Welsh Journals

THE LEAD MINERS OF FLINTSHIRE AND DENBIGHSHIRE C. J. WILLIAMS Clwyd Record Office LEAD ore has probably been mined in north-east Wales for over two thousand years, although early activity was on a small scale, and sporadic in nature. Evidence of mining in the Roman period comes from the discovery of inscribed pigs of lead and a smelting furnace, probably for ore from Halkyn, excavated at Pentre, near Flint. Lead was supplied for the building of castles, abbeys and churches in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and small groups of skilled German and Derbyshire miners were brought in to develop the mines. Both at Hopedale in Flintshire and Minera in Denbighshire traditional mining laws and customs, on the model of those in use in Derbyshire and elsewhere, were intro- duced and codified. Yet mining remained limited by later standards, being confined to opencast or shallow workings along the veins. Only in the seventeenth century, and especially after the Restoration, did a period of continuous and systematic mining begin, which lasted until just before the First World War. In 1601 the Grosvenor family of Eaton Hall in Cheshire acquired the mineral rights of much of central Flintshire and Denbighshire, and took over a smelting-mill at Leadmill, Mold.2 At the end of the century the Quaker-owned London Lead Company appeared in the area, and in 1703, at Gadlys near Bagillt, successfully developed the process of smelting lead ore with coal. A series of lead-smelting works sprang up along the Dee estuary, and these smelted ores not only from the local mines, but from central Wales, Shropshire, Ireland and Scotland, until the end of the nineteenth century. The production of the Flintshire and Denbighshire lead mines between 1845, when official statistics begin, and 1938, was nearly a million tons of lead and zinc ore, more than any other orefield apart from the northern Pennines, and equivalent to 13 per cent of the total British production of lead ore, and 27 per cent of that of zinc.4 The highest output came in the 1850s and 1860s, followed by a decline, a boom in the last two decades of the century, and another decline which accelerated sharply after about 1910.5 Before 1845 no official statistics are available, but it has been estimated that production in the century and a half before 1845 was more than twice as much as in the period since.6 Between 1841 and 1901 the census, taken every decade, shows that the number of lead miners in both counties combined7 varied between 2,786 (1851) and 1,351 (1891), the general trend being towards the lower figure. In this period there were more lead miners in the Flintshire and Denbighshire orefield than in any other Welsh county, except in 1871 when slightly more were employed in both Cardiganshire and Mont- gomeryshire.8 There is no evidence of the number of miners before 1841, although the output figures quoted above suggest that there were more in the eighteenth than in the nineteenth century. The decline of lead mining in the late nineteenth century, and the growth of the coal mining industry, can be illustrated by comparing the numbers of men each employed. The number of coal miners in Flintshire and Denbighshire in 1841 was about 3,700- double the figure for lead miners (1,792). It had increased to 14,500 (mostly in Denbigh- shire) by 1911, when the lead mines employed only 664 men. But in the same years the