CHAPTER XVIII 



EVOLUTION OF THE RAILWAY 



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 con- 

 struction 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 



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