262 Mr. J. Phillips on Ancient Metallurgy, fyc. 



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 mentioned before, — the fur- 

 naces, the roads, the restricted vend, the foreign trade — they seem 

 to me to indicate a people who came with many inventions from 

 the metalliferous east to the metalliferous west, before the Athe- 

 nians 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 yielding to the re- 

 verberatory furnace ; silver is no longer obtained by oxydation of 

 some thousand times its weight of lead ; steam blows our furnace 

 fires, rolls and pipes our metals, and flies with iron wings on roads 

 more solid than the Appian Way. The world of George Ste- 

 phenson is much different from that of Julius Agricola ; but some 

 features of the past remain to connect the earliest with the latest 

 aspect of our country: and among these the least altered, and the 

 most instructive, appear to be the mineral products and the min- 

 ing processes. If by these we judge the great Brigantian tribes 

 which surround Isurium, they must be placed far higher on the 

 scale of civilization than the place usually accorded by the Saxon 

 to the Celt. 



I presume to think, indeed, that without full attention to the 

 mining history of Britain, as indicated by fragments in classic 

 authors, and illustrated by processes not yet extinct, the opinion 

 which may be formed of the ancient British people would be al- 

 together conjectural, derogatory, and erroneous. 



* The mines in the neighborhood of Wirks worth 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 abbeesof 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 Archbishop 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. 



