Man’s ascent throughout the ages has always been calibrated as a coefficient of power. From the earliest precivilized societies, man’s ability to lift, move, propel, and ignite endowed him with the decisive advantage over every competitor, human or not. True, the use of tools separates man from beast. But the ability to dynamically utilize those tools separates one man from another. Hence, the concepts of better, faster, and farther have always been the measure of any society’s capacity to flourish, manufacture, defend, and conquer—and thereby succeed, however transiently until outdone by another.
From the first waterborne boats and wheels of ancient Mesopotamia fifty-five hundred years ago, to the Industrial Revolution and our twenty-first-century world, competitive man has been in a power struggle, that is, a struggle to discover and harness the energy needed to achieve or maintain supremacy. He who controls energy controls the key to any society’s prosperity or demise. In consequence, the quest to master nature’s second-greatest mystery—after life itself—compels society to eagerly reach for the power, if necessary walk into the flame, even when it burns.
Energy cannot be created. It can only be captured or released by technology or an act of nature. As far back as prehistoric times, even the omnipresent elements of wind, sun, fire, and water, as well as the readily available brute force of man and yoked beast, all required technology to make them work. Rudimentary wheels, simple riverboats, pulleys, torches, bows, crude waterwheels and grindstones, all constituted the cutting-edge technological advances of their day. They enabled survival for many and wealth for a few. Throughout history, energy has been used to decisively advance society—but always at a high price that enriched the few who controlled it. The history of society’s dependence on energy is a chronicle of monopoly, manipulation, and merciless profiteering from time immemorial.
The masters of energy and its technology always became the masters of men, and likewise, the masters of men regularly acquired the newest secrets of technology in a pattern of dominion and resource exploitation. He who dominated also exploited. Whether in the spotlight or the shadows, the struggle to marshal energy throughout the ages became mankind’s truest power struggle.
Beginning with civilization’s earliest chapters, the supply of energy sources to be tapped became as pivotal as the technology itself. From the Stone Age to medieval times, humanity thrived on a single depletable energy source, a precious fuel that heated dwellings, cooked food, yielded all manner of comfort, and eventually propelled armies and navies into battle. Controlling its supply motivated endless invasions and conquests and brought great wealth to the masters of that supply.
That fuel was wood.
More than a mere source of Promethean sustenance to thwart the cold and cook one’s meat, wood was quite simply mankind’s first industrial and manufacturing fuel. Over ten thousand years ago early people used campfires to create hardened pottery and ceramics and concomitantly learned that certain rock metals melted into molten slag that could endlessly be shaped by hammering and casting. Now all sorts of hardened tools, weapons, and ornaments were possible. From the prized ashes of simple society arose the smelting industry.1
Pyrotechnic production required higher temperatures than the heat of a campfire, which typically burns at a temperature of about 600–650°. Hearths, kilns, and furnaces that intensified fire to above 800° followed, and then superheated forges, capable of 1,300° flames. This technology catapulted the manufacture of sophisticated tools, weapons, jewelry, and ornaments. It enabled the creation of coins—metal money—which was the prerequisite for expansive trade.2
Smelting became the industrial dynamo of conquerors and the exalted. Its manufactured product permitted trade. It facilitated agriculture. Smelting enabled civilization itself. It was the technological font from which everything else flowed.
But it all required massive supplies of trees and brush. Only seven metals were known to ancient smelters: gold, going back eight thousand years; copper, going back some sixty-two hundred years; and subsequently, silver, lead, tin, iron, and mercury. The craving for jewelry and the fruits of metalworking swept through the ancient world. In industrialized regions where smelting flourished, forests were depleted faster than they could be restored. A felled tree for tomorrow’s smelter could be replaced only after a generation of growth.3
In the ancient world, palace doors were festooned with regal insignia. Metallic temple gods were arrayed in statuary grandeur. Knives cut deep. Swords cleft swift and sure. Tiny awls and needles dug into minuscule places. Crafted bracelets and amulets graced the perfumed bodies of both men and women. Before all those products were created, a tree furnished the energy to make them. Trees burned for fuel beneath black, sooty smelters made the world more beautiful, more efficient, and, of course, more deadly. Supplying these trees gave rise to an ancient lumber trade as lucrative as the one for gold and diamonds.
Cyprus bears witness. The island of Cyprus itself became synonymous with copper smelting. The metal copper itself is actually named for Cyprus. In Latin, copper was known as cyprium or “metal of Cyprus.” Romans and other ancients imported virtually all their copper from the Mediterranean isle. In the desert kingdoms of the Nile and Mesopotamia, the timber needed to stoke the smelters was scarce. Cyprus emerged as the leading copper supplier not because of its many craftsmen—who could be found elsewhere, or the presence of copper deposits—which could be found in mines throughout the greater Middle East region, but because the island possessed the vast forests needed to fuel the smelters. Cyprus had the power.4
The island’s supply was bountiful. A typical Cypriot copper ingot weighed about sixty-five pounds. These mass-produced ingots became a veritable unit of trade throughout the Mediterranean. More than twenty-thousand pieces of copper slag were unearthed near the furnace fragments of just a single copper-smelter on Cyprus. One shipwrecked vessel alone, sailing either to or from Cyprus, was sent to the bottom hauling more than eleven tons of pure copper.5
Copper smelting was not merely the concern of craftsmen who toiled at the smelter’s scorching flames. The topic infused the conversations of kings, who marveled at the awesome products that emerged from the pyre.
“Now I have sent five hundred talents of copper to you,” wrote the Cypriot king of Alasiya to the Egyptian pharaoh in Amarna in the mid-1300s BCE. The king of Alasiya added, “I have sent it to you as a gift for my [regal] brother [the pharaoh]. Do not. . . be concerned that the amount of copper is too little, for in my land the hand of [the god] Nergal, my lord, has killed all the men of my land [with a plague], and so there is not a single copper-worker. Therefore, do not let my brother be concerned. Send your messenger along with my messenger quickly, and all the copper that you desire I will send you.”6
During the subsequent Bronze Age, Cyprus quickly became an exporter of not only smelted goods, but also of the timbers needed to fuel smelters elsewhere in the arid and often treeless Near East. That same mid-1300s BCE letter to the pharaoh in Amarna reminded the Egyptian, “Furthermore, my brother, the people of my land speak to me about the lumber that the king of Egypt receives from me. So, my brother, make the payment to me.”7
In all lands, wood as a fuel to smelt copper, bronze, and iron, and also to fire pottery, always competed with its requirement as a construction material for ships, furnishings, weapons, and other basic uses. Therefore, in the ancient Mediterranean basin, Cyprus became a pivotal supplier to the warring kingdoms, many of which lacked the abundant forests needed to power their sieges and conquests.8
One of the mightiest of the contending kingdoms was Egypt. The pharaoh would not permit his Cypriot timber supplies to dwindle. To forestall an Egyptian invasion to seize the woodlands, the Cypriots regularly paid massive amounts of lumber tribute to the pharaoh. Eventually, in the early 1500s BCE, Thutmose III would not settle for tribute. He annexed the island outright and plundered long tracts of trees, completely denuding many areas of the island. But long before the takeover, the smelters, woodcutters, builders, and plunderers had almost totally deforested Cyprus. Many centuries later, the island is still treeless along much of its terrain. Arid conditions set in.9
Without wood fuel there was no food, no warmth, and, even more important to ancient monarchs, no capacity for war. The raging appetite of the warring nations was insatiable and reflected little regard for the replenishment of their precious power source. After Cyprus became depleted, ancient rulers looked to other lush coastal areas to secure wood fuel. The lands that became Greece, Spain, and Italy all fed the wood-fuel machine. One typical Grecian lime kiln engorged one thousand muleloads of juniper wood in a single burn. Fifty such kilns would devour six thousand metric tons of trees and brush annually. Buried within the Mediterranean littoral are some seventy to ninety million tons of slag from ancient smelting, about a third of it concentrated in Iberia. This ceaseless industrial fueling caused the deforestation of an estimated fifty to seventy million acres of woodlands.10
Agricultural settlement also cleared broad tracts of trees throughout Central Europe and especially in England.11 Controlling the forests for fuel as well as game animals, construction purposes, and agrarian enterprise continued throughout the centuries as a raison d’être for invasion and became fundamental in the definition of wealth. Timberland not only furnished valuable fuel, it also represented strategic territory.
Hence, throughout the Common Era, monarchs understood that even if wood was not the world’s most precious commodity, such as dazzling gems and fine spice, it was certainly the most important. Without wood, industrial fueling and building were impossible. In England, for example, the Norman kings coveted the vast forestlands for fuel as well as for game and building material. Quickly, it became the trees that really separated the peasant people from their ruling monarchs. Trees, in many ways, defined the class struggle itself.
It began with William the Conqueror of Normandy in the years after he was crowned king of England in 1066. William was a sometimes compassionate but often ruthless ruler. He banned most capital punishment in favor of gouging out the eyes and cutting off the testicles, which he claimed was a compassionate and humanitarian substitute. The hard-battling monarch was also profoundly consumed with the details of every natural and economic asset extant in his realm. Everything of value was enumerated. Everything was taxed. William received the tax revenues, aggrandizing his war-making and personal coffers. This in mind, William commissioned the fabled Domesday Book, an exhaustive inventory and census of every person, every asset, and every natural resource in all of England’s 13,418 settlements. The survey itemized seventy-eight hundred wooded areas with an average tree cover of 15 percent.12
As part of this all-encompassing approach to national asset management, William ordained the repressive Forest Law. Prior to William I, the Anglo-Saxon kings had maintained large swaths of land to protect game animals, but the peasants were free to cut trees to use as firewood and to use in the assembling of rough-hewn furniture. Once enthroned, William I revised the Anglo-Saxon traditions, annexing land from the barons to create what he termed the New Forest. The New Forest was a massive and enlarged protected realm where deer and trees became sacrosanct and humans could be executed for seeking nature’s meat and warmth. Only the king and his favored parties and designates could hunt venison and boar, and only they could cut wood for any use, personal or industrial. Hunting and woodcutting by peasants and even barons was prohibited under penalty of fine, mutilation, or death. In practice, money was always preferred to mutilation by both the defendant and the king.13
Some believe that William I’s New Forest, along with a collection of other protected forests, comprised as much as 25 percent of England’s total landmass. The process called afforestation, that is, adding lands to the New Forest, engulfed more than just obvious woodlands. The New Forest extended over purely residential villages and church sites, establishing a unique regal definition of “forest” that included not just dense wooded acreage, but also small clusters of trees along the side of the roads, hedgerows, and waterways and even those sparsely located amidst the grasslands.14
While William’s main motive in establishing the New Forest, often fenced in by impalers, was to protect the habitat of the venison and boar he loved to hunt, he wanted to lock in more than just a personal food supply. Controlling all the trees of the New Forest enriched the king with the wealth of timber, not only for building, but also for fuel.15
The barons and mercantile class became obliged to curry favor to secure wood. William I created hunting and woodcutting “exemptions” for his noble friends and important personages—but at a price. Being well-to-do only increased the king’s vexatious levy.16
What became costly for the comfortable man was oppressive for the common man. New Forest policies deprived the subsistence population of the very trees they needed for everyday living. To cook their meals and fight the cold English nights, the peasantry resorted to traveling on foot beyond the closest forest border to find wood fuel. If they were in or near the New Forest, they nervously felled protected trees at night or engaged in clandestine coppicing and pollarding, methods of cutting live trees for rapid regrowth.17
Further brutalizing the common man, special “forest courts” were established to try both poachers of game and gleaners of royal limbs and branches. These ruthless courts were insulated from all other legal processes, capriciously administered, often viciously punitive, and it forged an hour-to-hour source of hatred and resentment toward the Crown. He who dared saw off a tree limb or even a branch in the king’s forest to heat his home would be fined a ruinous amount, which if he could not pay, meant jailing; or the offender could have his hand hacked off, and sometimes his eyes ripped from their sockets or his testicles cut away. No one could predict how harsh or lenient any judgment would be because Forest Law was by definition arbitrary justice.18
Meanwhile, the new technology of charcoal made the king’s forest and all other woodlands even more valuable as a fuel source. Charcoal, oven-dried wood devoid of moisture, generated more energy per measure than wood, but more important it weighed far less than cut firewood. The price of every bundle of medieval wood fuel incorporated a transportation cost of about 20 percent, often more. The lighter the load, the cheaper the shipping cost, so wood fuel became more affordable when converted to charcoal. Hence, much of London’s industrial wood fuel entered the city as charcoal. Lightweight and delivered in handy sacks, charcoal quickly became the choice of iron smelters.19
In 1189, Richard I elected to raise money by disafforesting, that is, by detaching lands from the New Forest and selling them back to the barons and others who needed wood for industrial fuels, heating, and ordinary building. Wood and charcoal distribution flourished under a small group of favored woodmongers and dealers located around London’s Wood-wharf.20 Although the power source had shifted from the king’s near monopoly into an elite oligopoly, the masses were still afflicted when they sought wood fuel.
But through the oligopoly, charcoal fuel proliferated throughout London’s trades and industries. By the 1200s, brewers and bakers, tile makers, glassblowers, pottery producers, and a range of other craftsmen all became hour-to-hour consumers of charcoal.21 This only further magnified the indispensable nature of the oligopolists.
In 1215, King John consented to the Magna Carta in response to the seething grievances of “the people,” that is, the barons and mercantile class who rebelled against the sting of regal prerogative. Among its many other provisions, the Magna Carta also seemingly dismantled the New Forest and its odious practices. “All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. . . . All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants. . . are at once to be investigated in every county . . . and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably.”22
But in practice, England’s forest inequities continued. Shortly after the Magna Carta was promulgated, King John’s son and successor, Henry III, announced a supplement, the Charter of the Forest, to appease unad-dressed continued mass discontent over the woodlands. The Charter rescinded mutilation and blinding as penalties for wood and game enroachment.23
Yet the Charter of the Forest still did not open wood fuel to the common man. Instead, the reform merely amplified the wood oligopoly’s ability to exploit the forests and manipulate the price of this precious but dwindling resource. In cycles that alternated between ample supply, hoarding, and calculated shortages, wood became simultaneously indispensable and often impossible to obtain except at a great price.
By 1300, the fast-growing iron industry and the equally fast-depleting timber supply had precipitated a protracted energy crisis. Everyone needed wood. They took it faster than the harvested trees could be replaced. London’s bakers and brewers alone consumed about 30,000 tons of firewood each year. The whole city, population 80,000 strong, burned about 140,000 tons annually. The Middlesex and Surrey counties by themselves may have consumed 518,000 acres of forest each year, or about 10 percent annually of the wooded acreage in those two counties. By this time, transport, mainly by river, came to constitute some 20 percent of wood charcoal’s cost, just as it did with plain wood. In fact, overland costs could double and even quadruple the price of firewood, depending upon the distance traversed and tolls paid. Therefore, proximity and geography were a decisive factor in any supply.24
Add the substantial nonfuel uses of wood, such as construction, shipbuilding, carving, and fence making, as well as broad clearances for agriculture and settlement, and it was clear to all that the woodlands of England were depleting faster than they could be replenished.25
Throughout the 1500s, the populace roiled over a constellation of grievances of which the forest emerged as a key focal point. The popular late Middle Ages fictional character Robin Hood, dressed in green to symbolize the forest, dodged fines for forest offenses and stole from the rich to give to the poor. His character was fictional. But his appeal was painfully real and embodied the struggle over wood.26
More people in medieval England would have gone hungry, and more forest acres would have been cleared, had it not been for some rank and unlikable alternatives. The first alternative was peat. Peat can best be described as rotted vegetable matter, carbonized over millennia, but captured only midway in the coalification process. Found in dense bogs, peat can be cut into sections and burned as fuel. Peasants had resorted to peat for generations, but it required wading into thick muck to slice off portable squares. In their homes, villagers endured an awful sulfuric stench when incinerating peat for heat or food preparation. Not everywhere abundant, peat was concentrated in certain districts of the British Isles, mainly available to those living near the malodorous bogs in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. But peat was also transported to city centers, including London, for those residences and businesses that could not afford or could not obtain dependable supplies of ordinary firewood or charcoal.27 The foul solution of peat drove home to the peasantry that wood fuel was a fulcrum of their class struggle.
In the 1500s, peat fuel was surpassed by an even more distasteful alternative: coal. The same millennial process that produces peat also yields coal after final aeons of geological pressure. Known for its noxious, smelly smoke and grime, coal, in spite of its repulsiveness, trapped more concentrated carbon energy per pound than firewood, charcoal, or peat. True, it was mined from the ground in hazardous operations. True, this dismal fuel alternative transformed England into a sootscape.28 But by virtue of its immense power yield, coal defined centuries of English industrial life and concomitantly allowed that country to preserve her rapidly dwindling forestlands for more important things, such as building naval warships.
Coal use began not with the well-known ore extracted from subterranean seams, but with a similar substance called sea coal, which washed up along the coast near Durham in England’s northeast. Later, the more familiar rock was also discovered inland, exposed in the hillsides and the banks of the nearby river Tyne. The Romans certainly employed it in the early centuries of the Common Era. The combustible nuggets produced the fuel to forge Roman military metal and operate Caesar’s war fortifications. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the peasant class, especially those without access to peat, were compelled to rediscover coal as a substitute for wood.29
The royal wood monopolies and hoarding regimens had made the repugnant sea coal a necessity for the average man’s survival, as well as for industrial and commercial growth. In the last four decades of the thirteenth century, the cost of wood increased about 70 percent, while sea coal only increased 23 percent. Coal became affordable. For most in London, wood was not. Even though the New Forest had been dismantled, cartel hoarding kept the woodlands out of reach of most households and manufacturing concerns. Londoners had no choice but to resort to sea coal, which was rapidly becoming known simply as coal. By 1300, London’s total annual wood-fuel demand was seventy thousand acres. By 1400, it was only forty-four thousand, despite prodigious industrial, commercial, and population growth. Why? Because wood and charcoal continued to hover out of reach for the many.30 That said, the abundant use of cheap coal, toxic and polluting as it was, actuated the city’s extraordinary expansion, turning London into an economic powerhouse—a sooty, choking powerhouse, but nonetheless a powerhouse.
Yet almost from its inception, coal became more than just an abundant substitute source of fuel to benefit the advancing Western European civilization. For mankind, coal was both a blessing and a curse. This black combustible was plentiful in the ground. It was also poison in the air. That said, a nugget of coal was power in the palm of one’s hand. But whose hand? Quickly, coal became the basis for a rapacious controlling medieval cartel that manipulated its supply, gouged the price, and waged war against competitors. The Lords of Coal achieved great personal wealth, but doing so required continuous deception, price fixing, and other monopolistic tactics to the disadvantage of an entire society that depended upon their commodity.
The glissando of coal cartels began in the Church, which owned the original northeastern coastal lands that contained the ore deposits, especially around Durham. In the late 1100s and throughout the 1200s, the prince bishops of Durham controlled much of northeast England’s best coal. The holy men of the Durham diocese were called prince bishops because they enjoyed the independent power to convene their own parliament, raise armies, levy taxes, and control the woods and mines of Durham County.31
For many years, the ecclesiastic monopoly was able to manipulate coal prices by restricting its supply. In 1303, the prince bishop of Durham, under increasing pressure from London to reduce his secular activities, leased key coal lands to wealthy speculators. By this time a budding rival cartel was emerging in nearby Newcastle on the Tyne. No matter how much coal was pulled up in baskets from the dugout mines and excavated from the deep pits of Durham, the coal depended upon the river Tyne for transport. Newcastle and its monopolistic guilds controlled the river Tyne. After a bitter feud with the prince bishops, the merchants of Newcastle wrested the monopoly from the Church, and built their own powerful coal cartel.32
The successor cartel, not controlled by Church or Crown, was a combine of private merchants known as the Hostmen of Newcastle. The Hostmen—so named because they “hosted” other merchants and traders—were willing to squeeze and starve all of coal-dependent Britain and Western Europe for their financial gain. Their success was guaranteed by the great geographic fortune of a river they controlled and, of course, the dearth of wood, which made coal increasingly indispensable. Certainly, coal deposits existed and were mined elsewhere in England, Wales, and Scotland. But the Tyne River allowed Newcastle to treat their coal not as a local commodity but as an export to the fuel-hungry cities, such as London. Coal was transported by water. Those cities that imported coal became dependent upon the Hostmen and their river-empowered monopoly.33
The almost invincible coal monopoly of the Hostmen lasted for centuries. The Hostmen wrote the rulebook and the schoolbook for all fuel monopolies to follow, even into the twenty-first century. They invented the calculated energy shortage.
Coal in the 1200s and 1300s was a relatively newer aspect of commerce, one not covered by Newcastle’s powerful guilds. The Hostmen seized upon coal commerce. Being seagoing merchants, the Hostmen owned the boats. Thus, they exercised total control over the restive wage-earning keelmen. That gave them effective control over the coal, regardless of who owned the coal mines. No coal could be carried down the river unless Hostmen keelboats serviced the anchored cargo vessels.34
The aggrandizement of the Hostmen continued throughout the 1300s during successive royal reigns with Crown writs of protection directed against the Church and other competitors. In 1404, Henry IV formally recognized the Hostmen as an official company. The Encoppice-ment Act of 1483 mandated that charcoal-producing woodlands be left protected for seven years at a time. As wood availability dwindled, coal continued to ascend, with the Hostmen at the helm.35
By the 1500s, the Hostmen rigidly controlled every keelboat and keel-man on the river Tyne. Their river-ferrying consolidation coincided with Henry VIII’s dissolution of ecclesiastic powers throughout England beginning in 1536. This permitted the Hostmen to move beyond the river. They acquired and/or leased many of the nearby coal mines themselves. Then they went further and purchased interests in the great coal ships known as colliers. By the 1550s, the Hostmen commanded the coal—from ground excavation to river distribution—that much of England and several Western European nations depended upon for their social and industrial lifeblood. The town of Newcastle grew to some ten thousand inhabitants, many directly or indirectly involved in supplying coal to England and Western Europe. Coal was Newcastle. Newcastle was coal. Newcastle functioned almost like an insulated and autonomous exporting nation, but situated within the kingdom.36
With the rise of the Royal Navy and other national fleets in the mid to late 1500s, massive amounts of wood were diverted for war vessels. This too further pinched the availability of wood for charcoal. In 1578, Elizabeth I, who owned the coal lands of the Newcastle region, decided to profit more personally. She issued an advantageous 99-year lease to her favorite moneylender and industrialist, Thomas Sutton. Her so-called Grand Lease gave Sutton control of vast stretches of Newcastle coal holdings.37 Sutton and Elizabeth could rule the nation’s energy supply.
But Sutton was not a Newcastle freeman and was instead considered an outsider. Although he owned the mines through royal lease, Sutton was unable to buy or influence his way into the Hostmen’s favor—despite the queen’s personal backing. They froze him out of freeman status and prohibited the keelmen from ferrying any of his loads. Within five years, the influential Sutton was forced to sell his leasehold to the Hostmen for a mere £4,75O.38
But Elizabeth I still owned much of the Newcastle coal lands, whoever exploited them. Moreover, royal counselors advised the cash-strapped queen to quietly lease additional coal tracts in Durham from other owners. That meant the Church. Elizabeth successfully pressured the bishop to approve cut-rate land leases to her. Then, acting as a pure middleman, the queen released the land to genuine mine operators at a profit, thus adding shillings to every coal consumer’s fuel cost.39
In 1570, when Elizabeth had passed a law against the further cutting of trees for smelting in her own remaining royal forests, this to preserve wood for navy shipbuilding, demand for her coal lands had simultaneously soared. That demand continued to grow exponentially due to the onslaught of better and more charcoal-consuming smelters. With the rise of navies, the need for iron cannons, anchors, and fittings multiplied. The forests literally sprouted blast furnaces and forges, especially since smelting operations were by necessity located within ten miles of a forest and its charcoal supply. A man traversing the forest would discover one blazing smelter every two square miles. Each such ironworks consumed the annual regrowth of 70,000 wooded acres.40
Surely, by the end of the sixteenth century, the new forbidden fruit for the masses was not an apple, but a tree branch. Wood was reserved only for the most essential needs or affluent customers. Every preserved tree only increased the power of the Hostmen. In 1590, the lord mayor of London complained to Queen Elizabeth’s treasurer, Lord Burghley, “of the monopoly and extortion of the owners of Newcastle coals.”41 Unbeknownst to most, during the prior few decades, Queen Elizabeth had herself become an entrenched albeit unseen member of coal’s cabal.
In 1600, Elizabeth went further, incorporating the Hostmen syndicate as a guild with a royal charter, thus cementing their power over the precious black rock. Although the Hostmen ostensibly numbered in the hundreds, their network was controlled by an inner elite of a few dozen influential men, most of them also merchant adventurers, and most doubling as officials of Newcastle’s municipal government. What the Hostmen elite, the Lords of Coal, could not accomplish through bruising business tactics, they affected through bureaucratic maneuvers. It was these powerful men that Elizabeth specifically named for the royal charter.42
By 1600, coal had essentially replaced wood as the dominant fuel of England. Within a decade more, the Hostmen were annually shipping nearly 240,000 tons of coal down the river Tyne, about 10 percent of it destined for foreign ports. That was more than twenty times the coal shipped by the minuscule surviving coal industry in nearby Durham, which shipped via the river Wear. By 1630, approximately eighty blast furnaces across England and Wales burned day and night, annually disgorging an estimated 25,000 tons of pig iron destined to be fabricated into everything from battle-axes to banisters to belt buckles. Elizabeth’s heir, James I, created several greed-driven cartels. But coal was perhaps the most bloated. The people groaned under the weight of those monopolies.43
A 1623 parliamentary statute forbade all monopolies. Just one was exempted: the Hostmen of Newcastle. With the ability to halt coal to any city, stop its industry, disrupt naval operations, and throw any population into the dark or winter frigidity, the Hostmen were too powerful to stymie, too influential to cross. A journal in 1637 recorded that of the “many monopolies spoken of,” the most awesome provided “that only ten men may sell coal throughout England.”44
Coal became a national security issue as well. The long supply route from Newcastle to London and other southeast English cities worried military planners. They proposed a squadron of warships devoted to protecting the irreplaceable and indispensable coal convoys. Dependence upon Newcastle extended beyond the English cities to the south. To feed Western Europe’s industrial lifeline, French importers would dispatch fleets of forty or fifty cargo vessels at a time to haul Newcastle’s black gold to ports in France, Germany, Flanders, and beyond. Clearly, disruption of a single cargo flotilla could shut down the industrial infrastructure of any number of foreign nations.45
No power rivaled the power to enable power. The Hostmen possessed that power. They knew it. England knew it. Western Europe knew it.
King Charles could not resist skimming Newcastle’s accelerating coal revenues. In about 1637, with a cancellation of the royal charter always looming, Charles sealed a secret deal with the Hostmen to sell their coal to him, as a sub-rosa middleman. He would then resell at a profit to the entire country, creating a surcharge on every chaldron—justified by nothing more than the Crown’s desire to accrue more wealth. This payoff was of course incorporated as a cost of doing business, passed on to the coal ship owners, and from them to the struggling consumers. So broad a skimming operation, involving numerous royal sales agents and brokers, could hardly be kept a secret. Word circulated. Fierce protests against the king’s avarice arose from both the shipowners and the public at large. Charles was forced to rapidly abort his effort to siphon Hostmen profits.46 This only proved that the Hostmen could survive efforts to share their power. Their profits remained intact and undiluted.
Indeed, the Hostmen’s monopoly was continuously fortified against all comers with well-honed frivolous litigation, shadowy municipal obstruction, and raw intimidation. Each year, their lock became stronger. In 1638, one coal mine operator rigorously compared Hostmen tactics to “other irresistible Oppressions, like the Spanish Inquisition.”47
Clearly, only force could disrupt the grip of the Hostmen. England’s brutal civil war in the 1640s targeted the Hostmen when the Newcastle cartel, which owed its existence to a royal charter, sided with the monarchy against Cromwell’s Parliamentary forces. Scots allied with the Parliamentarian insurrection invaded Newcastle, trying to assure supplies to the Cromwell side while denying them to those who remained loyal to the throne. The Parliamentarians themselves decided that high taxes on coal would only help finance mercenaries to fight for the Royalists. In 1643, Cromwell’s forces decided to forgo coal from Newcastle and blockaded the river Tyne to prevent the Royalist Hostmen from profiting. Misery walked the streets and alleyways of London as coal supplies dried up. London shivered that winter, using dried dung, straw, and anything else that would burn, just to stay warm and fed.48
Finally, by force of arms, Cromwell loosened the Hostmen’s ironclad monopoly in Newcastle by revoking the Hostmen leases and opening the coal trade up to nearby rivals, thereby relieving London’s suffering.49
But the civil war only slightly relaxed the Hostmen’s grip. London learned that the entrenched coal supply line could not effectively be replaced. Within a few years of the first stage of the civil war’s conclusion in 1646, the Hostmen leases were reconfirmed, thereby ensuring a reliable supply of fuel to all of southeastern England. The Newcastle syndicate’s mighty hold was restored, so much so that a swell of new Hostmen members began appearing. These included “fitters,” or “agents” for non-Hostmen coal operators desperate to achieve Hostmen sanction so they could also tap the swirling updraft in coal demand. An elite inner cabal of the wealthiest Hostmen reacted to preserve the Hostmen legacy. The most senior Lords of Coal, such as the Lidell family, the Ridells, the Carr clan, and the Claverings, policed the larger fraternity, purging it of those who tried to beat the group by joining it.50
After the Great Fire of London of 1666, Parliament began taxing coal for urban reconstruction. There were taxes for Warwicke Lane, Paternoster Row, and Watling Street, to rehabilitate ruined parishes, and to rebuild St. Paul’s Cathedral. Eventually, eleven separate taxes were levied over the next several decades, so much so that all increases in the price of coal arose not because of further price hikes, but because taxes were passed through to the public. As much as £40,000 annually was generated by coal taxes. Unfortunately, many of the admirable public works cited never saw the money. Instead, the coal taxes went to reduce national debt and finance a war with Spain and France.51
Even as they were taxed, the Lords of Coal found new ways to increase their profits and manipulate the coal supply. One was to secure tiny lengths of roadway called “way leaves” and extort from coal miners huge tolls to pass. It was the same notion as the keelboat exaction, but these blockaded yards were on dry land. Another scheme was to pay miners to keep their coal in the ground. That kept supply tight. Uncooperative competitors would soon find their mines “drowned,” that is, flooded. Parliament passed a law against drowning of mines, but that statute was also ineffective. In consequence, tax or not, glut or not, mass poverty or not, the Hostmen secured profits as high as 65 percent.52
In 1703, Queen Anne demanded Parliament halt the Hostmen’s unique ability to “enrich themselves by a general oppression of others, and particularly the poor.” One hapless complainant lamented, “The world is now come to that sad pass that an honest man cannot live; for if he gives to every one his due, he gains nothing; and if he does not. . . he shall have no trade.”53
As deep as the mines are the tales of Hostmen devices to manipulate coal prices, and these antics, sometimes coercive and sometimes just conspiratorial, continued throughout the eighteenth century. When thwarted by laws and investigations, the Hostmen extracted extra moneys out of their miserable workers, the keelmen and the coal miners themselves. The keelmen commonly organized labor strikes or even rioted. Municipal militias, civil lawsuits, lockouts, and prosecution broke their strikes. Coal miners broke their backs beneath the oppressive weight of the ore they pulled and pickaxed from the pits, so often iconically appearing as two white eyes within a disconsolate face of soot, breathed blackened air through blackened lungs, and from time to time were killed by drowning, suffocation, and gas poisoning, or crushed by cave-ins, or blasted to bits by explosions. For their wretched toil, coal miners earned one or two shillings per day.54
What eventually happened to the Hostmen? As part of their efforts to trim expenses and eke out productivity gains, they helped sponsor and promote a new invention: a steam-driven engine that could be made portable to haul loads. Locomotives running on steel rails were able to drag tons of coal more cheaply than any combination of man and horse. Railroads quickly proliferated throughout the 1800s, not only as coal haulers, but also as general cargo trains and passenger conveyances. Mighty and mightier locomotives created a symbiotic engine for growth. Railroads moved coal more cheaply, opened up vast lands, connected coasts and countries, invented new economic systems, created cities, defined national territorial claims everywhere in the world, and changed man’s ability to travel and learn, trade and thrive, conquer and dominate. Bloody wars were fought to ensure their ownership and operation. Trains and the evolution of that industry spawned thousands of romantic chronicles by numberless buffs and historians in every country, enough to fill many libraries. That said, every time a train pulled out of the station, its coal cars brimmed. Encapsulated within those blackened heaps was the legacy of the Hostmen.
With trains, coal mines far beyond Newcastle were finally able to free themselves from river transport. That was how the Hostmen cartel was finally broken up. Although the syndicate could not be defeated by labor riots, civil wars, parliamentary investigations, regulatory statutes, and the will of the people, the Hostmen could not resist the unstoppable wave of technological progress. The quiet and gradual atomization of the Hostmen was hardly the end of an era. Rather, it was the beginning of a tradition bequeathed from fuel cartel to cartel as an established robber-baron style of business. From the coal cartel of the Hostmen emerged the trains and the key ingredient needed to fire steam engines.
Steam engines helped cause their own revolution, the Industrial Revolution. Burning coal created the heat needed to boil water into steam, which then updrafted through turbines that turned great machines. These machines, simple and complex, enabled mass factories, mass production, and jetting economic advance. Now the concept of a craftsman laboring with personal skill in a workshop was replaced by multitudes of laborers whose hard, repetitive toil in compressed factories fed the final product of the steam-driven, coal-fired machines. Did the machines make possible the workers? Or did the workers make possible the machines? Who served whom? That unanswerable debate gripped all of society throughout the eighteenth century. But in truth, they served each other and, in so doing, transduced society into another era where lives and nations were even more dependent upon coal energy.
The by-product of the Industrial Revolution was an accursed tradeoff: great economic and manufacturing advance in exchange for a deadly pollution of the air and body. From the onset, England knew its growing dependence on coal was slowly killing its citizens. A royal commission in 1258 concluded that sea coal was dangerous to the health of all, asserting, “The air is infected and corrupted to the peril of those frequenting . . . and dwelling in those parts.” Similar commissions throughout the thirteenth century concluded the same. So noxious were the fumes that, in 1298, one group of London smiths decided that their artisans “should not work at night on account of the unhealthiness of coal and damage to their neighbors.”55
Edward I, in 1307, issued a proclamation against using coal in kilns because “an intolerable smell diffuses itself throughout the neighboring places and the air is greatly infected . . . to the injury of their bodily health.” His proclamation was ignored. Within two weeks, yet another royal commission tried to “punish offenders by grievance ransoms.” But such police actions were mere lip service, as London continued to coalify its air and the lungs of its inhabitants.56
In 1661, commentator John Evelyn of the Royal Society of London complained bitterly of the worsening coal pollution. “Men could hardly discern one another for the cloud,” he wrote, citing the nearby smokestacks, and blaming “that hellish and dismal cloud of sea-coal.” Vehemently, Evelyn deplored coal’s “impure and thick mist, accompanied by . . . filthy vapor, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences corrupting the lungs, and disordering the entire habit of their bodies.”57
A few years later, another Royal Society fellow, John Graunt, often called “the father of demography,” reported that before 1600, the mortality rate in London and the countryside was essentially identical. But with the widespread urban adoption of coal, that had all changed. By 1665, “Little more than one of 50 dies in the country,” he reported, “whereas in London it seems manifest that about one in 32 dies.” He stressed that these deaths were “over and above what dies of the Plague.” Why? Because “sea-coals . . . are now universally used,” he wrote.58
But in the mid-1700s, another revolutionary answer, a new form of energy, appeared. It was totally clean and nonpolluting. This newly discovered source was mightier than all the wood in the forest and all the coal in the ground. It emulated the power of all the seas and winds. One could only marvel in awe at this magical new energy that did not lie beneath the grounds of Newcastle or within the perimeters of the New Forest, but was in fact everywhere. Everyone already knew it. It tore through the heavens, lay quiet in every object, and, in the intellectual lingua franca of the day, dwelled within the soul—waiting to be released or captured.
No one in the eighteenth century pretended to understand this stunning, newly apprehended force, for science and physics during the early modern period were manifestations of a learned kinship of endeavors called natural philosophy. In plain words, it was the proto-scientific study of nature. Natural philosophy sought to explain the movement and makeup of man, his world, and the heavenly bodies, as well as the harmony, clashes, and chaos of existence in philosophical and theistic terms imbued with mathematics and reason. The prodigious discoveries, observations, and explanations of humanity’s greatest minds, the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, the universal laws of gravitation propounded by Isaac Newton, the astronomy of Edmond Halley—these were all encased within the proto-science known as natural philosophy.59
Natural philosophy orbited a core belief in Weltseele, or the spiritual force of the world that inhabits all things, the force that mystically imbues the extremes of unified existence. Opposites dance. This Godforce was the new energy.
Life and death, destruction and creation, weather, chemical reactions—all of it in the mind of the great intellects of the day devolved from the finger of God. Those who explored the great movements of God’s hand chose not to challenge the deity, not to supplant him, but only to better comprehend the universe they traveled in. This new energy was the ultimate juxtaposition of opposites, capable of moving mountains with God’s miraculous strength.
But this new energy force was not merely the oft-exalted finger of God. This was his very bloodstream, the all-powerful animating dynamo of existence some thought too terrible to embrace. They knew from their Bibles that their Lord dwelt in a special place between the metallic surfaces of the gold cherubim atop the Ark of the Covenant. Exodus 25:22: There above the cover between, between the two cherubim that are over the ark . . . I will meet with you and give all my commands.
Leviticus 16:2: The LORD said to Moses: “Tell your brother Aaron not to come whenever he chooses into the most holy place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, because I appear in the cloud over the atonement cover.
Within the eighteenth century mind-set of those who discovered this new force, it was also too frightful to handle. Those who even touched it would be shocked or could be killed. Yet this energy could uplift the world. Awesome in every way, utterly incomprehensible, impeccable in its purity, miraculous in its might, the world changed when it discovered the new omnipresent, inexhaustible, completely clean power source.
In 1752, Benjamin Franklin discovered modern electricity.
To read the expanded story of the Hostmen coal monopoly and cruel medieval forest laws in England, see the excerpt at www.internalcombustionbook.com .