CONTENTS

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.