in Brigantia and other parts of Britain. 259 



drawn with especial reference to the mining wealth of the 

 districts. 



May we not regard, as a confirmation of all that has been 

 advanced touching the antiquity of our mining processes, the 

 fact of the existence to this day, though impaired by recent 

 acts of parliament, of peculiar rights and privileges in the 

 mining districts ? These rights are sometimes guaranteed by 

 and appear to emanate from royal charters, as in the stan- 

 neries of Cornwall and Devon, but they are probably of far 

 earlier date, and have merely been confirmed as old customs 

 by John and his successors. In Mendip, the Forest of Dean, 

 and Derbyshire, the miners' rights were preserved by royal 

 officers, but the rights themselves transcend all history and 

 tradition. To sink a pit or drive a level in any field ; to cover 

 the rich herbage with barren ore-stufF; to cut a way to the 

 public road ; to divert, employ, and waste the running waters ; 

 and to do all this without consent of owner, and without com- 

 pensation being so much as asked by lord or villein, landlord 

 or tenant, implies in Derbyshire a settlement of mining rights 

 long anterior to Domesday Book, the charters of Repton 

 Abbey*, the neighing of the Saxon horse, and the flight of 

 the Roman eagle. In connection with all that has been men- 

 tioned before, — the furnaces, the roads, the restricted vend, 

 the foreign trade — tliey seem to me to indicate a people wht) 

 came with many inventions from the metalliferous east to the 

 metalliferous west, before the Athenians drew silver from 

 Laurion, or the Carthaginians from Iberia. 



To these ancient, these Semitic mining processes we have 

 added perhaps steel instruments, and certainly explosive 

 agents ; the ore-hearth still remains, but it is generally yield- 

 ing to the reverberatory furnace; silver is no longer obtained 



* The mines in the neighbourhood of Wirksworth were wrought before 

 the year 714; at which period that district belonged to the nunnery 

 at Repton, over which Eadburga, the daughter of Adulph, king of the 

 East Angles, presided as abbess. In that year the abbess sent to Croyland, 

 in Lincolnshire, for the interment of St. Guthlac, who was originally a monk 

 of Repton, a sarcophagus of lead lined with linen (plumbum lintheumque). 

 This lead was obtained from the possessions of the old Saxon religious 

 establishments at Repton, part of which were the mines near Wirksworth. 

 In the year 835, Kenawara, then abbess of the same nunnery, made a grant 

 to Humbert, the alderman, in which she surrenders that estate of mines, 

 called Wircesworth, on condition that he gives annually, as a rent to Arch- 

 bishop Ceolnoth, lead to the value of 300 shillings, for the use of Christ's 

 Church, Canterbury. On the destruction of the religious houses by the 

 Danes in 874, it is probable that the lead mines became the property of 

 the Crown. As such they are mentioned in Domesday Book. — Glover's 

 Derbyshire, vol. i. p. 73. 



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