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February 2005

Parish History Episode 46

The Origins of the Coal Trade

There have been several references, in recent articles in this series, to the growing importance, in the Houghton area, during late mediaeval times, of mining, though no pit would be sunk in Houghton town until the Nineteenth Century. In the November “Signpost”, for instance, there was reference to the tendency, in the period after the Black Death, for male serfs to desert their manors, and to seek employment in the coal mines that were beginning to be sunk on Tyneside and elsewhere.

In many parts of this region, coal seams could once be seen even on the surface of the ground. This was not the case at Houghton, a town founded on limestone rocks, where the coal seams lay hundreds of feet deep, and exploitation could only begin with the development of more advanced mining equipment. At Penshaw and the Raintons, however, coal lay almost at the surface, and it required little effort to gather. But probably the first men to pick it up had no intention of using it for fuel.

Such coal, lying around for the taking, would seem an attractive type of rock, and the eyes of Stone-Age men may well have been drawn to it. While coal is too soft to be used for making tools, it is easily carved, and, like jet, can be made into ornaments. Some rocks of coal might be brought back to camp for carving, and then discarded. If someone else then tried to use such rocks as hearth-stones, their peculiarly combustible property would soon be discovered.

So long, however, as wood was readily available, coal would be little used for domestic fires; but in later ages first the potter and then the smith would discover that mineral coal gave out as good a quality of constant heat as charcoal, and, in regions such as North-East England, it could be obtained with much less trouble, and so regular digging of coal from surface out-crops would begin. It would soon be noticed that the coal which lay a little bit below the surface was not so water-logged, nor was it adulterated with top-soil, and was of better quality, so the potter and the smith began to dig a bit deeper for their fuel.

The first men in these parts to use coal for domestic heating were probably Roman soldiers and Anglian monks. Both tended to live in large stone buildings, difficult to keep warm and dry during long damp winters, and so the warmth from coal fires dried out their forts and abbeys. Coal was slower to catch on for wooden buildings, but by about 1200 it was probable that some merchants and peasants were aping their “betters”, who dwelt in keeps or castles, abbeys or convents, and some people of all ranks would be making use of coal. People from other regions began to notice, and commented on the smell of coal-smoke which hung over towns on, or close to, the coalfields. Edinburgh became known as “Auld Reekie”, not for the quantity but for the unpleasant quality of the smoke which pervaded its streets.

There were elsewhere in 1200 large cities, like London and Paris and the textile towns of Flanders, whose inhabitants knew nothing of coal. By then, however, firewood was becoming scarce and expensive, and the poorer citizens were having to buy peat instead of wood. If a few people did try coal, they found its smell obnoxious, and went back to using wood or peat according to their means.

Soon peat-swamps in the neighbourhood of these towns began also to be exhausted, and large-scale digging of peat began further away. The Norfolk Broads are not the natural waterways they appear to be, but are, at least in part, the remains of mediaeval peat-diggings which once supplied London with domestic fuel.

Before coal could become a common fuel, two innovations were necessary: these were the chimney and the glass window. Most people, rich or poor, down to 1200 and beyond, lived in houses which contained one main room, “the hall” (though the houses of the rich would have small chambers opening off the great hall), lit by a central fire, for cooking as well as for warmth, with the smoke escaping through a hole in the roof (and there would be a device which could narrow this smoke-hole, when it was raining outside). The hall would always be full of smoke, even in summer, and particularly when it was raining, but some mitigation of the conditions could be obtained through opening the shutters on the leeward windows. Barons in castles, especially keeps with each floor built above others, needed, if they used fires at all, to have fireplaces in the side of the room, with chimneys running up the walls of the keep, and monks in abbeys also warmed themselves by such fires, but nearly everyone else claimed to prefer the traditional central open hearth - until they began to develop bronchial troubles. But when the rising price first of firewood and then of peat forced them into buying coal, they could not bear the reek, until chimneys were inserted into the walls of their house in order to clear the fumes: and it would soon be noticed by those who were wealthy enough not to need to buy coal, that homes so fitted were normally smoke-free, and so everyone wanted a chimney.

But, as in a blast-furnace, a chimney creates a strong draught, and cold air tended to rush in through the unglazed windows, even when the shutters were kept tightly closed. So, shortly after installing his new chimney, the purchaser found it necessary to put in window glass as well.

[Was this an opportunity for Sunderland, later to be a major glass-manufacturing centre? Well, it should have been, and Sunderland is proud of the fact that there are records of glass being made at Monkwearmouth in the Seventh Century. As glass was manufactured from sand, which was readily available on local beaches, though better quality sand was sometimes imported from elsewhere; and from limestone, which was quarried a few miles inland, at Houghton for instance; and from alkali, which could be obtained from potash or sodium chloride, both quarried in the Cleveland Hills; and as its manufacture needed the heat of furnaces burning coal, which was abundant a short way inland - Sunderland should have been an ideal site. But there is no real evidence for glass manufacture in Sunderland between the Seventh and the Seventeenth Centuries.]

But, wherever it was made, glass windows were appearing in the houses of the rich, in towns like Newcastle and Edinburgh, by about 1200. There, by this time the rich lived in multi-storey houses, with brick chimneys and glazed windows. The poor lived in tenements, running up the slopes of Castle Rock in Edinburgh, or down to the Quayside in Newcastle, with fireplaces and chimneys on each floor, but probably without window glass. By 1300 such housing had become increasingly common, even in cities remote from the coalfields; and London and other towns became increasingly dependent on the North-East for winter fuel.

In London at this period, the sea-coal was either sold to the poor, or bought, for industrial uses, by potters and smiths, and increasingly by cooks, bakers and brewers. However there long remained among the wealthy a prejudice against coal-fires in the home, or even being used in food production outside it. But eventually the cheapness of coal, combined with the ever-rising price of firewood, caused even the most fastidious to convert their homes to coal-burning.

During the Middle Ages, the Tyne was by far the most important source of coal for London. Coal exports from the Wear didn’t really begin until the very end of the Fourteenth Century. The Tyne was a better river for shipping (not so many shallows), and though much of the more easily accessible coal had gone long before 1300, the lie of the seams was understood, and men knew how to work them.

Along the lower Tyne valley, the coal measures are overlain by sedentary strata, and buckled and faulted by subsequent earth movements, but can be visualised, in simplified form, as shown in the accompanying diagram, as black waves surging underneath later rocks. One crest of such a “wave” rose through the upper strata, and even broke through to the surface at some points, at Newcastle and Gateshead, and just to the West of those cities, around Elswick and Benwell, Bensham and Whickham. Another crest, not quite so high, approached the surface at North and South Shields. Between the two crests, there lay a trough, below Wallsend and Jarrow. A bit up-river from Newcastle, around Walbottle and Winlaton, there lay the “Ninety-Fathom Fault”, with the same seams being found some four hundred and fifty feet deeper, to the West of that fault-line.
Crests were obviously easier to access than troughs, and the exploitation of Tyne coal took place in five stages, the most accessible coal being dug out first. In the first phase, during the Middle Ages, the easily won coal around Newcastle and Gateshead was taken. Then, in Tudor and Stewart times, the coal industry became concentrated around the mouth of the Tyne. In the third stage, during the Eighteenth Century, the main collieries were to be found West of the Ninety-Fathom Fault, from Throckley to Wylam, and from Blaydon to Crawcrook. In the fourth stage, in the Nineteenth Century, deeper and deeper mines won coal from the “trough of the wave”, around Wallsend and Jarrow. In the fifth, and presumably final, stage, during the Twentieth Century, the main effort went more and more into winning coal from deep under the North Sea. The Great Coal Strike of 1984 brought that activity to a halt, and now the coal industry, if not the seams, is practically exhausted.

The coal industry first developed on a large scale along the river Tyne. But outcrops of coal are to be found in many areas in the North-East of England, as can be witnessed to-day by the widely scattered open-cast coal workings which scar our countryside; and many other rivers, beside the Tyne, were pressed into use for coal exports. These included the Tweed, the Coquet, the Wansbeck, the Blyth, and of course, in our neighbourhood, the Wear. But the Wear was a lot slower to develop as a coal river than the Tyne. The colliery that was to be sunk in the Nineteenth Century at Monkwearmouth (on the site now used for the Stadium of Light, owned by Sunderland’s football team) was very deep (the men who sunk the shaft went down over fifteen hundred feet before any worthwhile coal was reached), and no easily accessible coal was to be found along the Wear below Cox Green; and river navigation was very difficult above Hylton Castle. These problems condemned the coal industry in these parts to be a late developer compared to the Tyne coalfield.