of the
fourteenth century, but it was not until the middle of that century
that the vogue of alabaster began. From 1360 onwards there exists a
magnificent series of alabaster monuments which bear striking testimony
to the skill of the medieval English carvers,[269] and it is clear
from records and the evidence of such fragments as have survived the
triple iconoclasm of Reformers, Puritans, and Churchwardens that these
monuments found worthy companions in the statues and carved reredoses
scattered throughout the churches of England.[270] One of the finest
of these reredoses must have been the 'table of alabaster' bought in
1367 for the high altar of St. George's, Windsor. For this the enormous
sum of £200 (more than £3000 of modern money) was paid to Peter Mason
of Nottingham, while some idea of its size may be gathered from the
fact that it took ten carts, each with eight horses, to bring it from
Nottingham to Windsor, the journey occupying seventeen days.[271]

All the evidence points to Nottingham having been the great centre of
the industry, the material being brought from the Derbyshire quarries
of Chellaston. The stone and the workmanship alike found favour
outside this country, and in 1414, when the abbot of Fécamp required
alabaster he sent his mason, Alexander de Berneval, to England to
procure it; and it was from Thomas Prentis of Chellaston that the
stone was bought.[272] The alabaster tomb of John, Duke of Bretagne,
which was erected in Nantes Cathedral in 1408, was made in England by
Thomas Colyn, Thomas Holewell, and Thomas Poppehowe,[273] but it is not
certain that they belonged to Nottingham. Various customs accounts[274]
show that carved alabaster figures were often exported to the
Continent, and Mr. Hope has shown that a number of carvings still to
be seen in the churches of France, and even of Iceland,[275] have the
green background, with circular groups of red and white spots, peculiar
to the Nottingham school.[276]

Thomas Prentis, who is mentioned above, is found in 1419 in company
with Robert Sutton[277] covenanting to carve, paint, and gild the
elaborate and beautiful tomb of Ralph Green and his wife, which may
still be seen in Lowick Church, Northants, for a sum of £40. An
examination of this tomb makes it almost certain that the glorious
monuments of the Earl and Countess of Arundel at Arundel, Henry IV.
and Queen Joan at Canterbury, and the Earl of Westmoreland and his
two wives at Staindrop, were all from the same workshop. During the
last twenty years of the fifteenth and the first thirty years of the
sixteenth century, we have the names of a number of 'alablastermen'
and 'image-makers' in Nottingham,[278] Nicholas Hill in particular
being prominent as a manufacturer of the popular St. John the
Baptist heads,[279] and during the same period we find a number of
'alblasterers' at York.[280] At Burton-on-Trent, also, where Leland in
the sixteenth century mentions 'many marbellers working in alabaster,'
the trade was evidently established in 1481, when Robert Bocher and
Gilbert Twist were working for a number of religious houses; and it
still flourished there in 1581 and 1585, when Richard and Gabriel
Royley undertook contracts for elaborate tombs of alabaster,[281] but
for all practical purposes the English school of alabaster carvers
ceased to exist when the Reformation put an end to the demand for
images and carven tables.

The alabaster, or gypsum, when not suitable for carving, was still
valuable for conversion into plaster by burning, the finer varieties
yielding the so-called Plaster of Paris and the coarser the ordinary
builders' plaster. References to the actual burning of plaster seem
practically non-existent, but it is noteworthy that one of the places
from which Plaster of Paris was obtained for the works at York Minster
was Buttercrambe,[282] where there is a large deposit of gypsum
which probably furnished the York alabasterers with their material.
In the same way CHALK, though to some extent used for masonry, was
most in demand for conversion into lime. When building operations of
any importance were undertaken, it was usual to build a limekiln on
the spot for the burning of the lime required for mortar. In earlier
times the kiln seems to have taken the form of a pit, 'lymeputt' or, in
Latin, _puteus_, being the term usually employed, but in 1400 we find a
regular kiln (_torale_) built, 3300 bricks and 33 loads of clay being
purchased for the purpose.[283] Where lime was burnt commercially, that
is to say for sale and not merely for use on the spot, the kilns would
naturally be larger and more permanent, and a sixteenth-century account
of the erection of eight such kilns[284] at a place unnamed—probably
Calais—shows that each kiln was 20 feet high, with walls 10 feet thick,
and an average internal breadth of 10 feet, and cost over £450.

When wood was plentiful it was naturally employed for burning the lime,
and a presentment made in 1255 with regard to the forest of Wellington
mentions that the king's two limekilns (_rees calcis_) had devoured
500 oaks between them.[285] But it was soon found that pit coal was
the best fuel for the purpose, and it was constantly used from the end
of the thirteenth century onwards, as much as 1166 quarters of sea
coal being bought in 1278 for the kilns (_chauffornia_) in connection
with the work at the Tower.[286] For the most part, chalk and lime
required for work at London or Westminster was brought from Greenwich.
Kent has indeed always been one of the great centres of the trade, both
home and foreign, and in 1527,[287] to take but one instance, we find
six ships from Dutch ports taking out of Sandwich port chalk to the
value of £20.[288] In the chalk hills round Chislehurst labyrinthine
galleries of great extent bear witness to the flourishing state of
chalk-quarrying in this district in former times;[289] smaller quarries
of a similar type exist in the 'caverns' at Guildford. Kent, Surrey,
and Sussex[290] were indeed busily employed in quarrying chalk during
the medieval period, and for long afterwards, down to the present day.

CHAPTER VI

METAL WORKING

The English craftsmen were renowned for their metal work from the days
of St. Dunstan downwards. St. Dunstan was the patron of the goldsmiths,
his image being one of the chief ornaments of their gild hall in
London, and a ring attributed to his workmanship was in the possession
of Edward I. in 1280,[291] while his tools, including the identical
tongs with which he pulled the devil by the nose, may still be seen
at Mayfield. Coming to later times and the less questionable evidence
of records, we may probably see in Otto the Goldsmith, whose name
occurs in the Domesday Survey of 1086, the progenitor of the family
of Fitz-Otho, king's goldsmiths and masters of the Mint from 1100 to
1300.[292] The names of many early goldsmiths[293] have survived, and
the beautiful candlestick given to St. Peter's Abbey at Gloucester in
1110, and now in the South Kensington Museum, is evidence of their
mastery of the art. The great religious houses were foremost patrons
of the craft, many of them, as the Abbey of St. Albans, numbering
amongst their inmates artists of great repute. The famous college of
Beverley included a goldsmith in its household,[294] but in 1292, when
it was determined to erect a new shrine for the relics of St. John of
Beverley, the chapter did not entrust the work to their own craftsman,
but sent up to London to the establishment of William Faringdon, the
greatest goldsmith of that time. The contract between his servant,
Roger of Faringdon, and the Chapter of Beverley is still extant.[295]
By it the chapter were to provide the necessary silver and gold; Roger
was to refine it, if needful, and to supply his own coals, quicksilver,
and other materials. The shrine was to be 5 ft. 6 in. long, 1 ft. 6 in.
broad, and of proportionate height: the design was to be architectural
in style, and the statuettes, the number and size of which were to be
at the discretion of the chapter, were to be of cunning and beautiful
work, the chapter reserving the right to reject any figure or ornament
and cause it to be remade. For his work Roger was to receive the weight
in silver of the shrine when completed, before gilding. No very general
rule can be laid down as to the proportion between the intrinsic value
or weight of metal and the cost of workmanship, but roughly in the case
of simple articles of plate the cost of manufacture may be set at
approximately half the weight. Thus in the case of the plate presented
by the city to the Black Prince on his return from Gascony in 1371[296]
we find six chargers, weight £14, 18s. 9d., amounting with the making
to £21, 7s. 2d.; twelve 'hanappes,' or handled cups, weight £8, 12s.,
amounting to £12, 7s. 7d.; and thirty saltcellars, weighing £15, 6s.
2d., amounting to £21, 17s. 8d. The charge for making silver basins
and lavers in the same list amounts to about two-thirds of the weight.
The rate appears to have remained fairly constant, as in 1416 William
Randolf made four dozen chargers and eight dozen dishes of silver for
King Henry V. at 30s. the pound.[297]

The demand for silver plate during the later medieval period must
have been brisk, for every house of any pretension had its service of
plate standing on the cupboard or dresser. Nothing more astonished
the Venetian travellers in England in 1500 than this extraordinary
profusion and display; they noted that,[298] 'In one single street,
named the Strand, are 52 goldsmiths' shops so rich and full of silver
vessels, great and small, that in all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice,
and Florence put together I do not think there would be found so many
of the magnificence that are to be seen in London. And these vessels
are all either saltcellars or drinking-cups or basins to hold water
for the hands, for they eat off that fine tin which is little inferior
to silver.' Although the home of the goldsmiths is here stated to be
the Strand, their chief centre was in Lombard Street and in Cheapside,
where, just about the time that this Venetian account was written,
Thomas Wood built Goldsmiths' Row with its ten fair houses and fourteen
shops and its four-storied front adorned with allusive wild men of the
wood riding on monstrous beasts.[299] Even as late as 1637 efforts were
made to compel the goldsmiths to remain in Cheapside for the greater
adornment of that thoroughfare.[300]

The Venetian reference to the 'fine tin' used for plates and dishes
serves to remind us that gold and silversmiths had no monopoly of
metal-working. Pewterers, founders, and such specialised trades as
bladesmiths and spurriers played an important part in the realm of
industry, and if the materials upon which they worked were less
valuable in themselves, the finished products were not to be despised
even from a purely artistic point of view. The figures of Queen Eleanor
of Castile and Henry III., both cast by William Torel, and those of
Edward III. and Queen Philippa, by Hawkin of Liége—to name but a few
obvious examples—are magnificent examples of the founder's work.
Mention may also be made of the tomb of Richard II. and his queen, at
which Nicholas Croker and Godfrey Prest, coppersmiths, worked for four