Lead has been mined in Britain since ancient times – archaeologists have found evidence of Roman lead mining in Somerset’s Mendip hills. Galena (lead ore) was also exploited in Cumberland, Derbyshire, Devonshire, Durham, North Wales, Westmorland and Yorkshire. After being refined or smelted, lead was incredibly versatile; it was made into sheets, pipes, and lead-shot.

The way the mines were worked depended on the geology of the area. In the Alston Moor district, the men drove the first level (horizontal passage) into the hillside. Then they would “ascend upwards, and make another level&hellip by drilling and blasting out the rock by gunpowder”. Scaffolding or ladders were used to climb from one vein to the next. Alternatively, the men followed the veins of ore downwards in a similar fashion, placing ladders between each level with resting places, repeating the process until they were “500 or 600 feet lower down than the first level”. (Children’s Employment Commission: Report on Mines, XV, 1842).

At Wanlockhead in Scotland, miners ascended and descended the shafts by “ropes attached to windlasses worked by their comrades. No buckets… as… in coal-pits were used, but a knot having been made in the cable, the right leg was thrust through it; the rope was then grasped between the left arm and the sides; the candle, inserted in a ball of clay, was carried in the left hand; and the right used in fending off the sides of the shaft”. (Sir William Fraser, The Stirlings of Keir, Edinburgh, 1858).

Miners worked under the ‘bargain’ system, in which a gang of men agreed a price with the mine boss or overseer, and shared out the profits from their work. Local repositories hold ‘bargain books’; for example, Northumberland Archives has examples for the Weardale district (NRO672) from the early 18th century to the late 19th century, www.experiencewoodhorn.com/ collections/.

The miners’ wages depended on the price of lead. During the reign of Charles I, Derbyshire miners petitioned the House of Commons asking for relief from the tax on lead, and The National Archives, Kew holds a copy of the petition: E101/280/18.

Yorkshireman Frederick Hall complained in the early 1800s that if lead’s price was low, miners earned only 2s 6d to 3s per week, and subsisted mostly on oatmeal. When lead fetched a high price, they earned 8s to 12s weekly, worth roughly £45 today (An Appeal To The Poor Miner, 1818). Meat was still a rare luxury in the early 1840s at Leadhills, south Lanarkshire, where the only village butcher abandoned his shop owing to poor sales; mining families lived on potatoes, oatcakes and milk.

Local customs
Derbyshire had its own peculiar lead mining customs; for a detailed account, see Thomas Tapping, A Treatise On… Derbyshire Mining Customs, Shaw and Sons, 1854 (free on Google Books books.google.co.uk). The barmote courts, which dated back to medieval times, regulated disputes over claims to the land, and royalties or duties owed on the lead mined. The metal rights holders were called ‘barmasters’. Derbyshire Record Office holds several collections relating to these courts, derbyshire.gov.uk .

Mining could be dangerous; sometimes the tunnel roof collapsed, or men fell down the mine shaft. Lead is highly toxic, so miners suffered from lung disease (‘miner’s asthma’) because they breathed in ore dust (which sometimes contained arsenic) and smoke from the gunpowder used for blasting. According to the 1842 Mines Report, most miners were ‘permanently disabled at fifty’ or even 40 years of age.

Whole families were involved in mining. From about the age of nine, children worked on the surface as ‘dressers’: they washed, broke up and sorted the ore to make it ready for smelting. A nine-year-old could earn 4d per day. Unlike coal mines (where tiny children often worked underground before the 1842 Mines Act), it was rare to find child lead miners, because strength was needed to extract lead ore from the surrounding rock. At Alston Moor in Cumbria, where over 5000 people worked in lead-mining, only 432 children and young persons were employed, and of these just 53 worked underground; only seven were younger than 13 years (Children’s Employment Commission: Report on Mines, XV, 1842).

Many lead miners were renowned for their literacy. Parents took pride in their children’s education. One very good free school at Nenthead, Cumbria, was run by a Quaker firm, the London Lead Company. Children aged six to eleven learned the three ‘R’s, natural history and geography; girls were taught sewing and knitting. In the summer, working children attended evening classes. During winter months, when no ore-washing was done (it was too cold), olderchildren also attended day classes. The firm insisted that children attended Sunday school, and pupils were presented with a Bible when they reached a certain standard of religious knowledge.

At Leadhills, the school was so good one observer claimed miners’ children enjoyed a “better system of intellectual culture than even the middle-class children of England generally”. The Leadhills miners set up their own lending library in 1741: the first workers’ library in Britain. It boasted 1800 volumes by the 1840s. At nearby Wanlockhead, home to about 700 people, miners had “their own minister and school; and a library of upwards of 1300 volumes, founded in 1756&hellip [and] a juvenile library” (Second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission: Trades and Manufactures, XIII, 1843).

However, by World War Two, cheap foreign imports made it uneconomic to mine lead in Britain. Thousands of years of mining have left their mark on its landscape, however, and there are several museums where you can explore your miner ancestors’ heritage and picture their hard working lives.