ABSTRACT
Although agriculture remained the largest source of income and employ ment until well into the nineteenth century, other elements in the regional economy continued to expand. An account in 1605 noted that ‘in the countyes of Durham and Northumberland there be no great trades as clothing and suchlike used, by which the poorer sort are sett on worke and relieved from begery saving only the trades of colyery and salting’. (Thirsk 1984, 57)
The northern coalfields helped to meet rising demand for fuel, with Nor thumberland and Durham the most important district here. (Flinn 1984, 26)
There were early examples of transformation of rural communities under pressures of economic change, especially in areas close to coal-shipping ports. At Whickham, near Gateshead, before the Union of the Crowns, the copyholders ‘were all well defended by their customs from seigneurial exploitation, and they were free to pass their lands, their goods, and their rights to their children’. (Levine and Wrightson 1991, 89, 139-41, 150-1) Modern studies have examined how the expanding coal industry brought about decline of such small occupiers, with coalowners accumulating hold ings to develop collieries and access routes. (Levine and Wrightson 1991; Clavering and Rounding 1995) Some copyholders profited from mining opportunities; others lost their independence. By the end of the seventeenth century, ‘The institutions of the manor were now all but defunct. . . The Elizabethan agrarian community had been submerged within a largely in dustrial and commercial order.’ (Levine and Wrightson 1991, 150)
Between 1640 and 1680 coal output doubled in Northumberland and Durham, and by 1680 this contributed about 40 per cent of the national total. By 1750 there had been another doubling in output. The Tyne con tinued to dominate the coal trade. In 1609, its nearest rival, the Wear, shipped only 5 per cent of the Tyne total. Although Wear shipments con tinued to grow, even in the early eighteenth century they amounted to less
than a third of the Tyne trade. The Tees did not enter the trade on any substantial scale until 1826.
