196 History of Inland Transport 



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 sub- 

 stitute for wood, and an improvement in domestic archi- 

 tecture 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 there- 

 abouts, the total had further risen to 900 vessels, these 

 figures being exclusive of the foreign fleets carrying coal to 

 France, Holland and Germany. 



