CONSERVATION AND REPLENISHMENT. 193 



until traces were found of its having been dug away at 

 some remote time, no one could even conjecture when, 

 and it was surmised that probably it was for fuel. 



In the passage from Harrison cited above (p. 68j, the 

 Hon. P. G. Marsh, in his volume entitled, The Earth as 

 Modified by Human Action, remarks : 



" It is evident from Holinshed, reprint of 1807, i. pp. 

 357, 358, and from another statement, p. 397 of the same 

 volume, that, though sea-coal was largely exported to 

 the Continent, it had not yet come into general use in 

 England. It is a question of much interest, when mineral 

 coal was first employed in England for fuel. I can find no 

 evidence that it was used as a combustible until more than 

 a century after the Norman conquest. It has been said 

 that it was known to the Anglo-Saxon population, but I 

 am acquainted with no passage in the literature of that 

 people which proves this. The dictionaries explain the 

 Anglo-Saxon word grcefa by sea-coal. I have met with 

 this word in no Anglo Saxon work, except in the Chronicle) 

 A.D. 852, from a manuscript certainly not older than the 

 twelfth century, and in two citations from Anglo-Saxon 

 charters, one published by Kemble in Codex Diplomaticus, 

 the other by Thorpe in Diplomatarium Anglicum, in all 

 which passages it more probably means peat than mineral 

 coal. According to Way, Promptorium Parnulorum, p. 

 506, note, the Catholicon Anglicanum, has ' A turfe grafte, 

 turbarium.' Grafte is here evidently the same word as 

 the A.-S. grcefa, and the Danish Torvegraf, a turf-pit, 

 confirms this opinion. Coal is not mentioned in King 

 Alfred's Bede, in Neckam, in Glanville, or in Robert of 

 Gloucester, though the two latter writers speak of the 

 allied mineral jet, and are very full in their enumeration 

 of the mineral productions of the island. 



"In a Latin poem ascribed to Giraldus Cambrensis, 

 who died after the year 1220, but found also in the manu- 

 scripts of Walter Mapes (see Camden Society edition, pp. 

 131, 350, and introduced into Higden's Polychronicon . 

 London, 1865, pp. 398, 399), carlo sub terra cortice, which 



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