[Under construction]
Types of mining=sea-coal mining (gathering chunks at low tide);open-cast or strip mining; bell-pit mining (with hole filling); drift (horizontal) mining; slope mining; (vertical) shaft (and drift) mining=the most dangerous type
Open quarry mining and strip mining used as much as possible due to convenience and safety. Horizontal or drift mining was common. Vertical shaft mining was extremely dangerous.
Horizontal tunnels of up to 3,500 feet and shafts and tunnels down to about 600 feet exist, but depend upon the water table. The supports and existing pump technologies cannot handle any deeper shafts.
Mining
Coal, Iron, Lead, Tin, Silver, Gold, Gems, Salt, Lime, Slate
Quarrying
Slate, Stone, Marble, Alabaster, Chalk–a sizable kingdom could have thousands of open-air quarries or hillside quarries because residents building with normal stone needed a local supply or transportation costs could exceed the cost of the stone itself. So a town or village, especially one not on the coast or next to a river, often would have several quarries close by the settlement itself. For specialty stones like marble or pink, if the quarry was more than forty to fifty miles from the construction site, transporting the stone by ship was the practical option.
Iron–used for tools, weapons, armor, horseshoes, arrowheads, nails; forge, furnace (charcoal); figure on about a 4:1 ratio for raw ore to smelted ingots; output=lumps or blooms, pigs (side channel shaped pieces) or sows (larger shaped blocks); a bloom typically weighed about two hundredweights (or ~fourteen to sixteen stones of fourteen pounds each; market value=~7s/hundredweight; export duty=0.5p/load of ore taken from mining site; smith (bloomer) earns about 5p for every bloom smelted+1p for cutting it into bars; smelting uses enormous quantities of wood (e.g., thousands of cords for one mine over a period of several years would be about right), so towns with several smelters could literally consume a decent-sized forest in a few years.
Copper [bars, wire, raw copper in baskets or cases]
Tin [bars]–from shaft mining or dredging alluvial tin on stream beds (the bed layer can be up several to several dozen feet deep); furnace and leeching; tin ore appears to range from about 58 to 72 percent metal content (stream ore is typically less pure; ore from a mine is more purse; transported in blocks from 100-250 lbs), so about 200 lbs of mined ore would yield about a 150-lb. block of tin.
Lead [ingots]–byproduct of silver mining because galena ore (high lead content) has silver too; often found near copper and iron ores; ingots weighing up to 35 kg., or about 77 lbs.
Coal–used for working iron, burning lime; after chimneys, heating living areas; sea coal is low quality coal; mined in shallow bell-pits or hillside mines; cost to mine=~5-6s/fathom; sold by the hundredweight, quarter (~6p); seam (horse-load); keel (barge load, or about 20 tons); export duty on a keel=~2p; fee to lord for one horse-load=1p.
Gold
Silver [ingots]–often mixed with lead and copper ore; according to one source, a load (cartload, fodder, fother; i.e., the long ton, although the unit often varied in different regions or stages of processing) of lead ore, when smelted, would yield about 27 lbs. of silver; producers owed a tax to the king and a tithe to the church; Port Liberty and Ravenwood ingots=~6 kg. (~25 marks). Plates or ingots between 10 and 20 lbs. were common; a good mine might produce between ~800 and ~1,800 lbs. of silver per year.
Minting of Coinage [almost always a sovereign monopoly]
Ravenwood mints–in the year before the war started, the Ravenwood mint stamped over 2,800 pounds of gold and 2,400 pounds of silver into coins.
Khartras mints–in the year before the war started, the Khartras mint stamped over 2,400 pounds of gold and 8,500 pounds of silver into coins.
Tiberian Empire mints–the available data are incomplete, but the best estimates are that the mint stamped approximately 2,000 pounds of gold and 18,000 pounds of silver into coins. The declining production of gold in the Empire is one possible reason for the attempt to seize the former southern provinces.
Salt
So-called salt mountains were valuable strategic objectives, especially for any regions without easy access to salt water (oceans, salt springs, salt lakes, or dried salt lake beds). Salt monopolies were lucrative, but people resented the higher prices.
Lime
The so-called mortar-lime had several uses. Lime pits were the production sites.
Tin+Copper=Bronze [Church bells]
Tin+Lead=Pewter [Plates, Mugs]
Ravenwood produces about 600 long tons of tin
Status of miners
Miners rank above textile workers in the hierarchy of laboring trades.
Production
At the height of the Tiberian Empire’s prosperity, the Empire was operating over 200 gold mines that yielded over 20,000 pounds of gold per month. But during the decades prior to the Restoration War, yields from most of the gold and silver mines were decreasing rapidly. Many veins of ore were exhausted, and many mining shafts were too deep for the available pumps to keep the tunnels free of flooding.
Early mine owners often accumulated fabulous wealth, with one famous donation to one city by one person reaching the equivalent value of 20 million quarter penny loaves of bread.
The Ravenwood new mines are spread over a region of fifty miles from north to south and twenty-five miles from east to west. The current estimate now (c. 504 A.C.) is that Ravenwood miners produced over 6,000 pounds of gold and over 300,000 pounds of silver. The mines near West Crossing are reportedly producing enough silver for 2,500 silver coins per day.
Settlement into the Southern Continent is occurring rapidly because many people believe that Craig’s mine is a harbinger of many more possible productive mines.
