Cornwall: Romances of the Miners

This is a short chapter, but it contains something terribly valuable to me as a writer: it explains what’s going on with the Jews.  This matters a more deeply than may be superficially apparent. When we were writing Ars Magica, we kept looking for places where we could squeeze in black people, gay people, woman and other minorities. History is whitewashed, to quote the Doctor, and we tried to give new options without resorting too strongly to fantasy. Ans so: it’s great to get some Jews.

I knew the knockers, the faeries of the mines, were said to be the ghosts of Jews. That was a little. I knew that the town we now call Marazion was called “Market-Jew” historically, and its modern name refers to the suffering of Zion. I knew that Richard of Cornwall was the Jew-farmer of England, a few decades after the game period begins. Jews, and Saracens, were said to have come to Cornwall to ship the tin to distant lands. The Cornish, to protect the secret of where they found their tin from the “Fincians”, as they called all these foreigners, set up trading ports on little islands, which might yet be covenant sites. Hunt suggests Looe Island, St Nicholas’s Island, St Ives, Chapel Rock and many other places.

In 1220 Jews are kept from many professions. They are allow to work as merchants and bankers, and Hunt records traditions that they rented the lands that were mined from the Crown, and in turn leased them to miners. He gives the tradition that the churches of Dartmoor were all raised by Jews as a tax for the tin stream licenses.

He goes further though.  Mining is a terrible job, uncomfortable, dangerous and giving wages only at random. Jews were not, in some recorded folklore, forbidden from engaging in this profession. The ghosts in the mines are Jews because the people in the mines were Jews: Jews that allow you to have player characters who are not Shakespearean bankers and merchants.

A related idea, mentioned in Hunt, is that the knockers are the ghosts are Jews, but that they were the slaves of Romans, forced into the mines during the Empire. The knockers are also called buccas. Knockers only work productive lodes, so their presence is liked by the miners.

Ghosts

There’s a mine mentioned in the notes where many men had died in a cave-in. The bodies were pulled to the surface mangled beyond recognition. To spare the feelings of the relatives, one of the miners shovelled the gore in the furnace. Since then, the mine has been haunted by tiny black dogs, which are seen before disasters.

In Polbreen Mine there’s a ghost called Dorcas, which is the spirit of a girl who committed suicide by throwing herself down the shaft. She calls out to miners, distracts them from their tasks, and perhaops does more. When a tribute ( a miner working for a share of profits rather than wages) has had a poor month, people joke with him that he’s been chasing Dorcas. One at least one occasion she saved a miner from a rockfall by telling him to move. It wasn’t a shouted warning: she’s not that sort of ghost.

Demons

There is another spirit called Gathan which mocks the miners. He repeats their blows stroke for stroke, fills mines with smoke, and leads them astray with false fires. He seems to be a separate presence from the little imps often seen by miners. They are often seen lounging about underground, near lodes which they work while the miners are away. he imps are seen as lucky, but will not let the cross be drawn or made underground.

A dead hand, carrying a candle, has been seen in many mines. It climbs ladders, as though a body were attached. It holds the candle between forefinger and thumb while grasping with the other three, as a miner would. There is a story about how a miner had his hand cut off in an accident: but surely a ghost should haunt a single mine, rather than the many in which it has been spotted? It is perhaps a demon or a faerie.

Faeries

The spriggans meet in the depths of the deepest mines on Christmas Eve and have a Mass. During which they sing a carol that Hunt calls “Now Well!”  In a footnote, he amuses by giving the lyrics as “Now Well! Now well! the angel did say / to certain poor shepherds in fields who lay / lay in the night, folding their sheep / a winter’s night, both cold and deep. Now well! now well! now well! Born is the King of Israel!” They have a temple for this purpose, that they built themselves, and it is magnificent.

Sometimes people see a blue flame underground which makes full mine carts move by themselves, as if pushed by a strong, skilled man. This is Bluecap, and his wages need to be paid promptly and correctly, by leaving them in a disused corner of the mine.

Hunt mentions Jack the Tinker here, tying him to Wayland Smith. This has been dealth with at some length in the Giants episode.

The Story of the Jew and the Miners

Hunt gives the story of a group of miners who found their streams had given out, and so travel to take service with a Jew in a distant place. They work in his mine for three years, and every year when they sought their share of the profits he put them off, and tells them never to leave an old road for a new one. When they are sick of this behaviour, they head home. The Jew’s wife gives the oldest miner a cake.

As they travel they discover a new highway has been built, so they have a shortcut home. The younger men take this road, while the oldest one keeps to the path he knows. The youngest ones are best by bandits, and loose what little they have. The older man makes it home unhurt. His wife, who has been waiting patiently for him for three years, is not pleased when he shows that his entire wage for three years work is a single cake.

When the wife argues with her husband, she becomes enraged.  She flings the cake against the wall, and it breaks apart. Within are golden coins, and a letter, carefully tallying the shares of the three miners. Happiness is restored, and the miners live happily ever after.

To me, this Jew seems rather like a faerie. There’s the pattern of three miners and three years, for example.

Saints

The Cornish are sure famous people came to visit them. Jesus himself was broght in his boyhood to the Lizard by his uncle, Joseph of Armithea. The uncle returned later, with the Holy Grail, a thorn from the crown, and bottles of the blood of Jesus, which he took to Glastonbury. The miners of Gwenapp believe that St Paul came to sermonise them in his lifetime. (He preached somewhere along the road from Princes-town to Plympton and it is celebrated on Whitmonday).

“Tokens”

Miners are superstitious, and in Cornwall this takes the form of belief in “tokens”, which is to say, signs of impending trouble. If a miner walking to work in the middle of the night sees any woman at all, he’ll return home. This time, the walk in the dead of night to the mine, is the primary time to see tokens. If he sees a hare or whiter rabbit near the mine, he will warn others it is about to collapse. In the northern mines, there are Seven Whistlers, spirits who warn to avoid the mine by making sound like the wind, when no gale blows.

Hunt says that if a miner sees a snail on his midnight walk to work, he always cuts some tallow from the side of his candle and drops it for the animal to eat.

 

Miners will not work on Midsummer’s Eve or New Year’s Day, and will not tell people like Hunt why. That seems like a plot hook right there.