Buckets are kibbals; breaking up ore is bucking.
A whim is said to have derived its name from this: A man named Coster, observing the labour that was expended on bringing up the refuse from the mines in buckets, fell a-thinking.
"Well, old man," said a mate, "what be up wi' you?"
"I have a whim in my head," he answered, "and I'm tryin' to reduce he to practice."
Coster's whim was much joked about, but when set up outside his head at the pit mouth, it proved to be no joke at all, but a real boon.
Superincumbent earth is burden.
A miner worked at Headland Warren mines, on the Webburn, and lived at Challacombe. Every day when leaving work he brought away with him a lump of ore in his pocket, and on reaching his lodging threw it away among the furze bushes. Years after the farmer at Challacombe removed three cartloads of these lumps; that was when tin was at £60 a ton.
From a speech of Sir Walter Raleigh in Parliament in 1601, when Lord Warden of the Stannaries, it would appear that the pay of a working tinner was then four shillings per week, finding himself. Of this he boasts as a great change for the better, inasmuch as previously the tinner had received but half that amount. By all accounts the tinners were in a worse condition than the agricultural labourers.
The Stannary Parliament for the tinners on Dartmoor sat on Crockern Tor till the court was removed to Truro.
The first Parliament held there of which records remain was on September 11th, 1494; the last I have heard of was held at the close of last century.