A bal maiden, from the Cornish language , a mine, and the English "maiden", a young or unmarried woman, was a female manual labourer working in the mining industries of Cornwall and western Devon, at the south-western extremity of Great Britain. The term has been in use since at least the early 18th century. At least 55,000 women and girls worked as bal maidens, and the actual number is likely to have been much higher.
While women worked in coal mines elsewhere in Britain, either on the surface or underground, bal maidens worked only on the surface. It is likely that Cornish women had worked in metal mining since antiquity, but the first records of female mine workers date from the 13th century. After the Black Death in the 14th century, mining declined, and no records of female workers have been found from then until the late 17th century. Industrial improvements, the end of Crown control of metal mines, and rising demand for raw materials caused a boom in Cornish mining in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Increasing numbers of women and girls were recruited to the mines from about 1720, processing ore sent up by the male miners underground. The discovery of cheaper sources of copper in North Wales in the 1770s triggered a crash in the copper price, and many mines closed.
As the Industrial Revolution began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Welsh metal mines declined and mining in Cornwall and Devon became viable once more. Women and girls were recruited in large numbers for work in ore processing. Women and children accounted for up to half the workers in the area's copper mines. Although machinery was capable of performing much of the work done by bal maidens, the industry grew so quickly that the number of women and girls working grew steadily even though their numbers fell as a proportion of the workforce to 15–20% by 1850. At the peak of the Cornish mining boom, in around 1860, at least 6,000 bal maidens were working at the region's mines; the actual number is likely to have been much higher. While it was not unusual for girls to become bal maidens at the age of six and to work into old age, they generally began at around age 10 or 11 and left work once they married.
From the 1860s, Cornish mines faced competition from cheap metal imports, and legislation introduced in the 1870s limited the use of child labour. The Cornish mining system went into terminal decline, leading to a collapse of the local economy and mass emigration both overseas and to other parts of the United Kingdom. In 1891 the number of bal maidens had fallen to half its peak, and by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 very few remained in employment. In 1921 Dolcoath mine, the last employer of bal maidens, ceased operations, bringing the tradition to an end. Other than women recruited for ore processing at Geevor as a result of labour shortages during the Second World War, and a very few female workers after the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 banned the practice of recruiting only male mineworkers, women never again performed manual labour in Cornish mines. The last surviving bal maiden died in 1968, and with the closure of South Crofty tin mine in 1998, Cornish metals mining came to an end.
Background
For at least 3,000 years from antiquity until the late 20th century, mining of tin and copper played a significant part in the economy of Cornwall. Cornwall, the northern part of Iberia and the Ore Mountains (the modern border between the Czech Republic and Germany) are the only places in Europe in which major tin deposits are found near the surface. As tin is an essential ingredient of bronze, Cornwall was of great economic significance in Bronze Age Europe despite its relative isolation. Mining by the Roman Empire led to the Iberian mines becoming depleted by the 3rd century AD, leaving Cornwall and neighbouring Devon the most significant sources of tin in Europe. While it appears from surviving evidence that after the decline of the Bronze Age civilisations copper production ceased in Cornwall, it seems that the tin mines were in continuous operation throughout the Roman period and the Middle Ages.
The primitive early mines of Cornwall and Devon probably were operated by local extended families, with the men, women and children all working. Men and boys probably worked both above the surface and below ground, and women and girls worked only above ground; there is no archaeological evidence for women and children working underground in Bronze Age Britain, although some mines from the period contain tunnels so small that only children or very short adults could have worked in them.
At some point between the death of Cnut the Great in 1035 and the death of Edward the Confessor in early 1066, the independent Kingdom of Cornwall was annexed by the neighbouring Kingdom of Wessex, a part of the Kingdom of England. In late 1066 Cornwall, along with the rest of the lands under the control of the English king, was conquered by the Normans and came under the control of William the Conqueror. By the late 12th century the metal mines were brought under the control of the Crown; operation of the tin mines was devolved to the Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and mining of other metals was directly controlled by the Crown as Mines Royal.
Female mine workers in the Middle Ages Although women and girls probably worked in mining since antiquity, the earliest known written references to female manual labourers in mining are in the 13th and 14th century records of the royal lead and silver mines at Bere Alston, on the border between Devon and Cornwall. The mines were bordered on three sides by a loop of the River Tamar, the east bank of which has been the traditional boundary between Devon and Cornwall since 936. The mines themselves were on the Devon side of the border at Bere Alston itself, but the surface-level smelters were on the Cornish side at Calstock as there was a readier supply of timber for use in the furnaces.
Although the mining itself was carried out by men, female workers were employed to sort ore for crushing, to prepare the bone ash used as a flux during the smelting process, and for general manual labour. An adult woman was paid up to one penny per day, and young girls between and of a penny. Miners and other skilled labourers at Bere Alston were recruited from throughout England and Wales, and from the evidence of surnames in the records it appears that many of the female labourers were the wives and daughters of these incomers rather than locally recruited women.
The area's population collapsed both during and after the Black Death. Those miners who had survived the pandemic left mining to work in farming, in which wages had doubled owing to the severe labour shortage, and the mines of Bere Alston were abandoned.
Women and girls were almost certainly employed at the lead and silver mine at Bere Alston, and a few records have also been found of female workers at tin works on Bodmin Moor and around Redruth and Marazion in the 14th century. However, it does not appear that significant numbers of female labourers worked in Cornwall's mining industry until the early 18th century, as no records have yet been discovered for this period.
Mechanisation and the 18th century copper boom In 1678, Clement Clerke introduced the coal-powered reverberatory furnace, greatly increasing the quantity of metal extractable from ore. The Royal Mines Act 1688 (1 Will. & Mar. c. 30) ended Crown ownership of Cornwall's mines, allowing private investors and local families to begin mining operations. At the same time, the Nine Years' War (1688–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) caused high demand for metals. As a consequence, the Midlands, with easy river and canal access to the coal mines of Wales and northern England and to the metal mines of Cornwall, became a major centre for metallurgy. Ore was shipped from Cornwall up the River Severn to smelters in Gloucestershire where it was refined and sold on to the factories surrounding Birmingham. Financiers and entrepreneurs began investing in and reorganising the mines of Cornwall. With a shortage of manual labour in rural and lightly populated Cornwall, and with a prevalent belief that women and children were best suited to ore separation (which required dexterity and good observation skills but little in the way of physical strength), the large-scale recruitment of women and girls to the mines began. It is around this time that the term "bal maiden" appears to have come into common usage, derived from the Old Cornish (mine). A significant proportion of Cornwall's young women quickly became involved in mining; by 1736 the vicar of Ludgvan was complaining that he was unable to hire servants as the young women of the town were "employed about copper".
In around 1720, two key innovations revolutionised the Cornish mining industry. The whim, a horse-powered mechanism for lifting ore to the surface, made mining in deep shafts practical, and the horse-powered pump allowed mining beneath the water table.
Role of 18th century bal maidens With the need for expensive machinery and horses and for large numbers of workers at each mine, the traditional operation of mines by extended families or by individual entrepreneurs became impractical, and the new deep-level mines came under the ownership of groups of investors and of mining companies. A group of people known as a "tribute team" (often a single extended family) would bid for the right to work a specified portion of the mine; the men and older boys would dig in the appointed section, and the women, girls and young boys would dress the ore sent up by the men. In later years the practice of bal maidens dressing only the ore sent up by the men of their tribute team was abandoned, and they would instead be paid a flat wage by the mine owner to dress any ore sent up, and the tribute team which had sent up the ore would be billed for the work done. Typical work for a bal maiden in this period was picking ore from rubble, breaking and separating the ore, and carrying ore and metal. Generally girls under 12 would sort the ore, older girls would separate the ore, and grown women would carry out the heavy manual labour of breaking rocks with hammers and of transporting ore between various pieces of apparatus. As the bal maidens of the smaller tribute teams often did not have the time to dress all the ore sent up, or it was not financially worthwhile to pay for the poorer quality ore to be processed, large quantities of poor quality ore were discarded unprocessed in waste heaps. On those occasions when improved extraction techniques or rises in the price of metals made it worthwhile to process this discarded ore, sometimes separate tribute teams would bid for the right to dress and process this rubble. As the practice of using tribute teams declined in the early 19th century, the mine owners themselves would hire bal maidens to dress this waste ore.
Records from the Pool Adit copper mine at Trevenson (the most successful of the early copper mines) show in 1729, 25 bal maidens and three males worked as 'pickers' sorting high quality from poor quality ore, earning a flat rate of 4d per day and typically working 20 days per month. (Records do not show the ages of the pickers at Pool Adit, but the male pickers are likely to have been boys too young for heavy labour.) In 1730 Pool Adit employed 30 female and four male pickers, and by 1731 the figures had risen to 55 female and five male, typically working 22 to 26 days per month. The number of bal maidens employed in the industry rose dramatically, and by the early 1770s Dolcoath, by then the most significant of the Cornish copper mines, employed around 220 bal maidens on the copper dressing floors alone.