Carew’s Survey of Cornwall is an interesting little book, filled with useful material and much quoted by my more modern sources. It was written in 1605, and the version I’m using, which is copied from Internet Archive, has the linguistic quirks of the time. It uses the f for long s, and has the letters U and V reversed to the modern sounds. I spent a good minute wondering who the Lord of the Foyle was, before I realised he meant “lord of the soil”. I’m so pleased with it I’m thinking of Librivoxing it once I’m done with my other projects.
In this next little series, I’m cutting up Carew in an arbitrary way: his book lacks the sort of internal divisions which might sensibly be used.
Minerals (Stones and Metals)
I need this for shape and material bonuses, but also just to describe how buildings look.
- “Rough” which I presume is granite
- Slate, which is slower but surer than rough, when building. There are three types: blue (the best), sage-leaf coloured and gray (the “meanest”). “In substance thin, in colour fair, in weight light, in lasting strong”. The blue type is generally on top as mined, and its found at about the water level.
- Moorstone, which is used for window and door frames and sparkles at certain angles.
- Pentuan, dug out of sea cliffs and coloured like grey marble.
- Caracloufe stone, which is black.
- Quarried freestone.
- Pebble stones, which are sea stones that have been tumbled smooth and are used for paving.
- A type of marle-stone is baked with furze or coal to make lime. Coal is more expensive but makes a whiterl ime.
- Copper is found in various places, but people seem to be secretive about it. Silver and gold are also found.
- “Dyamonds are in many places found cleauing to those Rockes out of which the Tynne is digged; they are polifhed, fquared and pointed by nautre.” I’ll stop that now: Carew knows these are not “right” diamonds, they are darker and less hard, but says they can fool a lapidary at times, and they get as big as a walnut.
- There are pearls here, but they are not as large or round as oriental ones.
- Agates and white coral are found in Cornwall, which means he’s seen the substance those snakestons are made of.
Tin (or Tynne…no, I’ll stop)
Carew loves tin. “It cannont be of mean price which has found, with it, diamonds, amongst it gold, and within it silver.” He’s good at turns of phrase, Carew. that’s why I’m interested in recording him.
Sometimes the tinners dig up trees, which they see as proof of the flood of Noah. Vis source!
Carew mentions a metaphor that the tine is like a river, or a tree, or the veins of a man’s body, with the main load deep in the earth, and lesser loads spreading out through the land from it. I can use that literally for a dragon or giant or something.
The tinners believe that their works are ancient, and were first hewn by Jews, who used pickaxes of “holme ,boxe and harts” horn. I know that last one is deer. I’ll need to check the others. They sometimes find small, ancient, brass tool fittings, which they call “thunderheads”.
There are two types of mining, stream and load. First the tinner finds a shoad (a patch of tin on the surface of the ground). Then he either digs a stream (a trench 6 feet deep by three or four wide) or sinks a shaft (four feet long, two feet wide, seven feet deep) then either follows the load, or sinks a fresh shaft further along his supposed line of the load. If a river gets in the way of a stream, then the miners divert it, which is legal, but landlords hate it because it causes flooding on farmland until they divert it back, wrecking crops.
Some people who have dreams which reveal the location of valuable loads.
People have noticed that if you look over the spoil heaps of mines, you’ll often find valuable tin, apparently missed by the miners who came before. They don’t know their technology is getting better: they think that tin regrows. If all of the tin is linked and it is growing, is it like a vast mushroom, or the circulatory system of a giant or dragon? Did Scilly sink because it moved?
Carew’s notes on mining
When a miner fines a lode, he needs to pay a fee to claim it, so he gets some partners in case it all goes wrong, and they go shares. The partners choose a Captain, who acts as a sort of quartermaster and arranges working times. Carew says the toil is so extreme most miners work only four hours on workdays.
The basic tool is a pickaxe with a spike on one end, and a mallet on the other for driving in iron wedges.
The loads may go down to forty or fifty fathoms. Sometimes you can see stars at noonday if you are that deep, which is cool for an astronomer covenant. Men go into the mine on a rope that is winched by two other men, and the miner stands in a stirrup on the way down. Miners sometimesw only get a foot a week? Damps may “distemper their heads” The trusses in the mines are wooden, and often cave in.
Carew talks about devices to drain water. I’m not sure how in period they are.
When the tin is mined it is ac carried in wains or on horseback to a stamping mill. If the stone is too damp it’s dried on a grill before being stamped. Basically the stamping mill is three or five poles, shod in iron, which rise and fall as a waterwheel turns. This grinds the ore down. It’s then sent to a crazing mill, where it is ground through water-powered millstones, to a fine sand. Wet stampers, which are a new idea to Carew, do not need crazing mills.
The tinner then takes the sand away and puts it on sheets of turf, and washes it. The heavier tin stays. THey then put this tin in a big wooden dish and do something like gold panning. This is now called “black tin” and this is split between the partners. Tin is weighed by the Gill, Toplisse (Topliffe?), Dish and Foote, which are a pint, pottel, gallon and almost two gallons. A foote weighs about 40 pounds. Two pounds of black tin give one pound of white tin.
The man takes his tin to a blowing house, where it is melted in a coal fire stoked with watermill powered bellows. It is then set in thin, square ingots. The tin is sold at markets called Coynages. There are two per year. Carew describes the lies the merchant and miner tell each other to shift the price. Generally the merchant and a tinwork’s owner will start the fair with a big sale, which sets the anchor value for the price.
There’s a type of banking here that allows a miner to borrow money and pay back in tin. As the price of the tin is not known in advance, there’s technically no usury here. The merchant is kind of a partner.
Carew says that miner’s families are lazy and mining wrecks the morals and body of the miner, which can be recovered by farming.
Games From Folktales 