TIN MINING
The granite eruptions in Devon and Cornwall--_Elvans_--
_Lodes_--Tin passing into copper--Stream-tin--Story of S.
Piran and S. Chigwidden--Dartmoor stream-tin--Joseph of
Arimathea--The Cassiterides--Jutes--Danish incursions--Tin
in King John’s time--Richard, Earl of Cornwall--Elizabeth
introduces German engineers--Stannary towns--Carew on
mining--Blowing-houses--Miners’ terms--Stannary Courts--Dr.
Borlase on tin mining--Present state.
I remember being at a ball many years ago at that epoch in the
development of woman when her “body” was hooked along her dorsal ridge.
Now I learn from competent authorities that it is held together in
other fashion.
There was at the ball a very lusty stout lady in slate-grey satin.
By nature and age, assisted by victuals, she was unadapted to take
violent exercise. Nevertheless dance she would. Dance she did, till
there ensued an explosion. Hooks, eyes, buttons, yielded, and there
ensued an eruption of subjacent material. In places the fastenings held
so that the tumescent under-garments foamed out at intervals in large
bulging masses.
This is precisely what took place with Mother Earth in one of her
gambols. Her slate panoply gave way, parted from N.E. to S.W., and out
burst the granite, which had been kept under and was not intended for
show.
Her hooks and eyes gave way first of all in South Devon, and out
swelled the great mass of Dartmoor. They held for a little space, and
then out broke another mass that constitutes the Bodmin moors. It
heaved to the surface again north of S. Austell, then was held back as
far as Redruth and Camborne. A few more hooks remained firm, and then
the garment gave way for the Land’s End district, and, finally, out of
the sea it shows again in Scilly.
Or take it in another way. Cornwall is something like a leg. Let it be
a leg vested in a grey stocking. That stocking has so many “potatoes”
in it, and each “potato” is eruptive granite.
Granite, however, likewise cracked, formed “faults,” as they are
called, in parallel lines with the great parent crack to which it owed
its appearance, and cracks also formed across these; and through the
earlier cracks up gushed later granite in a molten condition, and these
are dykes.
Moreover, the satin body not only gave way down its great line of
cleavage, but the satin itself in places yielded, revealing, not now
the under-linen which boiled out at the great faults, but some material
which, I believe, was the lining. So when the granite broke forth there
were subsidiary rifts in the slate, and through these rifts a material
was extruded, not exactly granite, but like it, called _elvan_. These
elvan dykes vary from a few feet to as many as four hundred in
breadth, and many can be traced for several miles. The younger granite
intruded into the older granite is also called elvan.
But when the secondary fissures occurred, the intrusive matter was not
only a bastard granite, but with it came also tin and copper. And these
metallic lines, which run on Dartmoor from E. to W., and in Cornwall
from E.N.E. to W.S.W., are called _lodes_.
The cross-cracks do not contain metal. They are called _cross-courses_.
In addition there are some capricious veins that do not run in the
normal direction, and these are called _counter-lodes_. Their usual
direction is N.E.
The cross-courses, although without metal, are of considerable value to
the miner, because, as he knows well, the best lodes are those which
are thus traversed.
There is, however, one description of cross-course that is called
_floocan_, and which is packed with clay, and holds back water. These
are accordingly not cut through if it can possibly be avoided.
A very curious feature in the lodes is, that after going down to a
variable depth the tin is replaced by copper.
Percy was the first to establish this, towards the close of last
century. He pointed out that many an old tin mine was in his time
worked for copper. And it came to be supposed that this would be found
to be an unchanging law: Go deep enough after tin, and you come to
copper. But this opinion was shaken when it was found that Dolcoath,
the profoundest mine in Cornwall, which had for some time been worked
for copper, became next rich in tin. What seems to have been the case
was this: when a vent offered, there was a scramble between the two
minerals which should get through first and out of the confinement
under earth’s crust, and now a little tin got ahead; then came copper
trampling on its heels, but was itself tripped up by more tin.
Now, when the granite came to the surface, it did not have everything
its own way, and hold its nose on high, and lord it over every other
rock as being the most ancient of all, though not the earliest to put
in an appearance. There was a considerable amount of water about. There
is plenty and to spare in the west of England now, but we may feel
grateful that we do not exist in such detestable weather, nor exposed
to such sousing rains, nor have to stand against such deluges, as those
which granite had to encounter. Hot, over-hot, it may have been below,
but it was cold and horribly wet above.
The rains descended; the floods came, and beat on the granite, which,
being perhaps at the time warm and soft, and being always very
absorbent, began to dissolve.
As it dissolved, the water swept away all its component parts, and
deposited the heaviest near at hand, and took the lightest far away.
Now the heaviest of all were the ore from the veins or lodes, and
the water swept this down into the valleys and left it there, but
it carried off the dissolved feldspar and deposited it where it
conveniently could and when it was tired of carrying it. The former is
stream-tin; the latter is china clay.
Now to get at stream-tin very little trouble is needed. The rubble
brought down and lodged in the valleys has to be turned over; and the
ore is distinguishable by its weight and by a pink tinge, like the
rouge ladies were wont (a hundred years ago) to put on their cheeks and
lips. There is no tunnelling, no nasty shafts and adits to be made; and
shafts and adits were beyond the capacity of primitive man, furnished
with bone and oak picks only. Besides, why take the trouble to mine
when the tin lay ready to be picked up?
The story told in Cornwall of the discovery of tin is this:--
S. Piran came over from Ireland in a coracle, and, like a prudent man,
brought with him a bottle of whisky. On landing on the north coast he
found that there was a hermit there named Chigwidden. The latter was
quite agreeable to be friends with the new-comer, who was full of Irish
tales, Irish blarney, and had, to boot, a bottle of Irish whisky. Who
would not love a stranger under the circumstances? Brothers Chigwidden
and Piran drank up the bottle.
“By dad,” said Piran, “bothered if there be another dhrop to be
squeezed out! Never mind, my spiritual brother; I’ll show you how to
distil the crayture. Pile me up some stones, and we’ll get up the divil
of a fire, and we shall manage to make enough to expel the deuce out of
ould Cornwall.”
So Chigwidden collected a number of black stones, and the two saints
made a fine fire--when, lo! out of the black stones thus exposed to the
heat ran a stream like liquid silver. Thus was tin discovered.
The story won’t wash.
Tin was invented a thousand years at least before either Piran or
Chigwidden were thought of. But that was most certainly the way in
which it was revealed.
On Dartmoor the stream tin can thus be run out of the ore with a peat
fire. And the Dartmoor stream tin has this merit: it is absolutely
pure, whereas tin elsewhere is mingled with wolfram, that makes it
brittle as glass; and to separate wolfram from tin requires a second
roasting and is a delicate process.
Another Cornish story is to the effect that Joseph of Arimathea came
in a boat to Cornwall, and brought the Child Jesus with him, and the
latter taught him how to extract the tin and purge it of its wolfram.
This story possibly grew out of the fact that the Jews under the
Angevin kings farmed the tin of Cornwall. When tin is flashed, then
the tinner shouts, “Joseph was in the tin trade,” which is probably a
corruption of “S. Joseph to the tinner’s aid!”
We will now shortly take the history of tin mining in Devon and
Cornwall.
Whether the west of Cornwall and Scilly were the Cassiterides of the
ancients is doubtful. But one thing is sure: that they had their tin,
or some of it, from Britain.
Diodorus Siculus, who flourished in the time of Augustus, says so:--
“The inhabitants of that extremity of Britain which is
called Belerion both excel in hospitality”--they do
so still--“and also, by reason of their intercourse
with foreign merchants, are civilised in their mode of
life”--very much so. “These prepare the tin, working very
skilfully the earth which produces it. The ground is rocky,
but it has in it earthy veins, the produce of which is
brought down and melted and purified. Then, when they have
cast it into the form of cubes, they carry it to a certain
island adjoining Britain, called Ictis. During the recess
of the tide the intervening space is left dry, and they
carry over abundance of tin in carts.... From thence the
traders who purchase the tin of the natives transport it
to Gaul, and finally, travelling through Gaul on foot, in
about thirty days bring their burdens on horses to the
mouth of the Rhine.”
Ictis has been variously supposed to be S. Michael’s Mount, the Isle of
Wight, and Romney in Kent.
Whether the Romans worked the tin in Devon and Cornwall is very
questionable. No evidence has been produced that they did so. The Saxon
invasion must have destroyed what little mining activity existed in
the two counties, at least in Devon. It is noticeable that, although
Athelstan penetrated to Land’s End and crossed to Scilly, he is not
said to have paid any attention to the tin workings, which he assuredly
would have done had they then been valuable. To the incursions of the
Saxons succeeded those of the Danish freebooters, who ran up the rivers
and burnt Tavistock and Lydford in 997, and carried fire and sword
through the stannary districts of Devon.
Under the Norman rule mining revived. The general use of bells in
churches caused a considerable demand for tin, more particularly as
those for cathedrals were of large calibre. The chief emporium of the
tin trade was Bruges, whence the merchants of Italy obtained the west
of England tin and distributed it through the Levant. There exists an
interesting record of Florentine commercial industry by one Balducci,
composed between 1332 and 1345, in which is described the trade in
Cornish tin, and how it was remelted into bars at Venice and stamped
with the lion of S. Mark.
In King John’s time the tin mines were farmed by the Jews. The right to
it was claimed by the king as Earl of Cornwall.
Old smelting-houses in the peninsula are still called “Jews’ houses,”
and, judging by certain noses and lips that one comes across
occasionally in the Duchy, they left their half-breeds behind them.
During the time of Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans,
the produce of the tin mines was considerable, and it was in fact
largely due to his reputed wealth from this source that he was elected
(1257).
The tin workings went on with varying prosperity till the reign of
Elizabeth, when she introduced German engineers and workmen, with
improved appliances. In her time the tinners of Cornwall were divided
into four portions, named from the principal works of that period. Each
of these divisions had its steward under the Lord Warden, who kept his
court once in every three weeks. The four stannary towns of Cornwall
were Helston, Truro, Lostwithiel, and Liskeard; and at Lostwithiel may
be seen the remains of the ducal palace; and at Luxulyan the church,
in the tower of which the stannary records and charters were formerly
preserved.
In Devon the stannary towns were Tavistock, Ashburton, and Chagford, to
which Plympton was added in the reign of Edward III., and Lydford was
appointed as the stannary prison.
Ordinary justices of the peace had no jurisdiction over the miners in
their disputes.
Carew, who was about the court of Queen Elizabeth, has furnished
us with a valuable record of the state of the mines before the
introduction of new German machinery and methods.
He notices both the stream-works and the lodes, and his opinion was
that the deposits in the former were the result of the Deluge.
He then describes the process of _shoding_, that is of tracing the
direction of a vein by fragments found near the surface. The shode
pits, which are also called costeening pits, were holes sunk into the
ground to no great depth till indications of the lode were reached. The
miners next sank pits seven or eight feet deep till they reached the
lode itself.
“If they misse the load in one place, they sincke a like
shaft” (pit) “in another beyond that, commonly further up
the hill, and so a third and a fourth, until they light at
last upon it.”
Over Dartmoor and the Bodmin moors “the old men’s workings” may be
seen; hardly a gully has not been streamed, every river-bed has been
turned over. The face of the moor is in places welted to such an extent
that it alters the character of the scene. These workings are now
grass-grown; they are very ancient, and clearly were conducted open
to the sky. As the miners worked up a river-bed they built a colander
behind them of rude blocks of granite, through which the stream might
flow away, and many a rivulet now runs underground through these
artificial passages.
In dressing the ore the miners broke it with hammers, and then “vanned”
it on their broad oak shovels. The wind bore away the valueless
dust, leaving the metal behind. By the side of the “goyles,” or
deep workings, may be found “vanning-steads” where this process was
conducted. But with the introduction of machinery the _crazing-mill_
was employed, worked by a waterwheel, in which the ore was passed
between two grinding-stones. The washing of the dust which took the
place of the dry process was this:--
“The streame, after it hath forsaken the mill, is made to
fall by certayne degrees” (steps) “one somewhat distant
from another, upon each of which at every descent lyeth
a green turfe, three or four foote square and one foote
thick. On this the tinner layeth a certayne portion of the
sandie tinne, and with his shovell softly tosseth the same
to and fro, that through this stirring the water, which
runneth over it, may wash away the light earth from the
tinne, which, of a heavier substance, lyeth fast to the
turfe.”
After the black tin, or ore, had been thus treated it was conveyed to
the blowing-house. The usage on Dartmoor was, when a miner was far from
one of these, to tie the ore in a bag marked with his name or sign, and
hang it about a dog’s neck; the beast then conveyed it to the mill.
Of the “blowing-houses” a great many remain on Dartmoor. There are two
on the Yealm, one, very perfect, on the Erme, one very early, before
the introduction of the waterwheel, at Deep Swincombe, several on the
Dart.
The blowing-house was a small structure of one chamber and a _cache_,
or storeplace, underground. The doorway was rarely high enough to
admit a man without stooping double. The walls were of stone without
mortar, and, as far as can be judged from their remains, had no window.
The furnace was heated with charcoal, and the fire blown by means of
a great pair of bellows worked by a tiny waterwheel. The process was
so roughly conducted that “divers light sparkles” of tin are said to
have lodged in the thatched roof in sufficient quantities to render
the burning of the roof once in seven years worth the undertaking. The
melted metal ran out into a spoon-shaped hollow in a block of granite,
or elvan, and was run into moulds also cut in slabs, many of which
remain near the old blowing-houses.
The white tin was then conveyed to a royal smelting-house, where it
received a stamp; and no miner was suffered to dispose of his metal
till it had thus been marked, and he had paid his due to the Crown for
it.
[Illustration: A TIN MOULD]
Some of the terms used by tin miners may not prove uninteresting.
Stream-tin when found scattered beneath the surface on a small
declivity is called _shode_, and runs to a depth that varies from one
to ten feet. A right to work a certain portion is called a _sett_.
The rubbish thrown out of a mine is called _stent_; sand or gravel,
including tin, is termed _gard_; the walling on each side of a _tye_
or adit is called _stilling_; the channels by which superfluous water
is let run off are _cundards_, a corruption of “conduits.” Oblong pits
for a washing-floor are _gounces_; the frame of iron bars above is a
_ruddle_.
Buckets are _kibbals_; breaking up ore is _bucking_.
A _whim_ is said to have derived its name from this: A man named
Coster, observing the labour that was expended on bringing up the
refuse from the mines in buckets, fell a-thinking.
“Well, old man,” said a mate, “what be up wi’ you?”
“I have a whim in my head,” he answered, “and I’m tryin’ to reduce he
to practice.”
Coster’s whim was much joked about, but when set up outside his head at
the pit mouth, it proved to be no joke at all, but a real boon.
Superincumbent earth is _burden_.
A miner worked at Headland Warren mines, on the Webburn, and lived at
Challacombe. Every day when leaving work he brought away with him a
lump of ore in his pocket, and on reaching his lodging threw it away
among the furze bushes. Years after the farmer at Challacombe removed
three cartloads of these lumps; that was when tin was at £60 a ton.
From a speech of Sir Walter Raleigh in Parliament in 1601, when Lord
Warden of the Stannaries, it would appear that the pay of a working
tinner was then four shillings per week, finding himself. Of this he
boasts as a great change for the better, inasmuch as previously the
tinner had received but half that amount. By all accounts the tinners
were in a worse condition than the agricultural labourers.
The Stannary Parliament for the tinners on Dartmoor sat on Crockern Tor
till the court was removed to Truro.
The first Parliament held there of which records remain was on
September 11th, 1494; the last I have heard of was held at the close of
last century.
The Cornish tinners had their Stannary Court on Caradon.
Already in Carew’s time mines had been driven into the bowels of the
earth. It would appear that levels were at about five fathoms under
each other, and the water was raised to the surface by means of “a
winder and keeble, or leathern bags, pumps, or buckets.”
Dr. Borlase describes the engines that were employed just after the
middle of last century. He took a mine in Illogan as typical.
There were seven shafts upon the lode, upon one of which there was a
fire-engine working the pumps, and raising the water of the mine to the
adit level, twenty fathoms from the surface. Another shaft had a whim
upon it, and the remaining six had common winzes at their heads. The
walls of the lode were supported by timber, and planks were laid on
them for the _deads_, or unprofitable rock. Captains superintended the
work. The machines employed were the _water-whim_, the _rag and chain
pump_, the _bobs_, and the _fire-engine_. The whim was much the same
as the common horse-whim of the present day, employed to draw up the
water in kibbles or buckets. The rag and chain pump consisted of an
iron chain, furnished at intervals with knobs of cloth, stiffened with
leather, which on being turned round a wheel was made to pass through a
wooden pump cylinder, twelve or fifteen feet long, and to heave up the
water that rose in this cylinder between the knobs of rag. These pumps
were worked by hand. The waterwheels with bobs worked other pumps.
The machinery seems to us clumsy and imperfect in the extreme.
The atmospheric or steam-engine of Newcomen was costly, as it consumed
an enormous amount of coal; but in 1778 it began to give place to
Watt’s engine.
Since then the machinery employed advanced with strides till reaching
perfection, when the need for any ceased in Cornwall and Devon, where
nearly all mines have been abandoned. Barca tin can be raised so much
more cheaply, being surface tin, that lode tin cannot compete with it
in the market.
Now the mining districts of Cornwall are desolate. Heaps of refuse,
gaunt engine-houses, with their chimneys, stand against the sky,
hideous objects, and as useless as they are ugly. The Cornish miner
has gone abroad. There he remains till he has made his little pile,
when he returns home, builds a house for his wife and children, remains
idle till money gets low, when away he goes again.
A good deal of discussion has taken place relative to the causes of
the decline and extinction of the mining industry in Cornwall. The
primary cause is that already referred to, but there is another. Into
that industry too much dishonesty was allowed to intrude. Speculators
became shy of embarking capital in companies to work bogus mines. The
promotion of such schemes was too frequent not in the end to discredit
Cornish mining altogether.
The surface tin in the “Straits” mines must come to an end shortly, and
then let us trust captains in Cornwall will have learned by experience
that in the end honesty is the best policy.
Formerly the metals were taken out of Cornwall for distribution
over Europe. Now the coined metal is being brought into Cornwall
by trainloads of tourists, by coveys of bicyclists, come to visit
one of the most interesting of English counties and inhale the most
invigorating air, and everywhere they drop their coin. So life is full
of compensations.
[Illustration: LAUNCESTON CHURCH PORCH]