For a further considerable period the use of coal continued very partial; but in the sixteenth century great uneasiness began to be felt at the prospective exhaustion of the timber supplies of the country, and various enactments were passed with a view to checking the destruction of the forests. Great attention began to be paid to the use of sea-coal as a substitute for wood, and an improvement in domestic architecture led to a more general provision of fire-places with chimneys, thus allowing of a resort to coal fires for domestic purposes. Chimneys began to appear, in fact, in numbers never seen before. Harrison, writing in 1577, grieves over the innovation of coal fires, and recalls the good old times of wood and peat when, as he touchingly says, "our heads did never ake." Queen Elizabeth retained the prejudice against sea-coal, and would have none of it. Ladies of fashion, sharing, as loyal subjects, her Majesty's objections, would, in turn neither enter a room where coal was burning nor eat of food cooked at a coal fire. But James I., whose ancestors had long favoured coal fires in Scotland--and, it may be, thus made themselves responsible for the name of "Auld Reekie" conferred on Edinburgh--had coal brought for fires in his own rooms in Westminster Palace. When this fact became known Society changed its views, and decided that the hitherto obnoxious sea-coal might be tolerated, after all. Howes, writing in 1612, was then able to speak of coal as "the generall fuell of this Britaine Island." In the result, and especially following on the development in trade and industry which came with the Restoration, there was a great increase in the demand for coal. In 1615 the coal fleet engaged in the transport of sea-coal to London, and other ports on the east and south-east coasts--where fuel was scarcest--comprised (as stated in "A History of Coal Mining in Great Britain," by Robert L. Galloway) 400 vessels. In 1635, or only twenty years later, the number had increased to between 600 and 700, and by 1650, or thereabouts, the total had further risen to 900 vessels, these figures being exclusive of the foreign fleets carrying coal to France, Holland and Germany. {197}The collieries that were more especially required to meet this increased demand were those in the immediate neighbourhood of the Tyne, since they offered the advantages of thick seams of coal of excellent quality and close alike to the surface and to a navigable river. The proportions to which the industry had already attained in the year 1649 are shown by Grey, in his "Chorographia, or a Survey of Newcastle-upon-Tine," where he says: "Many thousand people are imployed in this trade of coales: many live by working of them in pits: many live by conveying them in waggons and waines to the river Tine.... One coal merchant imployeth five hundred or a thousand in his works of coal."