ROYAL MINING RIGHTS

21

monopolies of that time.1

No radical alteration in the

law was made till the time of William III., in 1689, when the expression "mines royal" was unambiguously defined by a new law. "No mines of Copper, Tin, Iron or Lead shall hereafter be adjudged, reputed or taken to be a mine royal, although Gold and Silver may be extracted out of the same." 2

Thus the mining rights in these metals were finally taken away from the Crown and assured to the landowner, and in consequence the raison d'être of the notorious mining monopolies, the Mines Royal, Mineral and Battery Works, and the later combination of these two, the Society of the Mines Royal,3 was removed.* The right of pre-emption of the Crown in the case of the tin mines in Cornwall and Devonshire remained. But the abolition in principle of the mining monopoly was doubtless the reason why the Crown made no further use of this method of creating a monopoly. It was used once more in the reign of Queen Anne; but after 1717 vanished wholly from the history of English mining.5

The legal position reached at the end of the seventeenth century, therefore, no longer put any obstacle in the way of free competition in the extraction of minerals. In coal the ownership of the landowner had been the rule in most cases from time immemorial. The law of 1689 put copper, tin, iron and lead in a similar position.

An exception remained in the so-called "free mining districts," which were subject to the royal rights of the Crown. Free mining existed, for the Crown merely received dues and supervised the mine courts; but the mining villages had built up a complicated system of principles and regulations which influenced in various

1 Price, 'Patents of Monopoly,' p. 50.

21 William and Mary, cap. 30; also Palgrave, ii. p. 765.

3 For details see Price, 'Patents,' p. 49 and seq. and p. 55 and seq.; also Cunningham, English Industries,' p. 59.

*Lewis, 'Stannaries,' p. 42.

5 Ibid. pp. 48-9, 220-221.

22

1

FREE MINING DISTRICTS

directions the organisation of each district. Generally speaking, no village in these districts set up a monopolist system of mining. Of the five free mining districts known to us, the Mendip Hills, Alston Moor, the tin districts in Devonshire and Cornwall, some parts of Derbyshire and the Forest of Dean, only the last was organised on the monopolist lines of a gild, while in all the others no special limitations seem to have been set by the local mining authorities on the grant of mining rights. In the Forest of Dean, however, the Mine Law Court started after about 1660 to attempt monopolist control over production and markets in all kinds of ways -by attaching various conditions to the permission to mine as a "free miner," by fixing the prices, even by assigning definite prices to particular markets, and trying to limit the production of individual miners.2 In 1675, however, this organisation seems to have been broken up by outsiders, who, in defiance of the Court, but also without interference from it, began to mine "with the express purpose of working against a coal monopoly." These "foreigners," as they were called, in contradistinction to the free miners," became more and more numerous, especially when the Mine Court came to an end in 1777, and the "free miners" relinquished their property more and more to strangers. Still the possibility of monopoly lasted longer here than elsewhere in English mining. The exception is, however, an inconsiderable one. In the other free mining districts, especially in the tin mines of Cornwall and Devon, there was no difficulty in acquiring mine concessions. Mining rights went

3

1Lewis, for coal, p. 78; for free mining, p. 76; for single districts, pp. 78-81; for the organisation in the Forest of Dean, pp. 79 and 173 seq.

2 Thomas Sopwith, 'The Award of the Dean Forest Commissioners,' London 1841, pp. 12-20; Nicholls, Forest of Dean,' London 1858, p. 45

and seq.

Fourth and Fifth Reports of Dean Forest Commissioners, London 1835, pp. 44 and 7-10; also Nicholls, p. 116.

4v. Lewis, op. cit. p. 161 for details.

THE CROWN'S PREROGATIVE. ITS ABOLITION 23

with the ownership of the land, after the law of 1689 had finally settled and brought into general use this legal principle.

In the same year took place the final repeal of another legal enactment of the highest importance for the creation of monopolies. The claims of the Royal Prerogative to dispense with the law, by which Prerogative the Crown had granted monopolies over the head of Parliament by hair-splitting interpretations or even open evasion of the existing law, was abolished in the Bill of Rights. Even though the number of existing monopolies had in all probability greatly decreased since about 1650 or 1660unfortunately we have no detailed record—the extinction of that right showed that Parliament had henceforth the power to prevent all private trade monopolies by means which could not legally be evaded. Only local monopolies based on gild and corporation rights and having nothing in common with the great national monopolies of the Tudor and early Stuarts could now exist, except where Parliament by its own act otherwise ordained. Great capitalist monopolies such as we have in view, controlling by legal privilege the entire national production of a given branch of industry, were once and for all impossible. The Long Parliament in 1640 had declared most of the monopolies void, and thereby taken upon itself functions in relation to the Crown for which it had no constitutional justification. After the Restoration the Crown found itself similarly hindered by the increasing power of Parliament 2 in the exercise of its former custom of settling industrial questions on its own initiative. This state of affairs received recognition in theory by the abolition in 1689 of the Royal Prerogative, and the always latent 3 conflict between a Crown inclined to befriend monopolists and a Parliament that was bitterly hostile to them was thus finally decided in favour of the latter.

1 Macaulay, p. 209.

2 Cunningham, vol. i. pp. 201 and 205.

3 Unwin, 'Industrial Organisation,' p. 169. Interesting account of such a conflict in 1664.

24 ECONOMIC ORGANISATION OF MONOPOLY

The legal conditions which were thus altered at the end of the seventeenth century had for about a century largely determined the creation of monopolies in its general aspect. But a number of other circumstances, such as the economic characteristics of the industries concerned, the various trade regulations, and the manner in which the laws relating to the trade were administered had no less influence on the actual development of the monopoly in individual cases. The forms of such monopolies were very various. They differed from one another, owing to the differences and permutations of the above and other circumstances, in structure, in the size of their sphere of action, and in economic potency. No correct estimate of the actual importance of the early monopolies in the economic life of the day can therefore be gained without an examination of individual monopolies and their special peculiarities.

Some of the most important, curiously overlooked by recent investigators, are to be found in mining, and especially in coal mining. Even without the aid of the law the large consuming centres were limited for their supplies of mining products to particular producing areas, which either because of the primitive means of transport or from lack of any competing source of supply soon acquired a monopoly. London, for instance, could only get coal or tin from Newcastle and Cornwall even when the prices of those commodities rose very high. Clearly, if the exploitation of these natural monopolies was further delivered over by legal concession to a few individuals, or often to a single individual, a monopoly of unusual strength was possible.

We first hear of monopolies in the coal mines of the north in 1590. Their history is connected with the group of mines which, as has already been mentioned, belonged originally to Queen Elizabeth, and was then transferred to the town of Newcastle. The town made over its property to a company of free citizens called 1 Neither Unwin nor Price mention the coal monopoly.

THE NEWCASTLE COAL GILD

25

hostmen, and this company gave its rights to eighteen or twenty of its members, who became coal miners and coal merchants in combination.1 This concentration of the coal trade in a few hands much disturbed the London buyers, the more so as the price of coal rose greatly between 1582 and 1590.2 Rumours of a monopolist ring among northern coal miners were in the air, and in 1590 the Lord Mayor of London made complaint to the Treasurer Burleigh that the the hostmen had " engrossed" the mines, and petitioned that "all mines should be worked and a maximum price of seven shillings a chaldron fixed." 3

No special privilege from the Crown had so far been necessary for the growth of a monopolist organisation of production. But it by no means followed that there was no desire for additional State protection. On the contrary, the stronger the agitation of the consuming interests became, the more anxious the monopolists were to see their organisation sanctioned by the Crown. After further complaints in 1597 against the excessive coal prices, hostmen seized a chance opportunity to attempt to obtain incorporation as a gild. The town of Newcastle had for a long while neglected an obligation existing since the days of Henry V. to pay a tax of 2d. a chaldron to the Crown. Queen Elizabeth claimed the debt, and the town made her the following proposal: the arrears to be struck off their debit account, and the queen further to grant a gild patent to a "brotherhood, called the free hostmen, for the sale of every kind of coal to the ships," in return for which she should receive 12d. for every chaldron of coal carried by sea. The queen accepted this

1 Brand, History of Newcastle,' p. 269.

2 According to Dunn, 'View of the Coal Trade,' p. 21, coal on ship at Newcastle cost 6s. in 1582; 8s. in 1585, and 9s. in 1590.

3 Brand, also Dunn, p. 13.

J. D. Rogers in Palgrave, London 1899, vol. iii. p. 615 A.

5 For authorities see my article on 'English Cartels of the Past" in Schmoller's 'Jahrbucher,' 1907, p. 158.