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Age of Invention: The Coal Conquest

There was no shortage of trees

In 1548-9, in a desperate bid to keep prices down, royal proclamations repeatedly and futilely banned the export of English wheat, malt, oats, barley, butter, cheese, bacon, beef, tallow, hides, and leather, to which the following year were added — like a game of inflation whack-a-mole — rye, peas, beans, bread, biscuits, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, ale, beer, wool, and candles. Wood-less, coal-dependent western Cornwall in 1600 clearly could grow trees if it wanted to — it did actually have a few coppices, but only wherever charcoal was needed to smelt the region’s tin.And by the 1720s one of the few major woods to cling on just southeast of London was mainly supplying a kind of kindling largely used in the upstairs bedrooms of the city’s taverns, presumably because they had not yet all had fireplaces installed for burning coal. A forest surveyor in 1607, writing of a county since swallowed up by London’s expansion, cried “who sees not that the general extirpation and stocking up of coppice ground in Middlesex will not breed want to them that shall succeed?” He warned that land, “if all for corn and grass, it were like Midas his wish” — enriching in the short-term, but soon to be lamented as a curse.But the problem was that coal almost always responded much faster to increased prices than wood ever could.

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