From the Forest by Sara Maitland

Author:Sara Maitland
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2012-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

A ‘hundred’ is an old administrative district, smaller than a county and larger than a parish. Tradition claims the name refers to an area expected to produce 100 men at arms for the Crown’s wars. About St Briavel barely anything at all is known – legend pleasingly relates that he was a forest hermit, but suggests no dates for his life, nor is there any record of him before 1130.

A Free Miner is one with the right to mine a ‘gale’ – a specific area of the forest – provided it is not being worked by another Free Miner. The Act in fact formalised a very ancient tradition. Although the oldest record of the miners’ laws and customs dates from 1610, there is good evidence that they already had exclusive mineral rights in 1244. The 1610 document contains 41 regulations for the ‘winning of Myne [iron ore] and Sea Cole [coal]’.9 The document lays down clear principles and laws on details like rights of access and the method for defining a claim. The duties of the Gaveller (the King’s representative) included the collection of royalties in cash or kind, whilst the court ‘that is called Myne Lawe’ allowed the Miners to be largely self-governing.

During the medieval period these privileges were not unique to the Dean miners. Edward I, who granted them a Royal Charter, granted similar privileges to other mining districts – for example, in Derbyshire. Legend claims that Dean’s Royal Charter was given as a reward for the services the Dean miners rendered the King in the recapture of Berwick-upon-Tweed from the Scots in 1296. Because of their experience in mining, they provided the army with a range of skills: undermining fortifications, creating earthworks and building timber structures. They were also called upon to serve in France, at the battles of Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415). In the seventeenth century a dozen of them were delegated to sail with Frobisher on his abortive search for the Northwest Passage. They were the Crown’s men by feudal law, and were renowned for their mining skills, hardy nature, gritty determination and ferocity in battle.

The Free Miners of the Forest of Dean have clung on to these rights tenaciously; seeing off serious threats from large-scale mine-owners from South Wales in the nineteenth century and winning an exemption for themselves from the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act in 1946. Once registered as a Free Miner by an official rather splendidly named the Deputy Gaveller, a man may to this day claim up to three unworked gales from the Crown; he becomes the owner of the underground area and can work the minerals there. These mines have always been small. Until the 1838 act, the Crown had the right to put its own miner in to work with the Free Miners in each mine and share the profits; this individual was traditionally know as ‘the fifth man’, strongly indicating that these were basically little family enterprises.

There are around 150 Free Miners alive today. In

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.