Coal mining

We don't think about coal and the Middle Ages together, but coal was certainly used for fuel then at least in some places and at least occasionally.  In fact, the Romans had used British coal when the legions were stationed there.

Now they did not have the deep tunnels and underground mines we now associate with coal mining.  Instead most of the coal that the Romans and medieval people used was what was usually called "sea coal."  They figured out that some of the black rocks that got washed up on shore would burn very hot (after being dried out, of course).  These would be pieces broken off from underwater coal deposits by the action of the waves, or perhaps pieces that fell from a deposit in an eroding cliff face.

Both Romans and medieval people would gather sea coal and, if they found an outcropping, dig out chunks, creating a pit.  Open pit mining is of course less dangerous than tunneling, which is why Britain closed its last coal mining tunnels around 2015, leaving only a few open pits.  Medieval people would have approved.

Coal had (and has) the distinct advantage that it will burn far hotter than wood.   A high temperature is needed if one is going to work iron or burn lime to make cement.  Coal was sparse throughout the Middle Ages, which is why they mostly used charcoal when high temperatures were needed.  But making charcoal, which requires burning a lot of wood very slowly, is a more complicated process than digging some shiny black rocks out of the ground, and it also uses up an awful lot of wood.

This meant that once coal mining became viable, enormous resources were poured into it.  Some of the first tunnels to be dug, following a seam of coal deep underground, were in Scotland.  Enough sea coal washed up on the shores of the Firth of Forth that a seventeenth-century entrepreneur in Culross started digging tunnels right under the firth, having figured out how to prop them so that they didn't collapse (or hardly at all).

Below is a view of the village of Culross today, on the edge of the firth. (The mines are long gone.)

 

In eighteenth-century Britain,  serious coal mining fueled the Industrial Revolution.  Britain, with its large supply of coal, was able to industrialize faster than any other region, which helped support its establishment of an Empire that extended from Canada to Africa to India to Hong Kong, with plenty of stops in between.

By the nineteenth century, Britain was fairly black with coal soot (the reason London had its famous "fogs," actually just really polluted air), and slag from the mines turned many rivers black.  Since World War II, however, Britain has really pushed toward improving its environment, phasing out coal and cleaning up the countryside.  Parts of the countryside look so verdant and pastoral that one can imagine they haven't changed since the Middle Ages.  Well, they have, but they've been restored to something closer to what they would have been like 800 years ago.

In the US, we are still mining coal, although with sustainable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro now cheaper, coal is clearly on the way out.  A concern of course is for the coal miners, many of whom have destroyed their lungs by years in the mines.  None of them love coal mining for its own sake, but it pays very well, and it allows them to live in the mountains that they love, much of which is still beautiful territory in spite of the mines.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.