Sabine Baring-Gould - A Book of Cornwall

Now to get at stream-tin very little trouble is needed. The rubble brought down and lodged in the valleys has to be turned over; and the ore is distinguishable by its weight and by a pink tinge, like the rouge ladies were wont (a hundred years ago) to put on their cheeks and lips. There is no tunnelling, no nasty shafts and adits to be made; and shafts and adits were beyond the capacity of primitive man, furnished with bone and oak picks only. Besides, why take the trouble to mine when the tin lay ready to be picked up?

The story told in Cornwall of the discovery of tin is this: -

S. Piran came over from Ireland in a coracle, and, like a prudent man, brought with him a bottle of whisky. On landing on the north coast he found that there was a hermit there named Chigwidden. The latter was quite agreeable to be friends with the new-comer, who was full of Irish tales, Irish blarney, and had, to boot, a bottle of Irish whisky. Who would not love a stranger under the circumstances? Brothers Chigwidden and Piran drank up the bottle.

"By dad," said Piran, "bothered if there be another dhrop to be squeezed out! Never mind, my spiritual brother; I'll show you how to distil the crayture. Pile me up some stones, and we'll get up the divil of a fire, and we shall manage to make enough to expel the deuce out of ould Cornwall."

So Chigwidden collected a number of black stones, and the two saints made a fine fire-when, lo! out of the black stones thus exposed to the heat ran a stream like liquid silver. Thus was tin discovered.

The story won't wash.

Tin was invented a thousand years at least before either Piran or Chigwidden were thought of. But that was most certainly the way in which it was revealed.

On Dartmoor the stream tin can thus be run out of the ore with a peat fire. And the Dartmoor stream tin has this merit: it is absolutely pure, whereas tin elsewhere is mingled with wolfram, that makes it brittle as glass; and to separate wolfram from tin requires a second roasting and is a delicate process.

Another Cornish story is to the effect that Joseph of Arimathea came in a boat to Cornwall, and brought the Child Jesus with him, and the latter taught him how to extract the tin and purge it of its wolfram. This story possibly grew out of the fact that the Jews under the Angevin kings farmed the tin of Cornwall. When tin is flashed, then the tinner shouts, "Joseph was in the tin trade," which is probably a corruption of "S. Joseph to the tinner's aid!"

We will now shortly take the history of tin mining in Devon and Cornwall.

Whether the west of Cornwall and Scilly were the Cassiterides of the ancients is doubtful. But one thing is sure: that they had their tin, or some of it, from Britain.

Diodorus Siculus, who flourished in the time of Augustus, says so: -

"The inhabitants of that extremity of Britain which is called Belerion both excel in hospitality" – they do so still-"and also, by reason of their intercourse with foreign merchants, are civilised in their mode of life" – very much so. "These prepare the tin, working very skilfully the earth which produces it. The ground is rocky, but it has in it earthy veins, the produce of which is brought down and melted and purified. Then, when they have cast it into the form of cubes, they carry it to a certain island adjoining Britain, called Ictis. During the recess of the tide the intervening space is left dry, and they carry over abundance of tin in carts… From thence the traders who purchase the tin of the natives transport it to Gaul, and finally, travelling through Gaul on foot, in about thirty days bring their burdens on horses to the mouth of the Rhine."

Ictis has been variously supposed to be S. Michael's Mount, the Isle of Wight, and Romney in Kent.

Whether the Romans worked the tin in Devon and Cornwall is very questionable. No evidence has been produced that they did so. The Saxon invasion must have destroyed what little mining activity existed in the two counties, at least in Devon. It is noticeable that, although Athelstan penetrated to Land's End and crossed to Scilly, he is not said to have paid any attention to the tin workings, which he assuredly would have done had they then been valuable. To the incursions of the Saxons succeeded those of the Danish freebooters, who ran up the rivers and burnt Tavistock and Lydford in 997, and carried fire and sword through the stannary districts of Devon.

Under the Norman rule mining revived. The general use of bells in churches caused a considerable demand for tin, more particularly as those for cathedrals were of large calibre. The chief emporium of the tin trade was Bruges, whence the merchants of Italy obtained the west of England tin and distributed it through the Levant. There exists an interesting record of Florentine commercial industry by one Balducci, composed between 1332 and 1345, in which is described the trade in Cornish tin, and how it was remelted into bars at Venice and stamped with the lion of S. Mark.

In King John's time the tin mines were farmed by the Jews. The right to it was claimed by the king as Earl of Cornwall.

Old smelting-houses in the peninsula are still called "Jews' houses," and, judging by certain noses and lips that one comes across occasionally in the Duchy, they left their half-breeds behind them.

During the time of Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans, the produce of the tin mines was considerable, and it was in fact largely due to his reputed wealth from this source that he was elected (1257).

The tin workings went on with varying prosperity till the reign of Elizabeth, when she introduced German engineers and workmen, with improved appliances. In her time the tinners of Cornwall were divided into four portions, named from the principal works of that period. Each of these divisions had its steward under the Lord Warden, who kept his court once in every three weeks. The four stannary towns of Cornwall were Helston, Truro, Lostwithiel, and Liskeard; and at Lostwithiel may be seen the remains of the ducal palace; and at Luxulyan the church, in the tower of which the stannary records and charters were formerly preserved.

In Devon the stannary towns were Tavistock, Ashburton, and Chagford, to which Plympton was added in the reign of Edward III., and Lydford was appointed as the stannary prison.

Ordinary justices of the peace had no jurisdiction over the miners in their disputes.

Carew, who was about the court of Queen Elizabeth, has furnished us with a valuable record of the state of the mines before the introduction of new German machinery and methods.

He notices both the stream-works and the lodes, and his opinion was that the deposits in the former were the result of the Deluge.

He then describes the process of shoding , that is of tracing the direction of a vein by fragments found near the surface. The shode pits, which are also called costeening pits, were holes sunk into the ground to no great depth till indications of the lode were reached. The miners next sank pits seven or eight feet deep till they reached the lode itself.

"If they misse the load in one place, they sincke a like shaft" (pit) "in another beyond that, commonly further up the hill, and so a third and a fourth, until they light at last upon it."

Over Dartmoor and the Bodmin moors "the old men's workings" may be seen; hardly a gully has not been streamed, every river-bed has been turned over. The face of the moor is in places welted to such an extent that it alters the character of the scene. These workings are now grass-grown; they are very ancient, and clearly were conducted open to the sky. As the miners worked up a river-bed they built a colander behind them of rude blocks of granite, through which the stream might flow away, and many a rivulet now runs underground through these artificial passages.