Nature's Evil

In England, coal had heated houses since Roman times. Dug from exposed seams or near the surface, it was not transported overland any further than quarried stone. In early modern England, it was called ‘sea coal’ – it always came to London by sea. From the pits and mines in northern England, flat-bottomed barges took coal along the River Tyne to Newcastle. Transhipped onto sailing vessels, it went down the east coast to the Thames. From 1550 to 1700, these shipments of coal increased at least twentyfold. The influx of Spanish silver led to dramatic inflation in London, but there was so much coal that its price did not increase: for a while, a peculiar equilibrium was established between the rising uses of silver and coal. The tonnage of English coal shipping exceeded the total tonnage of all the rest of the merchant fleet. The sailors who manned these ships formed the naval reserve in times of war. 1 Godforsaken parts of the country were seeing real money for the first time ever. Begun in open quarries, the extraction switched to mines; the costs grew, but so did the scale of the industry. Coal was compared to gold and the English countryside to Spanish colonies. As an anonymous author wrote in News from Newcastle in 1651:

England’s a perfect World! Has Indies too!

Correct your Maps: Newcastle is Peru! …

Let th’ naughty Spaniard triumph ’til ’tis told

Our sooty mineral purifies his gold. 2

The stability of coal prices was one of the great secrets of the British economy. The government was constantly preoccupied with maintaining grain prices, but coal prices were self-regulating. Coal production responded elastically to demand, and it all happened within the country – no customs were involved. Under pressure from the soaring price of firewood, almost all heat-dependent industries switched to coal – these included the manufacture of bricks, salt and soap, the burning of limestone, the refining of sugar and many other things. But breweries and forges were fuelled with charcoal; coal contained impurities that damaged metals and tainted beer. To produce 1 kilogram of pig iron required 8 kilograms of charcoal, for which 40 kilograms of firewood were needed. In the middle of the eighteenth century, British industry required about a million tons of firewood per year. Its price skyrocketed, and, although England and Scotland had excellent deposits of ore, they had to buy pig iron from Sweden and Russia.

In 1603, the aristocratic poet and naturalist Sir Hugh Platt proposed mixing coal dust and loam ‘according to the manner and making of snowballs’. In the fireplace, these balls looked ‘attractive’ and produced less ‘smoot’. Decades later, breweries in Derbyshire started using coke, which they produced by setting fire to heaps of coal mixed with clay; the new fuel was instrumental in the invention of pale ale and then cast iron. In 1709, Abraham Darby, a Quaker, first used coke for this purpose.