A HISTORY OF CORNWALL lowered them ; later came the horse-whim, 1 and perhaps the water-wheel as well, just as we have seen to have been the case with drainage. In some tin mines also similar devices served for the descent and ascent of the workmen. No difficulty would be likely to arise with regard to this matter as long as the works were shallow stream-tin affairs. In shammel workings, too, the shammels or terraces themselves furnished a means for men to go up and down. Lode works, however, required the adoption of special facilities. In Carew's day the workmen were let up and down in a stirrup operated by two men who turned a windlass at the top, 2 for a long time the only system in use besides ladders, but employable only in perpendicular shafts. Lad- ders in the small single-shaft concerns of early times would have taken up too much space, 3 but when levels and winzes became developed, they grew to be indispensable, and in time all but universal. 4 Among the chief advantages which their use entailed was the economizing of lifting power and the avoidance of the me- chanical difficulties of stopping cages or buckets at the entrance of different levels ; but it must be added that the use of ladders as the shafts deepened brought with it a terrible increase in the miners' toil, although it was not until the eighteenth century that this drawback became very apparent. The ventilation of tin works was probably not a pressing question until the sixteenth or seven- teenth century, when galleries began to be driven far and shafts extended in depth.' The old lode workers were much troubled by foul air, and went as far only from the shaft as the air would yield them breath. When it failed they sank another shaft, and as time went on this practice led to the establishment at regular intervals of air-shafts in the mines, leading up to the sur- face. With a few trifling exceptions, such as, perhaps, the use of large ventilating bellows at St. Agnes in 1696, after the manner in which Bushell had purified his Cardigan mines some fifty years before, 7 these few words sum up the subject of mine ventilation in the stannaries until a com- paratively modern date. 8 The primitive nature of early Cornish mining 1 Cf. Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade, 74, 168. Pettus, Fleta Minor, 307. 1 Carew, Sarr. ofCornw. (ed. 1811), 36. 3 Cf. Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade, 185. Phihsoph. Trans, iii, 770.
- Worth, Historical Notes on the Progress of Mining
Skill, 26. 5 Carew (Surf, of Cornw. ed. 1 8 1 1 , 37) speaks of ' unsavourie damps which here and there distemper their heads.' 6 Worth, Historical 'Notes on the Progress of Mining Skill, 33. 7 Bushell, Tracts on Mines, ' The Case of Thomas Bushell truly Stated.' 8 Cf. Childrey, Britannia, 8. is shown by a list of the tools of the ancient 'streamer,' 9 which consisted simply of a pick and shovel, with perhaps a bowl for bailing. 10 A working tinner of the Middle Ages was one of the poorest of men, and his poverty was so well recognized that it became proverbial, and was handed down in such local sayings as ' A tinner has nothing to lose,' ' A tinner is never broke until his neck's broke.' Discoveries in old stream works n show that as late as the sixteenth century wooden implements were not uncommon, al- though in Carew's time the pick was usually of iron and the shovel iron-shod. 12 In the lode works, before the invention of blasting, the sole additional tools were gads and wedges to split the rocks, the miner's pick being flat at one end to serve as a hammer. A few stone hammers have been found in Cornwall. In most other mining districts they abound, but in tin streaming they were not needed, and in lode-mining the poll-pick answered all purposes until the utilization of gunpowder for blasting, when hammers were required to beat the drills. Until then rock-splitting was done by wedges. Into holes bored in the same way as at present, except that the bit ended in a quadrangular point instead of in a single edge, were put two semi- cylindrical rods of iron or steel, called ' feathers,' of the same length as the hole itself. A steel wedge was then driven between them, and the rock broken off piecemeal. Sometimes also wooden wedges were driven into clefts, and then soaked with water to cause the wood to swell. When the ground was more than usually hard the miners wore away the face of the rock in the same manner as that in which masons cut stone for building. 13 From the work of actual excavation let us turn to the treatment which the ore received upon the surface. The process spoken of as smelting comprises two distinct operations the prepara- tion of the ore, and its conversion into white tin.
- For those used in a mediaeval Devonshire silver
mine, see 'An Indenture and Ordinance respecting the Working of Silver Mines in Devon and Cornwall,' by E. Smirke, Arch. Journ. xxvii, 314-322. Cf. also Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining and the CoalTrade, 53. 10 ' The Antiquity of Mining in the West of Eng- land,' by R. N. Worth, Journ. Plymouth Inst. v, 127. 11 Harl. MS. 6380, fol. I. Carew, Surv. of Cornw. 8. 11 These shovels were rude but elaborate. The handle was stuck slantingwise into a hole in the face, or, in the case of another specimen, in the Truro Museum, the entire shovel was of one piece, and shaped like a huge wooden spoon (' The Antiquity of Mining in the West of England,' by R. N. Worth, Journ. Plymouth Inst. v, 121). 13 'The State of the Tin Mines at Different Periods,' by John Hawkins, Trans. Roy. Geol. Sac. Cornw. iv, 85. Fire was used in the Mendip mines to break the rocks (Philosoph. Trans, iii, 769), and also, at an early period, in Derbyshire (Houghton, The Compleat Miner, 20, art. xl). 546
