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NOTES ON ANCIENT COAL MINING. BY T. W. EMBLETON, ESQ., M.E. 
The beginning of coal mining, like most other things, is enveloped 
in the obscurity of the past. There is little doubt that coal, so far as 
can be gathered from scattered notices discovered here and there in 
various records, was first obtained by manual labour from the out- 
crops on hill sides or the margins of brooks and rivers, or the cliffs of 
the sea coast. In such places the attention of the ancient people 
would be arrested by the contrast of the black mineral with the colour 
of the superincumbent and the adjacent strata. The use of coal and 
other mineral substances did not become general until the necessity 
for their use became apparent, nor were they at first extensively 
worked. In ancient British and Roman times coal could not have 
escaped the notice of the energetic people of the land, though the 
forests that then covered the gTeater part of England afforded 
abundant supplies of fuel. The Romans, as we shall see, had dis- 
covered coal and its uses, or had derived their knowledge from the 
Britons. In Anglo-Saxon and in Norman times, as manufactories of 
various kinds were established and increased in number and extent, 
the forests suffered in proportion. 
The iron and glass works which were carried on extensively in the 
northern and eastern parts of England consumed increasingly enormous 
quantities year by year; the forests diminished, and the use of wood 
as fuel became more and more costly. This destructive process had 
the effect of directing public attention to the acquisition of mineral 
fuel for manufacturing and domestic purposes, and hence the 
excavation of coal rapidly increased; but it was only after the inven- 
tion of the steam engine that the demand and supply enormously 
expanded, and has now attained dimensions which a century ago 
would have been deemed fabulous and altogether increditable. 
In the Saxon Chronicle of the Abbey of Peterborough there is 
the following passage: "About this time," a.d. 852, "the Abbot 
Coelred let to hand the land of Sempringham to Wulfred, who was 
to send to the monastry 60 loads of wood, 12 loads of coals, and 
peat and other things." 
