A ‘Mean Tenement’ on Wash Lane

Abstract A study of William Nock, one of fifteen colliers resident in Chilvers Coton in 1684; notes the residential zoning of the coalworkers and links it to the shifting spatiality of mining activity over the previous century; emphasizes the significance of the reopening of the Griff colliery and the enormous expansion in the demand for coalmining labour; uses the remarkable account books for the Griff colliery to reconstruct labour participation rates and compensation arrangements for the workforce in the winter of 1684‒5; notes the extensive demand for labour other than by skilled coalminers, and demonstrates the influx of migrant workers from beyond the parish boundary; stresses the risky, expensive, and discontinuous nature of colliery enterprise, especially the sudden termination of production in 1688‒9 and the enormous investment required to reanimate it in 1700‒9; discusses the changes in coalmining technique from pillar-and-stall to longwall methods and the resulting recruitment of a specialist but truculent workforce from Shropshire; describes the environmental devastation that coalmining entailed; emphasizes Nock’s skill, expertise, and authority as a colliery bailiff but notes that even he was insufficiently wealthy to leave probate material after his passing; closes with an analysis of the sole extant inventory left by a Chilvers Coton coalminer in this period.