Whilst
reading 'Industry in the Countryside: Wealden Society in the Sixteenth Century'
by Michael Zell a footnote indicated to me sources on colliers in the Kent County
Archive based in Maidstone [1].
A
quick search of their online archive for 'collier' revealed thirty seven mentions of colliers in court cases in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The earliest record is dated September 1592 and I have included entries up too August 1612 which isn’t technically Elizabethan but, it’s good stuff so it’s in there.
They are for the most part, from WEST
KENT QUARTER SESSIONS RECORDS which were ‘found at Maidstone Museum in 1964’.
To speed up publication, I have decided to drip feed my analysis of the results: each blog entry will look at an individual mentioned in the archive going forward.
So what is a collier?
Before I
start we need to address the term collier: what makes me so sure that these ‘colliers’ are
charcoal makers and not coal miners? Well to be honest cannot say for certain; however, I think it is much more likely they are charcoal makers
rather than coal miner for a number of reasons:
Firstly, in this period there were no coal mines in Kent (the later Kent
coal fields were not discovered until the 1890s) so the chances of coal mining
colliers living around Kent would be very slight.
Secondly, I have yet to find a contemporary
source that refers to 'Charcoal Makers' as such: they refer to 'colliers' or sometimes 'woodcolliers'[2].
Thirdly, there are hints in the sources themselves. The case of ‘William Mountfield of Bedhurst,
collier’ is for the offence of taking ‘rewards’ from various individuals to
‘relieve them of the burden of providing charcoal for the royal household under
colour of being deputy to John Roar, Purveyor’.
This is the only direct reference to charcoal in the cases examined and
although it does not prove his trade was making charcoal it certainly gives a
strong link. Another clue is the record
of the burial in July 1593 ‘of a collier dying suddenly at his work’, if this
man was a coal miner he wouldn’t be at his work in Kent to be buried there. I am confident that colliers referred to here
are charcoal makers, and as I find more evidence of colliers being charcoal makers
I will post them.
Number of individual Colliers mentioned:
Entries can
be roughly broken down into:
- 17 colliers being accused of a crime
- 9 colliers acting as Sureties for others
- 2 colliers being the victim of a crime
- 3 colliers mentioned for other reasons
A very rough
initial analysis seems to indicate colliers were more often on the wrong side
of the law than not.
As I have already said for the
foreseeable future my posts will be an analysis of these individuals in more
detail in no particular order
Notes on legal
Terms used in sources defined by the OED:
- Indictment - a formal charge or accusation of a crime.
- Recognisance - a bond by which a person undertakes before a court or magistrate to observer a particular condition, e.g. to appear when summoned.
- Surety - a person who takes responsibility for another’s undertaking.
[1]
See my previous blog entry: http://tudorwoodcollier.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-snippet-from-page-168-of-industry-in.html
[2] For
example, Ulpian Fulwell’s sixteenth century play, Like will to like, has a character Tom Collier of Croydon, a well-known
charcoal making area to feed London’s need for fuel, Colliers Wood being a nearby south London suburb that bears witness to the areas past.
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