INDUSTRIES 







century. The maintenance of these laws against 

 outsiders, however, depended in the last resort, 

 as was the case with the laws of other mining 

 communities, upon the Crown itself; and, as 

 time went on, this sanction became increas- 

 ingly more difficult to obtain, the richness of the 

 mineral deposits in the forest, as well as the import- 

 ance of its timber for naval purposes, making it an 

 object of cupidity on the part of even the Crown. 

 In the seventeenth century we find the beginnings 

 of an organized attack upon the forest privileges, 

 which led at the outset to the miners fatally 

 compromising their position by admitting that 

 they held their place upon royal sufferance rather 

 than by legal right. Thereafter, the history of 

 the forest people is that of a continual and 

 increasingly hopeless struggle against interlopes ; 

 the miner-, obstinately refusing to liberalize their 

 laws, yet, on the other hand, often admitting 

 outsiders to the privileges of their calling. 



The year 1831 is chiefly remarkable for the 

 riotous destruction committed on the fences and 

 banks of the enclosures in the forest by the free 

 miners, who by this time had become thoroughly 

 exasperated at the usurpation of their old rights 

 by ' foreigners ' in whose hands, by this time, were 

 the principal coal-works of the forest by purchase 

 or lease from free miners. 1 Military force 

 quelled these risings, but the feeling in the 

 district was so strong that an Act was passed 

 in the same year* authorizing the appointment 

 of commissioners to investigate the complaints 

 of the miners. The commissioners were in- 

 structed to ascertain the boundaries of the forest 

 and the encroachments thereon ; to inquire 

 into the rights and privileges claimed by the 

 free miners of the hundred of St. Briavtl's ; 

 the constitution, powers, jurisdiction, and prac- 

 tice of the court held there, as well as respecting 

 a court called the Mine Law Court ; and to 

 report on the expediency of parochializing the 

 forest. 



Under this Act a commission was appointed 

 which held several sessions,* covering a period of 

 as many years, during which the claims both 

 of the free miners 4 and of outside parties 

 having forest interests received an impartial 

 hearing. The fourth report gives a summary of 

 the rights and privileges claimed by the free 

 miners derived chiefly from evidence taken in 

 1832. The commissioners however express the 

 opinion that the persons by whom the mines 

 were worked at an early period could not 

 have been in the first instance free tenants of 

 the crown. It is more likely that they were in 

 a state of servitude,* and subject to the per- 

 formance of labour required of them. The 

 name ' free miners' by which they were, and 



1 Nicholls, Fereit of Dean, 1 10-12. 



I & 2 Will. IV, cap. 12. 



1 Cf. Nicholls, Forett of Dean, 1 1 3 et cq. 



Ibid. 120. Ibid. 4. 



had been for centuries known, referred pro- 

 bably to some right or privilege distinct from 

 their original condition, and it was not unreason- 

 able to suppose that certain persons at some 

 distant period, either by having worked for a 

 year and a day, or by reason of some circum- 

 stance connected with the origin of the privilege 

 were considered as emancipated, and thereupon 

 became entitled, or were allowed to work the 

 mines upon their own adventure, concurrently 

 with, or subject to the right of the crown to a 

 certain portion of the product.* 



The report goes on to state that the franchise 

 of the mine was unquestionably perpetuated by 

 birth from a free father in the hundred of 

 St. Briavel's, and afterwards working a year and 

 a day in one of the mines and abiding within 

 the hundred. The commissioners were, how- 

 ever, doubtful as to the necessity of birth from 

 a free miner, inasmuch as the son of a ' foreigner ' 

 could obtain his freedom after an apprenticeship 

 of seven years with a free miner. 



Entering, in the next place, into a considera- 

 tion of the actual claims of the free miners, the 

 commissioners recognized the fact that while 

 before the discontinuance in 1777 of the Mine 

 Law Court the free miners rarely leased, mort- 

 gaged, or sold their works to outsiders, this 

 practice had since then become so frequent that 

 the greater part of the mining properties were 

 in the hands of foreigners, 7 who, in absence of 

 injunctions or ' forbids ' from any mine court, 

 worked them by the employment of hired labour. 8 

 They declared their opinion as to the settlement 

 of these claims, suggesting at once the question 

 ' whether they could now be maintained with 

 advantage to the miners themselves or to the 

 community,' connected, as they were, with a 

 most defective system of working, productive of 

 incessant disputes and expensive litigation, and 

 occasioning never-ending jealousy.* 'Taking all 

 the circumstances of the case into consideration,' 

 they thus conclude, ' we are of the opinion that 

 the monopoly and customary workings are prac- 

 tically at an end, and that, if individual claims 

 were bought up, the whole coalfield might then 

 be let by the crown as between landlord and 

 tenant, defining the limits and regulating the 

 workings.' 



In the fifth and last report, the commissioners, 

 among other things, notice the stone quarries 

 which persons born within the hundred of 

 St. Briavel's claimed the right of opening in the 

 waste lands of the forest on payment of a fee of 

 y. to the gaveller and a further yearly rent of 

 3;. 4<, according to the custom of at least the 

 last century, a period too long to justify the 

 withdrawal of any existing 'gale,' or mine share, 

 unless with compensation. In view of this fact, 

 in order to render the conditions for the working 



* Fourth Rtf. Dean forest Commn. 4. 



' Ibid. 8. * Ibid. 9. * Ibid. 10. 



231 



