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28 but no great use was made of it, and indeed it does not appear to have been in use as fuel till the thirteenth century.

In the Leges Burgorum, which were enacted about 1140, a particular privilege is granted to those who bring fuel into burghs. Wood, turf, and peats are expressly mentioned, but with respect to coal there is a dead silence. In the year 1234, Henry III. of England renewed a charter which his father had granted to the inhabitants of Newcastle, in which he gave them, on petition, liberty to dig coals upon payment of £100 a year. By the end of the thirteenth century, however, the use of coal had been greatly developed on both sides of the Forth. Mention is made in a charter of 1291 of a grant to Dunfermline Abbey of the right to dig for coal in the lands of Pittencrieff in Fife ; and Chalmers quotes a charter of James, the son of Alexander III, of 1284 (shortly before his father’s death at Kinghorn), in which a grant is made to William de Preston of the lands of Tranent, with various privileges — “in moris, et maresiis, in petariis, et Carbonariis.” "Whatever,” he says, "this latter expression signified in prior times, it seems to have applied to pit collieries in that age.” In a charter of the Abbey of Newbattle, previous to 1214, a grant is made to the monks by Seyer de Quinci of the coal pit and quarry (carbonarium et quararium) between Whiteside and Pinkie. This is the earliest mention of coal in Great Britain of which there is any authentic account. The fossil coal did not, however, become the common fuel of North Britain till more recent times.

Travellers who visited this country in the fifteenth century mention the use of coal as a substitute for wood. Thus, about 1450, Aeneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, relates that he saw "the poor people, who in rags begged at the Churches, receive for alms pieces of stone, with which they went away contented.” "This species of stone,” says he, "whether with sulphur or whatever inflammable substance it may be impregnated, they burn in place of wood, of which their country is destitute.” And Boetius, in his description of Scotland, written in the sixteenth century, says: — "There are black stones also digged out of the ground, which are very good for firing, and such is their intolerable heat, that they resolve and melt iron, and therefore are very profitable for smiths and such artificers as deal with other metals ; neither are they found anywhere else