ABSTRACT
Mining was, for long, a part-time occupation, but this is, of course, a comparative term. It was not unusual even in the nineteenth century for a landowning colliery owner to use men sometimes for pit work, and sometimes for work on the land, as John Dodsley did during the 1847 harvest.1 There is little doubt however that, by the sixteenth century, there were men in developed mining districts whose regular occupation was that of miner, even though most of them may have retained some secondary occupation to be practised when the pits were idle through flooding, inaccessibility or slack trade. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the seasonal pattern of employment was reversed: the pits working full-time in winter and short-time in summer. Many colliery owners supplied their men with cottages having large gardens to keep them busy in the summer, as did Thomas North at Cinderhill in the early 1840’s.
