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March 2005

Parish History Episode 47

Monks and Miners

Last month, we described how, by the Fourteenth Century, the Tyne had become a major coal-exporting river, with London and other cities becoming dependent on the importation of “sea-coal” for domestic heating and cooking, and for use in the furnaces required for various manufacturing processes. Wool ships still sailed from the Tyne for the looms of Flanders, but colliers were becoming a more numerous and more significant sight on the lower Tyne. As yet, however, coal had not become of major importance in the valley of the Wear.

The exploitation of the local coal-fields was complicated by the legal rights enjoyed by the Prince-Bishops, who claimed “eminent domain” over all forests, all mines, and all other gifts of God which occurred naturally within the lands over which they held title (and the adjacent seas: the skeleton of a whale, which once had the ill-fortune to become stranded on the beach near Hartlepool, is still to be seen in the crypt of the cathedral). In view of this, the Bishops of Durham claimed a tax, known as royalties, on all coal mined within the Palatinate, and this included that brought to bank from the coal-pits around Gateshead and Whickham. In order to ensure that they received their royalties, the bishops appointed officials, known as veiours, that is viewers, to oversee the production of coal on their side of the Tyne, and these viewers regularly inspected the coal-pits and noted what was going on. At a later stage the word viewer came to mean a colliery manager, a man placed in charge of a coal mine, working it on behalf of the actual owner.

The Bishop of Durham was of course bishop on both banks of the Tyne - there were no Bishops of Newcastle in those days; but he only enjoyed Palatine Power, and Eminent Domain, on the South bank, in what became known as County Durham. On the other side of the river, the King of England enjoyed the same rights as the Prince-Bishop on this side, and so he possessed, in theory at any rate, eminent domain over all forests and mines, and was equally entitled to royalties on all coal brought to bank. But the kings were far away, in London town, sitting, in wintertime, beside great hearths on which pine logs burned, while, whenever they went out of doors, they coughed and spluttered as their noses became afflicted with the sea-coal fumes emanating from the cottages of the poor. In practice it was local lords who claimed royalties on the coal, and as the king needed their support in his wars with Scotland, and perhaps felt that he would be unpopular with the common people of London if he taxed the fuel on which they were becoming dependent, he let his rights lapse, and the local lords enjoyed their royalties on all coal produced on “their” lands, until 1947, when a reforming government brought coal directly into the possession of the people (or at least the government) of England.

By the Fourteenth Century coal was being dug up in many areas well away from the Tyne. It was however not always easy to get it economically to export markets, and therefore much of it was worked on a less intensive scale. There were even some places where coal seams cropped out naturally on the surface. One such place was at Mollygill Woods, just beyond Rainton Gate. These woods lay to the West of Moor House, where there is now a scout camp, and the surface coal seems to have been obtained near there, not far from the banks of the river Wear, in areas now traversed by a railway and a motorway. But they did not, of course, exist then, and the Wear is not an easily navigable river, and it would have been difficult to get such coal to distant markets.
It was however worked to a minor extent, and some of the coal from Mollygill Woods was presumably sold in Houghton, perhaps to the Rectory. The occupants of big houses, such as rectories, manor houses and castles, were, as mentioned last month, increasingly using coal fires as a source of winter heat, and monks, at Durham, Finchale and elsewhere, were also becoming dependent on coal. Up to this time, most of this coal, used locally in the Durham area, would come from nearby farms, and it would be worked by the tenant who held the farm. He would employ a number of hinds (farm servants), who would work for him on the farm in summertime, but would be employed in digging coal in wintertime, when there would be a regular market for the fuel.

Simply scraping coal off the surface of the ground would only produce a much adulterated fuel, of very poor quality. So the hinds were soon digging downwards, to reach more profitable coal. Having dug down and lowered themselves to a seam of coal, possibly twenty or so feet below the surface, the hinds, or pitmen as we might now call them, would then enlarge the base of the shaft by attacking the seam with picks, digging out the coal, shovelling it into baskets, and sending it up to the surface, either by balancing baskets of coal on their shoulders and carrying them up a ladder, or by attaching each basket to a hook suspended from a windlass, so that a surface worker could wind it up. This latter method was a more efficient way of working, and the windlass became very widely used, and in the coal districts the word was commonly abbreviated to winch.

As the pitmen worked outwards in all directions from the central shaft, their work became progressively more dangerous, as they were overshadowed by the unwanted surface rock, which they themselves were undermining as they hacked away at the coal seam. The pit would soon assume, in cross section, the profile of a bell, and such workings came to be known as bell pits.

When a bell pit began to become too dangerous to work, it would simply be abandoned, and another shaft would be sunk close by, and another bell pit begun. The waste from the new pit would be simply tipped into the old one, and a worked-out district would come to be covered by a network of partially filled-in holes, with one or more bell pits still open and in production.

In addition to the danger of the roof of a bell pit caving in, which it was sure to do sooner or later, there was also a danger of flooding, whenever it rained. The pit could be roofed over, or a temporary tent could be erected during rain, and trenches could be dug round the shaft-head to drain water away, but nevertheless large quantities of surface water were sure to flow into the pit. As there were no really effective pumps at this time, it was not unknown for a bell pit to be abandoned for no more reason than a season’s heavy rainfall.

A more expensive (and more hazardous) but more efficient method of mining was found to be by driving a drift in from a river bank, or from some such upright surface. In this case, the entrepreneur seeking to exploit a coal seam, began by driving a horizontal, or preferably an upward-sloping, roadway sufficiently far to reach coal worth working. This would obviously be immune from flooding due to rainfall. There might however be dangerous quantities of water underground (in fact, there often was a great deal of underground water in the neighbourhood of coal seams), and if the saturated rock was breached, the mine would become, almost instantly, flooded. It was therefore good practice to drive in a second tunnel, below the working level, simply to carry away the water. These lower tunnels were called aqueducts, abbreviated in local speech to adits.

If the risk of a mine being flooded could be reduced by the use of adits, there was still the danger of a roof fall, and the roof over the main roadway of a drift mine needed to be supported by large numbers of timber props, which themselves impeded the outbye transport of coal (normally on sledges hauled by men). A new danger was also emerging in these ill-ventilated workings: that of fire or explosion, through the accumulation of dangerous gases. This had occasionally occurred in bell pits, but once it was discovered that, when neighbouring bell pits were linked together, the gas would tend to disperse, it was realised that regular circulation of air would greatly reduce the risk of an explosion.
To sink a shaft down to, or to drive a road along to, a coal seam, was obviously becoming an expensive business, and coal mining would have soon been abandoned, if sources of capital had not been forthcoming. In practice, it seems, the main sources of such capital were the monasteries, and, in collusion with the bishops, who possessed “eminent domain”, and accepted royalties, the monks of Durham, Finchale and other priories were soon investing in coal, by sinking pits, and leasing them to men of good repute, who then paid miners to win the coal. Both Durham and Finchale Priories sunk mines in the Rainton area (then within Houghton parish), and we can read in the accounts of Finchale Priory of the opening up of a drift at Cocken, on the banks of the Wear, just below the Priory, in 1348, the year before the Black Death struck. A series of drift mines continued to be worked at Cocken for six centuries, the last one closing in 1958, a decade after nationalisation.

Judging by the monastic account books, quite large sums of money were invested in the labour of sinking shafts and driving roadways, and in the purchase of equipment. The inventories of Finchale Priory list the purchase of iron-tipped picks and of steel wedges, and even that of an “engine for raising water”, probably an endless chain of buckets emptying water from a sump, and worked by horses turning an axle by means of some sort of cog-and- -rung gin. By now, coal seems to be being won from below the level of possible drainage by means of adits, and water had to be raised vertically, or the mine abandoned.

It is often stated that in this area mining was begun by monks, and tales are told of pitmen, whether in deep mines or in open-cast workings, discovering the robes or rosaries of the ancient monks who had been the first to dig the coal. But it seems most unlikely that “professed” and ordained monks ever did go underground, even in a managerial capacity, even in the earliest stage of working, when coal was produced mainly for the abbey’s own needs. It is more likely that the labour was undertaken by lay brothers, or by hired servants, or by tenants, or by serfs, while the monks did what they could do best: they sang the offices in the choir.

The stories about the robes and the rosaries need not, however, be untrue. Monastic habits speak to us of men set apart from the World, and dressing up to indicate their difference from mere laymen; however in origin monastic habits are the normal dress of a mediaeval peasant, and were adopted as a sign of humility, not of superiority to laymen. The serfs of Finchale Priory probably wore dull-coloured, loose robes and hoods when working in the fields, and, though they might wear less when working underground, they no doubt dressed in such a fashion while crawling to their stall. If they had to leave in a hurry, they might well leave their clothes behind. If the remains of such garments were discovered centuries later, in a Protestant age, they might well be mistaken for monkish robes.

Also, at a later age than this, during the Eighteenth Century, when fire and explosion had replaced water as the chief danger to pitmen, it was often the custom to employ a “fireman” in each pit. This official, dressed in damp robes and a hood, and sometimes referred to as a monk or a penitent, because of his costume, would creep as low as possible through all the galleries of the mine, when the hewers and the putters were above ground and off duty, with a flaming torch attached to the end of a long pole, and he would thrust this torch into every nook and cranny of the rock in order to ignite any fire-damp that might be present, so as to engender a small, controlled explosion, endangering no-one but himself, and so not allowing any dangerous gases to accumulate until the day shift returned below.

As for rosaries and holy medallions, a layman can carry such aids to piety as well as any monk.