, skilled colliers were frequently in short supply, especially in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their scarcity manifested itself in a variety of ways in addition to enhanced wages and incentive bonuses. Moreover, the nature of the industry usually led coal owners to place great emphasis on continuous full-time working by employees, though with limited success. Thus, there frequently appears to have existed in the coal industry the conditions of which later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century writers complained in the economy at large: a combination of high wages and a reluctance to work. But to understand the true picture in coal-mining it is essential to break colliery work-forces down into their constituent parts. Some employees, such as viewers, overmen and grieves were mining engineers, surveyors, managers and clerks rather than manual labourers, while categories of manual labourers included those who looked after the horses, helped to drain the pits, maintained the wagonways and transported the coal above and below ground. The elite of the labouring colliers were the hewers, who won the coal from the face. Aside from strength and courage, hewing demanded considerable skill and experience in order to maximize the output and preserve the long-term viability and profitability of the pit; consequently, hewers were normally rewarded by rates of pay well above those received by the rest of the manual work-force of the colliery, and by those employed in agriculture in the surrounding countryside.(57)...
