The Coal Mills of Northeast England: The Use of Waterwheels for Draining Coal Mines, 1600—1750 ERIC CLAVERING Power, the Coalowner’s Problem For the British mine owner of the 17th century, said John U. Nef, drainage dwarfed all other problems and determined to a large ex tent the structure of his or her coal mine. Curiously, despite his ap pendix note on drainage technology, Nef did not see that the power needed to raise water obliged owners to turn to those ubiquitous motors of early industry, water mills, which appear in deeds of the time as “coalmilns.” They have been given much less attention by subsequent historians,1 largely because until quite recently there has been almost no archaeological inquiry into coal. This has caused an underestimation of early development of output and of the technol ogy needed. In 1991, excavation near Coleorton Hall in Leicester shire (see fig. 1) revealed pillar and stall working; the earliest refer ence to the system is of 1610, but here dendrology showed it had been in use 150 years earlier, in the mid-15th century.2 Existing accounts of mine drainage are plainly inadequate; similar archaeological evidence is needed to allow a reassessment in this field too. In the Tyne export industry, the spreading use of the coal mill Dr. Clavering was born in 1915 in what was then the working Durham coalfield. He taught in Britain and overseas in the field of languages and linguistics. Since retirement in 1981 from the University of Aston, he has attempted to come to some understanding of one of the earliest industry-oriented societies, that of Durham and Northumberland in the two centuries before 1770. ‘The four major studies of the early coal industry are all the work of economic or social historians: John U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, 2 vols. (London, 1932; reprint, 1966); Michael W. Flinn, The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 2, 1700—1830 (Oxford, 1984); John Hatcher, The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 1, Before 1700 (Oxford, 1993); D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making ofan Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560—1763 (Oxford, 1991). 2R. York and S. Warburton, “Digging Deep in Mining History,” Leicestershire Indus trial History Society Bulletin 13 (Leicester, 1990-91): 49—57; Hatcher, p. 198, pi. 1.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3602-0006$01.00 211 212 Eric Clavering TYNESIDE HARRATON LAMBTON LUMLEY WOLLATON COLEORTON Fig. i .—The main centers of technical development in early English coal mining: the East Midlands and the Northeast. was accompanied by technical advances and by change in the struc ture of ownership; it helped to hasten both. The process fell into three phases, roughly, 1600—1650, 1650—1700, and 1700—1750, but whereas the structural changes are easily documented and their dat ing secure, developments in drainage techniques are not. This histo riographical disparity limits the following account of the complex interplay between the aims of owner and of engineer (often in fact the same person), between the societal and the technological. In the 17th century, England was alone in living beyond any possi ble income of renewable fuels and accepting dependence on coal The Use of Waterwheelsfor Draining Coal Mines, 1600—1750 213 mining. By 1700 the woodland equivalent of the coal burned would have needed to cover well over a fifth of the kingdom. At that time the seaborne export trade in coal of northeastern England, according to the latest estimates, gave rise to 53 percent of the national output.3 Of this, four-fifths came from the Tyne; a century earlier the river’s share may well have been higher, the outcome of a unique set of factors. One, often forgotten, was that the industry had been created, not as elsewhere by landowners, but by a Newcastle merchant oligar chy that lacked neither capital nor ability. The major part of the accessible coal had belonged to the Church and had been seized by the crown by the Dissolutions. Under Queen Elizabeth most of the rest, lying in lands of the old Catholic gentry, risked the same fate; in time this...