The Coal Industry, 1550–1947

Coalmining occupies a unique place in the history of the British economy. For it was the exploitation and utilisation of coal which reduced the dependency upon use of wood and created the possibilities of an industrial sector to complement an agricultural sector, but supplies of wood were limited and were gradually being exhausted by the sixteenth century. In contrast stocks of coal seemed boundless. The problem was how to use the coal. In the Elizabethan period there was a minor industrial revolution which enabled glass and non-ferrous metals to be smelted with coal. Mining took place everywhere but because of their access to ports the coalfields of Northumberland, Durham and the Firth of Forth underwent greater development than the inland fields and they enjoyed a thriving coastal trade with London. In the sixteenth century Northumberland and Durham accounted for 33 per cent of total production and Scotland contributed a further 20 per cent.1 Coal was not the first industry to create an industrial wage-earning class; that honour belongs to the medieval building industry with its highly mobile labour force and its mass-produced alabaster saints.2 But coal produced a wage-earning class long before those of nineteenth-century textiles and engineering and it was a class located in isolated communities and working in unusual conditions.