The Earth as Modified by Human ActionMarsh, George P. (George Perkins)
History
The Earth as Modified by Human Action
Marsh, George P. (George Perkins)
Conservation of natural resources; Human geography; Nature -- Effect of human beings on; Physical geography
have met with this word in no Anglo-Saxon work, except in the Chronicle,
A.D. 852, from a manuscript certainly not older than the 12th century,
and in two citations from Anglo-Saxon charters, one published by Kemble
in Codex Diplomaticus, the other by Thorpe in Diplomatarium Anglicum, in
all which passages it more probably means peat than mineral coal.
According to Way, Promptorium Parrulorum, p. 506, note, the Catholicon
Anglicanum has "A turfe grafte, turbarium." Grafte is here evidently the
same word as the A.-S. grafa, and the Danish Torvegraf, a turf-pit,
confirms this opinion. Coal is not mentioned in King Alfred's Bede, in
Neckam, in Glanville or in Robert of Gloucester, though the two latter
writers speak of the allied mineral, jet, and are very full in their
enumeration of the mineral productions of the island. In a Latin poem
ascribed to Giraldus Cambrensis, who died after the year 1220, but found
also in the manuesripts of Walter Mapes (see Camden Society edition, pp.
131 and 350), and introduced into Higden's Polychronicon (London, 1865,
pp. 398, 399), carbo sub terra cortice, which can mean nothing but
pit-coal, is enumerated among the natural commodities of England. Some
of the translations of the 13th and 14th century render carbo by cool or
col, some by gold, and some omit this line, as well as others
unintelligible to the translators. Hence, although Giraldus was
acquainted with coal, it certainly was not generally known to English
writers until at least a century after the time of that author.
The earliest mediaeval notice of mineral coal I have met with is in a
passage cited by Ducange from a document of the year 1198, and it is an
etymological observation of some interest, that carbones ferrei, as
sea-coal is called in the document, are said by Ducange to have been
known in France by the popular name of hulla, a word evidently identical
with the modern French houille and the Cornish Huel, which in the form
wheal is an element in the name of many mining localities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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