A HISTORY OF CORNWALL in this hatch, and finding none in the next ascending, we have overshot our load. The remedie is easie, which is to sink nigher the hatch wherein we last found shoad.' ' The first form assumed by the ancient mines was that of pits open to the sky, the mineral at this early stage cropping out at the surface, and requiring only to be shovelled out like gravel, or else hewn in blocks. 2 This method has been followed where suitable almost continuously ever since the date of its adoption, examples being at hand in Carclase, near St. Austell, 3 and the Gwennap pit at the present day. 4 Another form of ' daylight mining ' is that of following the course of lodes, by trenches known as 'coffins.' A good instance of the survival of this method is still to be found in the Goonbarrow lode, a little to the north of Rock Hill, near St. Austell. 6 ' Costeaning ' was still another mode of pro- cedure adopted by the early miners, much as it was used, centuries later, by the tinners of Banca, in the East Indies. 6 A succession of small pits was sunk, from 6 to 12 feet deep, and drifts carried from one to the other across the direction of the veins or tin layers. 7 Probably subsequent to the introduction of these methods came that of the ' shammel,' 8 which seems to have been a mode of transition from open workings to' mining proper, and was carried on both in the open pits and under- ground, in stream works or in lodes. It is, perhaps, best described by the anonymous writer previously quoted. The lode found, ' we sink down about a fathom, and then leave a little long square place called a shamble, and so continue sinking from cast to cast (i.e. as high as a man can conveniently throw up the ore with a shovel), till we find the lode grow too small, or degenerate into some kind of weed. . . . Then we begin to drive either west or east as the goodness of the lode, or convenience of the hill invite, which we term a shift, 3 foot over and 7 foot high, so a man may stand upright and work, but in case the loade be not broad enough of itself, as some are scarce J foot, 1 ' Mineral Observations on the Mines of Cornwall and Devon,' Philosoph. Trans, vi, 2097-2100. 3 This seems to have been the case in Derbyshire (Farey, General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire, , 358. See also Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade, 19, 191). 3 Hunt, British Mining, 418. 4 Worth, Historical Notes on the Origin and Progress of Mining Skill, 10. 4 Ibid. II. 6 Le Neve Foster, Banca and its Tin Stream Works, 57. 1 Worth, Historical Notes on the Origin and Progress of Mining Skill, 7 ; Borlase, Natural History of Cornwall, 1 66 ; Pryce, Minerahgia Cornubiensis, 124, 1 66 ; Polwhele, History of Cornwall, , Supplement 63. 8 This method was known to the lead miners of Derbyshire (Farey, General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire, i, 359 . then we usually break down the deads, first on the north side of the loade . . . and then we begin to rip up the loade itself." 9 The shaft was thus divided into a series of step- like stages, each so high that a man could con- veniently heave stuff from one to the next above with a shovel. All of these processes proving useless for th'e discovery and raising of any tin beyond a certain shallow depth, it became necessary to contrive some other way to follow downward the tin- stone. Thereupon they sunk shafts down upon the lode, to cut it at some depth, and then to drive and stope, east and west, along its course. Thus, by a process of gradual transition, there crept in the system of lode mining such as exists to-day in Cornwall, to the exclusion of almost every other method. 10 Shaft mining of some sort is probably of great antiquity in Cornwall, although Pryce did not think it had been introduced earlier than the year I45O. 10 But although we may, perhaps, admit the existence in Cornwall in early times of examples of mining in the modern sense, the tin was probably for the most part still obtained from alluvial deposits, and the shafts were no deeper than was necessary to reach the layer of stanniferous gravel. The transitional period, during which the approaching exhaustion of the stream works rendered necessary the tapping of the lode itself, occurred probably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 11 At about this period we find unmistakable signs that mining was being pursued at depths which taxed to their utmost the rude machines for drainage. Stream works were all of limited depth, 12 it being a ques- tion merely of digging to the bed rock through the substratum, a distance varying according to the locality, but which could not well be greater than 50 or 60 feet. Thirty-six feet is the depth to which the miners had driven a tin stream work exhumed about half a century ago, 13 and, 9 ' Mineral Observations on the Mines of Cornwall and Devon,' Philosoph. Trans, vi, 2102 ; Pryce, Mineralogia Cornubiensis, p. 141. For examples of old shammel works, see Polwhele, History of Cornwall, bk. 2, p. 10, note ; bk. I, p. 175. 10 Pryce, Mineralogia Cornubiensis, 141. Shaft mining was surely employed somewhere in England as early as 1366, for Bartholomaeus Anglicus, who wrote in that year, has described it in terms which show that it had already passed its infancy (Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum (ed. 1582), p. 212). 11 Thomas Beare (Harl. MS. 6380) speaks only of stream tinning in 1586; Carew, in 1602, refers to both methods ; and Merrest and the anonymous writer already cited refer only to lode mining (Philosoph. Trans, vi, 2107 ; xii, 949). 11 'The Antiquity of Mining in the West of Eng- land,' by R. N. Worth, Journ. Plymouth Inst. v, 131- 134. 18 ' Description of the Stream Work at Drift Moor, near Penzance,' by Jos. Carne, Trans. Roy. Geol. Soc. Cornw. iv, 4756. 544
