Daniel Defoe and the miners

Daniel Defoe’s conversation with the miner he met on Brassington Moor, and with a miner’s wife whom he had met earlier, produced a vivid picture of the working life and reward of the small miner at the time. At Wirksworth he had noted that "there is no very great trade to this town but what relates to the lead works, and to the subterranean wretches, who they call Peakrills, who work in the mines, and who live all round this town every way". "Peakrill" was a dismissive and somewhat contemptuous term used by educated outsiders for the "lower orders" of the Peak District. He noted the strange mining customs, the rule of barmasters and juries, and the quarrelsome nature of the miners.

Defoe then set off over Brassington Moor and came upon a woman and her children living in a cave usually thought to be the cave at Harborough Rocks, which has evidence of prolonged occupation. There was a plot of barley, a cow and some pigs. Defoe was greeted by a barking dog. He introduced himself to the woman, who told him that her husband was a lead miner. She told Defoe that her husband earned about 5d a day and that she herself, when she could leave the children, could earn another 3d by washing ore. Defoe’s comments on this woman and her cave home belie the low opinion of the "subterranean wretches" generally held by people of his class. Inside the cave, which was divided into rooms by hangings, "everything was neat and clean" and the family "seemed to live very pleasantly, the children looked plump and fat, ruddy and wholesome; the woman was tall, well shaped, clean, and (for the place) a very well looking, comely woman". The description of his work given by the miner whom he met after leaving the woman, which had to be translated for him from the Derbyshire dialect, so moved Defoe that he thanked God "that we were not appointed to get our bread thus, one hundred and fifty yards under ground, or in a hole as deep in the earth as the cross upon St Paul’s cupulo is high out of it". Defoe gave the miner 2/- for a piece of ore, more than he could earn in three day’s work, and when he met him later in an alehouse in Brassington, gave him more money to take home to his family.