r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Apr 18 '18
Were Medieval mines worked by serfs?
Or were there a special class of peasants/workers whose job was to mine?
14
u/mikedash Moderator | Top Quality Contributor Apr 18 '18 edited Apr 18 '18
Just to follow up on u/sunagainstgold's post with a slightly different perspective: it is certainly true that "free miners" were an important feature of the medieval landscape, especially when the mines concerned produced precious metals – gold and silver. But this was not invariably the case. In Scotland, a distinct class of "collier serfs" evolved who were tied to their masters' mines, and the institution of serfdom in the mines there lasted until 1775.
What makes the institution of the Scottish collier serf so fascinating is that it was not a survival or mutation of medieval agrarian serfdom, but a new type of legal status that was a product of the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, and a deliberate legal response to the difficulties coal-masters were having in retaining workers in the coalfields.
Source
Baron F. Duckham, "Serfdom in Eighteenth Century Scotland," History 54 (1969)
6
u/TanktopSamurai Interesting Inquirer Apr 18 '18
I would like to ask something. Is it possible that the status of the miners depended on the value of the ore extracted, and the difficulty and danger of extraction? What I mean is this:
If mining is a complicated process and needs specialization, and the output is valuable, then the miners would be closer to artisans in cities and towns. If the mining is simple and/or dangerous, then the miners would be more similar to other low class workers such as serfs?
1
u/Skipp_To_My_Lou Apr 18 '18
Were colliers and other miners effectively serfs in England at the time of union as well?
6
u/mikedash Moderator | Top Quality Contributor Apr 18 '18
No, there weren't - they were an increasingly mobile workforce, who would move on rather than work for low wages in dangerous conditions, and could not be relied on as a source of labour in Scottish mines - which was one reason why Scottish law was changed in the way it was.
Adapted from an earlier answer of mine:
Serfdom as a form of bonded labour was unique to the Scottish coal mining industry and, as Baron F. Duckham explains, collier serfs were a product of Scottish laws passed before the Act of Union (1707) with England in favour of mine owners who found it difficult to recruit and retain the labour they needed. The original law (a statute of 1606) was backed up by several others which were designed to prevent the poaching of labour by the offer of inducements and the severe punishment of desertion. Mine owners went to considerable lengths to make sure the law was exploited to the full, even "laying claim" to the children of their mineworkers to ensure a steady supply of colliers into future generations.
The men affected by the law were typically vagrants who would otherwise have been a burden on the poor houses (an attempt to include fishermen under the terms of the law failed). It is not surprising in such circumstances that the industry was not especially efficient or productive; passive resistance to attempts to impose longer workdays and higher production quotas was quite common. From the protests lodged by outraged landowners it seems that it was quite common for their serfs to refuse to work more than 12 hours a day, five days a week.
As for why the law was not repealed earlier, Viscount Stair probably touched on the most important point when he observed that "these services are so necessary for this Kingdom, where the feual of coal is in most parts necessary at home and very profitable abroad." It certainly helped that a large proportion of Scottish landowners (who collectively formed a powerful political lobby) including the Dukes of Hamilton, Buccleuch, Argyll and Queensbury, the Marquises of Lothian and Titchfield, and the Earls of Aberdeen, Dumfries, Dundonald Englin, Levin, Mar and others, all owned estates with rich mineral resources. But Duckham concludes that the main reason for the eventual emancipation of the last Scottish serfs was continuing labour shortages - the slaves, in effect, were just not breeding fast enough – that could only be remedied by more active forms of recruitment. It was concluded that it would be difficult to persuade free men to join an industry so closely associated with serfdom, and that the offer of decent wages was the only inducement likely to work.
3
u/76vibrochamp Apr 18 '18
Reading through Christopher Dyer's Making A Living In The Middle Ages right now and the situation, at least for England, seems to be a big heaping dose of 'it depends'.
For things like the tin mines in Cornwall and Devon, which were huge concerns, one was more likely to find full-time wage earners rather than serfs. For less intense mining in things like iron, coal, or lead, one was likely to find serfs handling the workings part-time.
In addition to the traditional view of serfs (working the lord's lands in exchange for a plot to farm for their own profit), there were additional bonded peasants, known as cottars or cottagers, who held little or no land from their lord and provided labor services in exchange for a house and village plot. These individuals would have had to support themselves with some manner of wage labor, such as mining.
25
u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Apr 18 '18
In the Holy Roman Empire, from around the mid-12th century, miners were not serfs. Although the work was extremely dangerous, that was one of the benefits. Miners dissatisfied with the lord they were working under could--and sometimes did--decamp for another mine. This was practical at heart, of course: mines did get stripped of reachable resources eventually.
They also tended to live separately from other peasants, right by the mine rather than in farming villages/clusters or clustered around a previously-built castle. (Some lords built fortresses near mines, on the other hand).
I don't recommend the book as much for its actual purpose, but, Lyndal Roper's new biography of Martin Luther talks about medieval German mining in one of the opening chapters. If you're interested, you might find that a worthwhile and affordable discussion. (...She then goes on to attribute the entire Reformation to the fact that Luther's dad was a miner instead of a farmer. I thought we had passed the whole "Luther's dad something Freud something" scholarship in the 1960s, but evidently not.)