FOREST OF DEAN. 257 
Cromwell also had been engaged in association with 
Major Wildman, Captain Birch, and other of his officers 
in an enterprise of the same kind; and large works were 
set up in the Forest for this purpose, but without any 
success. From the beginning of the eighteenth century 
the working of the coal mines rapidiy increased, and they 
eventually became far more important and valuable than 
the iron mines. The timber of the Forest was essential 
to the working of these mines; and the coal was 
ultimately substituted for wood in the manufacture 
of iron. 
The Crown had from an early date recognised the 
rights of the Free Miners, as they were called, to search 
for and work both iron and coal mines. It is very doubt- 
ful whether this custom would have been acknowledged as 
a legal right, if it had been questioned in the Law Courts, 
owing to the technical rule laid down in ‘“ Gateward’s 
case” as to customs and prescriptions of the inhabitants 
of adistrict. Inacase which turned indirectly upon the 
rights of miners,* Mr. Justice Byles laid down, that but 
for the Act of 1838, in which the rights of the Free 
Miners were confirmed, they could not have been sus- 
tained, on the ground that a custom could not be main- 
tained to take profits out of another man’s land. 
“It seems to me,” he said, “first, that the Free Miners 
themselves could, in point of law, have had no such right as 
the defendants’ claim assumes them to have had. The claim 
of the Free Miners is to subvert the soil, and carry away the 
substratum of stone without stint or limit of any kind. This 
* Attorney-General v. Mathias. 4 K. & J., 579. 
R 
