A History of Inland Transport and Communication in England

by Edwin A. Pratt

The early history of the railway is the early history of the English coal trade.

Down to the sixteenth century the fuel supply of the country alike for manufacturing and for domestic purposes was derived almost exclusively from those forests and peat-beds that once covered so large a portion of the area of the British Isles. Coal was not unknown, though it was then called "sea-coal," a name distinguishing coal from charcoal, and given to it because the fact of the earliest known specimens being found on the shores of Northumberland and of the Firth of Forth—where there are outcrops of the coal measures—led to the belief that the black stone which burned like charcoal was a product of the sea. The name was retained, as an appropriate one, when coal was brought to London by sea from the north.

Coal is known to have been received at various dates during the thirteenth century in London (which then already had a Sacoles, or Sea-coal, Lane), in Colchester, in Dover and in Suffolk; but it was used mainly by smiths and lime-burners; and it was used by them still more when the construction of feudal castles and ecclesiastical buildings in and following the Norman period called for work not to be done efficiently with fires of wood or charcoal. The use of coal as fuel for domestic purposes remained, however, extremely limited. Unlike wood and charcoal, coal was not suitable for burning in the centre of rooms then unprovided with chimneys, while coal smoke was regarded as an intolerable nuisance, and as seriously detrimental to health. It was on these grounds that when, in the fourteenth century, brewers, dyers and others in London were found to be using coal, a Royal Proclamation was issued interdicting its use by any person not a smith or a lime-burner, and appointing a commission of Oyer and Terminer to see to the punishment of all offenders.

For a further considerable period the use of coal continued very partial; but in the sixteenth century great uneasiness began to be felt at the prospective exhaustion of the timber supplies of the country, and various enactments were passed with a view to checking the destruction of the forests. Great attention began to be paid to the use of sea-coal as a substitute for wood, and an improvement in domestic architecture led to a more general provision of fire-places with chimneys, thus allowing of a resort to coal fires for domestic purposes. Chimneys began to appear, in fact, in numbers never seen before. Harrison, writing in 1577, grieves over the innovation of coal fires, and recalls the good old times of wood and peat when, as he touchingly says, "our heads did never ake."

Queen Elizabeth retained the prejudice against sea-coal, and would have none of it. Ladies of fashion, sharing, as loyal subjects, her Majesty's objections, would, in turn neither enter a room where coal was burning nor eat of food cooked at a coal fire. But James I., whose ancestors had long favoured coal fires in Scotland—and, it may be, thus made themselves responsible for the name of "Auld Reekie" conferred on Edinburgh—had coal brought for fires in his own rooms in Westminster Palace. When this fact became known Society changed its views, and decided that the hitherto obnoxious sea-coal might be tolerated, after all. Howes, writing in 1612, was then able to speak of coal as "the generall fuell of this Britaine Island."

In the result, and especially following on the development in trade and industry which came with the Restoration, there was a great increase in the demand for coal. In 1615 the coal fleet engaged in the transport of sea-coal to London, and other ports on the east and south-east coasts—where fuel was scarcest—comprised (as stated in "A History of Coal Mining in Great Britain," by Robert L. Galloway) 400 vessels. In 1635, or only twenty years later, the number had increased to between 600 and 700, and by 1650, or thereabouts, the total had further risen to 900 vessels, these figures being exclusive of the foreign fleets carrying coal to France, Holland and Germany.

The collieries that were more especially required to meet this increased demand were those in the immediate neighbourhood of the Tyne, since they offered the advantages of thick seams of coal of excellent quality and close alike to the surface and to a navigable river. The proportions to which the industry had already attained in the year 1649 are shown by Grey, in his "Chorographia, or a Survey of Newcastle-upon-Tine," where he says: "Many thousand people are imployed in this trade of coales: many live by working of them in pits: many live by conveying them in waggons and waines to the river Tine.... One coal merchant imployeth five hundred or a thousand in his works of coal."

The one great difficulty in the way of development lay in the trouble experienced in getting the coal from the pit-banks to the river for loading into the keels, or barges, by which it would be conveyed to the sea-going colliers lying below the bridge at Newcastle.

The established custom was to send the coal to the river by carts, or wains, or even in panniers slung across the backs of horses; and in Robert Edington's "Treatise on the Coal Trade" (1813) mention is made of various collieries which had up to 600 or 700 carts engaged in this service. Inasmuch, however, as the art of road-making in general was then still in its elementary stage, one can well imagine that, with all this traffic along them, the roads between the collieries and the Tyne must have been in a condition that added greatly both to the difficulties and to the cost of transport. Nicholas Wood, in his "Practical Treatise on Rail-roads" (1825), gives an extract, dated 1602, from the book of a Newcastle coal company, showing that "from tyme out of mynd" the coal carts had brought eight bolls—equal to about 17 cwt.—of coal to the river; but added that "of late several hath brought only, or scarce, seven," a fact sufficiently suggestive of the deplorable state to which the colliery roads had been reduced even at the opening of a century that was to bring about so great an increase in the demand for coal.

Bad as the position was for the collieries located near to the Tyne, it was worse for those situate at any distance from the river, since, under the road conditions then prevailing, it was practically impossible for the owners of the latter collieries to get their coal to the river at all, or to secure any share in a trade offering such great opportunities and undergoing such rapid expansion. The coal had but a nominal value so long as it could not be got away from the pit-banks.