- Lodes, Seams, and What Lies Under Which
- Ironmere, 4597, and What Was Not Written
- The Ground Above Old Working
- Who Goes First into Unplanned Ground
- Old Working, Culverts, and the Ground Under Enginemead
- The Stone, and the Death That Takes Fifteen Years
“Coal lies flat and iron lies in a vein, and everything that is different about the two trades comes out of that one fact. A seam you follow. A lode you chase.”
Lodes, Seams, and What Lies Under Which
Beneath the industry that is the pits and the employer that is the villages lies a third thing, which is the ground itself, and the first fact to settle about it is that the county holds two entirely different kinds, lying one above the other and alike in nothing. A stranger who takes them for one kind will be wrong in the dark, where it matters.
The coal lies buried flat and bedded, in four workable seams on the Wold’s western shoulder, dipping gently eastward at about one in forty, so that a seam is followed rather than sought: the workings go out from a shaft in a pattern anybody can draw, the ground above is known within reason, and a plan of a coal working is a plan of something regular. That is why the Blackdown plans exist and can be used. That is why, too, the Brethren rule of 4606 could be written at all, for a rule about ground that is not on a plan supposes ground that could be.
The iron is the older trade and is not bedded. It lies in veins in the country rock below and to the north, going where it goes, and a lode is chased rather than followed, by men going after ore in whatever direction it went; whereby Redlode’s workings are a tangle four generations deep, of which there is no plan and never was. Ambrose Kite’s account is that the New Lode was opened in 4571 partly because the old workings had become impossible to work in, and that nobody would say so in writing. The tangle remains, and is still entered.
Where the two meet is the county’s peculiar hazard, and it is genuinely unmapped. In three places coal working has come down onto ground already gone through by iron men in the fourteenth century of the age, and a coal gallery cut on a plan has broken into an iron working that appears on none. Joan Skerrit’s survey notes give eleven such meetings since 4560. Seven were expected. Four were not, and one of the four was Blackdown.
Below both lies the chalk, and on this fact the county lives without discussing it. The measures sit on the chalk and the water sits in the chalk, so that every deep working in this county is a hole cut through a water-bearing ground into a wet one; which is why the pits are as recent as they are, and why pumping here is not a convenience but the entire condition of the trade, the one thing between a working and a drowned one.
For a company the practical point is which of the two grounds it is being sent into. A coal working has a plan, an owner, an officer and a rule, and a matter in one can be described to an employer beforehand; an iron working at Redlode has none of those, is entered by the recollection of men whose fathers cut it, and cannot be described beforehand by anybody living. Kite will say which is which. He will not be hurried.
There is a second distinction the mineral books do not make. A right to the coal or the lode is not necessarily a right to everything the working passes through. The wider mining trade learnt this expensively in places where ore lay beneath old shrines, burial ground or land held under a local pact: the lease was good, the assay was good, and the first sign of the missing argument was a blasting charge that would not take, a horse that would not use the haul road, or a dead man found somewhere he had already been carried from. Sarrum's companies dislike that class of story because it turns a mineral title into a question somebody else may have standing to answer.
The practical consequence in this county is quieter. Before a drive enters ground known to be old, a serious works clerk now asks not only for the plan and the owner's paper but for the nearest parish boundary, burial note and Brethren attendance. None of those documents proves anything by itself. Together they can establish that the ground has a history the mineral concession did not create. A company hired after such a check has failed is not being asked merely to inspect geology. It is being asked which older claim, if any, has survived the paper laid over it.
Ironmere, 4597, and What Was Not Written
“The lode gave out on a Tuesday and by the Friday fortnight there were four hundred people on the southern road. Nobody has ever asked me what the men saw in the last week of working, and I have never volunteered it.”
In 4597 the principal lode at Ironmere failed, and what followed is known to the county in its outward shape: something over four hundred people down the southern road inside a fortnight, relieved for eleven weeks by the Ninefields association out of its own fund, and recorded by nobody but Marget Sperrin, because the drove roads were blocked. The events at the lode itself have never been set down. No muniment says. The silence is the oldest thing about the matter.
The established account is small and not in dispute. The lode was working normally in the spring. A level was sealed in the June, on the company’s order, on a stated ground of exhaustion; the remaining levels worked eleven weeks more and were abandoned together. The company’s account to the Bank Council runs to four sentences, and Grace Ashdown has confirmed that it was accepted without a question being asked.
The reason the sealing came first is not established. An exhausted lode is worked out gradually and abandoned gradually, so that to seal one level while the others still work is what a company does about a thing it fears, not about a want of ore. Kite, who was a young man on the New Lode at the time and is the only officer surviving, has never contradicted the exhaustion account. Nor has he ever repeated it.
Ironmere says, and says in chapel rather than to strangers, that a gang came up in the last week of May and did not go down again; that the men were not disciplined for it; and that a company which does not discipline a gang for refusing a shift has decided something it is not going to explain. Marion Tull’s husband was of that gang. She has given her account four times in seventeen years, and it has not altered.
The Black Lantern house was not called, and that is the part which will interest anybody who knows how the house is called and how it is not. No entry stands for Ironmere in the suppression book in 4597 or in any year since. Brother Anselm, asked directly in 4612 by Selwyn Pace, replied in writing that the house attends where it is called and that it was not called; which is an answer, and is not a denial of anything.
For a company this is the oldest open matter in the county, offered perhaps once in five years, generally by an antiquary and twice by the Bank Council’s own people acting privately. The sealed level is still sealed, and still dark. The ground above it is now a flash, so that to reach the seal is a question less of permission than of water, and of what a man is willing to go down through, cold and blind, to ask it.
The Ground Above Old Working
“A field over a worked seam is a field that is going to move. Not may. Is. The only question anybody can usefully ask is when, and I have never been able to answer it and neither has anybody else.”
Everything the coal has been taken from comes down eventually. That is no hazard peculiar to this county, for it is what happens wherever a seam is worked; yet this county has been working seams since 4460, and holds therefore the largest area of hollow ground in Britannia, and nobody has ever stated it in so many words.
Simple in its working and unknowable in its timing, the thing proceeds thus: coal is removed, pillars are left, the pillars are robbed on the way out because a pillar left standing is money left buried, and the roof settles onto the floor over anything from a season to a century. What reaches the surface is a slow dishing. Fields pond where they did not; walls open; roads dip; buildings crack along one line and stand for a generation afterwards, over rooms that are empty and dark and cannot be seen.
How much ground is affected is not known, and Joan Skerrit’s estimate is the only one anybody has made. She puts it at something over nine thousand acres between the Wold shoulder and the Sarr valley, a fifth of the county’s arable, and has declined to publish it, on the ground that a published figure would be treated as a boundary and there is no boundary. The ground does not stop where a line is drawn.
Nobody is liable. It is this that governs the county’s behaviour. The companies that took the coal are in most cases wound up. The Bank Council holds the fields now, and holds them as an owner of minerals rather than of surface; and its position, never tested, because no court in the belt would hear it, is that surface damage from a working abandoned sixty years ago is a matter between the surface holder and nobody at all.
What the county does instead is price it, and that is quietly one of the more sophisticated things in the belt. Land over known working sells at a half to two thirds of comparable ground. Leases are short. Nobody builds in stone. And the drove courts accept a tenancy dispute about a moved boundary without ever ruling on why the boundary moved, which Sperrin calls the only sensible thing anybody has done about the whole subject.
For a company the practical use is that undermined ground is where the county’s cheap land is, and cheap land is where things happen that nobody is watching. Three of the four unlicensed benches in the county stand on it; so does the largest of the waste settlements; and so, on Skerrit’s reckoning, does about a third of the ground the flashes now cover, cold water lying where the coal was, over rooms nobody wrote down.
Who Goes First into Unplanned Ground
“The rule says an officer must be present and it does not say the officer goes first. I go first. It is not in the rule and it is not in my instructions and every brother of this house has done it since 4606.”
Blackdown produced the county’s one enacted rule for unplanned ground: since 4606 no working in the Sarrum orbit may be opened into ground absent from the plans without a Black Lantern officer present, paid by the owner. Owners complain annually and have never proposed abolishing it. Nobody who remembers the event that produced it argues for its repeal.
What an attendance actually is has never been described, and Edmund Rowse is the first officer to keep a book of them. Four men or fewer at a face, at the end of a shift, the gang stood back. The officer goes through first, which the rule does not require and every brother of the house does. What he does takes between a quarter of an hour and a night. The gang then works the ground, or does not.
The numbers are the useful part, and they are Kite’s. Something over forty attendances a year across the county’s workings, of which thirty-eight are entirely uneventful and the ground behind the break is rock. Two a year are not, and the house does not distinguish them in any record an owner sees. Rowse enters all forty identically, which he says is deliberate: the date, the working, the owner and the duration, and the duration alone varies, a quarter of an hour for thirty-eight and a night for the others. The county has worked out the arithmetic. It treats a long attendance as news within a day; the house knows it, and has never asked anybody to stop.
What happens during the longer attendance is deliberately absent from Rowse's book, but the precautions around it belong to a field discipline used well beyond Sarrum. Men are spaced rather than allowed to crowd a break; lamps are kept under one hand; nobody carries an unknown object back merely because it looks valuable; names, voices and movement on the far side are not answered casually; and the last deaths attached to the ground are established before anybody treats the place as empty. If a body has been lost, burial is part of the problem rather than something postponed until the engineering is finished. These are not secret rites. They are the underground equivalent of a convoy master keeping order in bad fog: arrangements intended to stop fear, curiosity and one man's mistake from becoming everybody's danger.
This is also why the first useful person at a difficult opening may not be the senior engineer. A deputy knows the timber, an assayer knows the material and a Brethren officer knows the discipline of uncertain ground; each can be right about a different part of the same face. Owners dislike the delay because three kinds of authority are expensive. Pit men prefer it to the old custom in which the most confident man went first and the rest learned from what happened to him.
The rule does not reach the village pits, the Deepcut, or anything on the chalk side of the line, and it is this gap the county talks about. A clunch pit is not a working in the Sarrum orbit; nor is a quarry face; nor, on any reading anybody has offered, is a swallow hole a man goes down. Rowse has raised it twice with his own house. The house agrees, he reports, and holds that the rule is the Brethren’s to keep rather than to widen.
For a company the attendance is the cheapest way into the county’s underground, and almost nobody uses it. An owner opening unplanned ground must pay for an officer anyway; a company engaged to be there at the same time is a cost he will often carry; and it is the one circumstance in which a company will stand underground in this county with a brother of the house beside it, and the brother going first into the dark.
Old Working, Culverts, and the Ground Under Enginemead
“They put the sheds up in 4544 because the ground was cheap. Every man who sold it knew, and every man who bought it knew, and the sheds are still standing, and I would not care to say for how much longer.”
Enginemead holds the largest roofed structures in Britannia outside the capital, and stands on a shallow coal working abandoned about 4390. The seam was thin, was taken by pillar and stall to a depth of ninety feet, and was left when it stopped paying; no plan was made; and the workings were the property of a family that failed in 4412, whose papers went to a creditor who cannot now be identified, and are as lost as he is. What lies under the largest roofs in the realm outside the capital is therefore known to nobody by any writing. The roofs stand on that silence.
What is known of the extent comes from three sources, and they do not agree. Bet Marchant’s people, who understand pillar and stall better than anybody in the county, have walked what can be reached of it in the dark and put it at forty acres. The Brethren have a figure of their own, have kept it since 4606, and have given it neither to the wharf company nor to anybody else. And the wharf company’s own surveyor reported eleven acres, in the survey of 4601. Of the three that is the paper to be sceptical of, and it repays reading for what it does not do.
It was commissioned after subsidence cracked the floor of the second shed, was conducted over nine days by a surveyor from the capital, and reported eleven acres of workings, all stable, none under a building. It contains no plan. It records that the surveyor went underground on three of the nine days. Bet Marchant, asked about it by the Bank Council in 4609, said that no man alive could walk pillar-and-stall workings of that age in three days and know what he had seen. Of the surveyor she declined to say anything further.
Since the Blackdown Stope of 4606 no working in the Sarrum orbit may be opened into ground that is not on a plan without a Brethren officer present, and the ground under Enginemead is on no plan. The wharf company has therefore not opened it, nor surveyed it since 4601, and has adopted the position that sheds which have stood eighty years on hollow ground may be expected to go on standing; a position held by people who have read Marchant’s deposition, and have decided what to do about it, which is nothing.
The culverts are a separate matter and are better understood. Four conduits bring water in from the chalk springs, are inviolate under the first article, and are walked monthly by men the council pays. A fifth channel, older, and never named in any council record, takes the Fleecegate overflow out below Scour Lane, and it is the more immediate problem and the one a company is likelier to be sent into. It is four feet high for most of its run. It discharges below the dye works, where a boat can lie at any state of the river, and it stands in no council record because the Fullers cut it before the council existed. Nobody walks it. The conduits are walked under the first article, the fifth channel is not a conduit, and so no obligation attaches to anybody; yet it is the only route into the heart of Fleecegate that does not cross a street, and everybody who needs such a route knows it, and goes by it in the dark.
The Stone, and the Death That Takes Fifteen Years
“I can tell a quarryman from a puddler across a room and the quarryman is the older-looking of the two at the same age. Neither of them believes me.”
The county’s own saying is that more men die of the stone than of the plague. It is said flatly, by people who have counted neither the one nor the other, and it is probably true. The hills are full of workings, the Deepcut, the village pits that supply every wall and road in the county, the marl, the iron at Redlode, and what the dust in them does to the men who work them nobody has ever written down.
What it is: quarrymen, clunch-diggers, sinkers, borers and the dry-end men cough for fifteen years, and then stop working, and then stop. It begins as being short-winded on a hill, is noticed at about forty, and is expected. Nobody calls it anything. A man who has it says he is short-winded, therefore, and a man who says he is short-winded at forty is describing this, and both he and his foreman know it.
The death is slow, and its slowness is the whole reason nothing is done. A fall kills a man on a Tuesday and produces a coroner, an inquest, a payment from the Colliers, an entry in a book and an argument. The stone kills him over a decade and a half, at home, of something a surgeon enters as a decline, and produces nothing at all. No article names it, no hall pays on it, no inquest sees it, and no figure anywhere in Britannia says how many it takes.
No plainer case exists anywhere in the county of how a trade spends its men. A trade that killed them in a week would have to be dealt with; yet a trade that kills them at forty-five, having had twenty good years of work out of each, has no problem to solve, since the man is used up at precisely the point where he was going to become expensive anyway, and the gate has four more. Nobody designed that, and nobody has to.