The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

The industrial revolution
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power (Crossley 1990). The overall pattern was not, however, one that was very different to other
European countries, and it was only after 1750 that the face of Britain began to change visibly.
Raw materials
The development of the British coal industry in the years prior to 1750 was to have a significant
impact on the wider process of industrialization. The expansion of the coal industry not only
enabled industries to move from dependency on timber or charcoal, but also created much of
the transport, capital and settlement infrastructure on which later industrialization was based.
This infrastructure is very apparent in the archaeological record.
In order to understand the development of coal-production, it is important to realize that
there are different types of coal in Britain—domestic coals, coking coal that can be used in
furnaces, steam coal and anthracite. The earliest coals to be exploited were the low sulphur
domestic coals, which could be burnt comfortably in a grate without emitting noxious fumes.
This coal was also used for industrial purposes on a large scale from the sixteenth century onwards
for burning lime, malting, glass-making and baking. The demand for coking coals grew considerably
during the late eighteenth century, following the discovery of ways in which to use such coal in
iron-making.
Early coal mines consisted of adits, or short tunnels into the seam where it outcropped near
the surface, but little evidence for these survives on the surface. In areas such as the Clee Hills in
Shropshire, or Rudland Rigg in North Yorkshire, regular patterns of circular spoil mounds are
surface evidence for the short shafts or bell pits dug from the surface down into the coal below.
One of the biggest problems with any evidence for mining is the difficulty of dating surface
evidence such as this without some access to below ground works; the large open-cast coal mines
dug in recent years have often exposed, and destroyed, archaeological evidence for the techniques
used in early coal mines. In 1991, a timber pit prop from Lounge colliery in Leicestershire dating
to between 1450 and 1463 provided one of the earliest accurately dated coal mining finds in
Britain, and showed that pillar and stall workings dated to the late fifteenth century.
Mines provide only a tiny fraction of the evidence for coal mining. Coal was bulky and road
transport difficult, and hence one of the earliest solutions was the use of wooden wagons or
railways pioneered in Newcastle early in the seventeenth century. At Bersham, Clwyd, archaeologists
have excavated a 40 m length of wooden waggonway in situ that was associated with the nearby
ironworks and probably used for transporting coal and ironstone (Grenter 1993). Elsewhere,
historic tramways survive in the landscape as old routes or footpaths, and occasionally as large
pieces of engineering, as at the Causey Arch near Durham—a huge masonry tramway bridge that
demonstrates the sophistication of, and level of investment in, many of these early tramway
routes.
Coal mining also created a new demand for labour that could not always be satisfied from byemployment
amongst traditional agricultural villages near the coalfields. From the seventeenth
century onwards, new communities are found in coal-mining areas and can be evidenced from
scattered plots of land. Many, such as those in the Forest of Dean, the Potteries and the Black
Country, became the nuclei of later industrial areas.
Iron
One of the great breakthroughs in industrialization was the increasing use of iron as a material in
construction, in engineering and even in ship-building. Wrought iron had been produced in small
quantities since prehistoric times in bloomeries, but it was only with the introduction of the
charcoal blast furnace in c.1500 that iron was produced in large quantities, both as cast iron
straight from the furnace, or converted into the more flexible wrought iron at the finery forge.