page_title: Bal maiden
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Bal maiden / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Earthworks in a valley. Caused by early tin workings in the valley bottom deposits - before more advanced techniques were employed.
context_page_description: A bal maiden, from the Cornish language bal, a mine, and the English "maiden", a young or unmarried woman, was a female manual labourer working in the mining industries of Cornwall and western Devon, at the south-western extremity of Great Britain. The term has been in use since at least the early 18th century. At least 55,000 women and girls worked as bal maidens, and the actual number is likely to have been much higher.
  While women worked in coal mines elsewhere in Britain, either on the surface or underground, bal maidens worked only on the surface. It is likely that Cornish women had worked in metal mining since antiquity, but the first records of female mine workers date from the 13th century. After the Black Death in the 14th century, mining declined, and no records of female workers have been found from then until the late 17th century. Industrial improvements, the end of Crown control of metal mines, and rising demand for raw materials caused a boom in Cornish mining in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Increasing numbers of women and girls were recruited to the mines from about 1720, processing ore sent up by the male miners underground.
context_section_description: For at least 3,000 years from antiquity until the late 20th century mining of tin and copper played a significant part in the economy of Cornwall. Cornwall, the northern part of Iberia and the Ore Mountains (the modern border between the Czech Republic and Germany) are the only places in Europe in which major tin deposits are found near the surface. As tin is an essential ingredient of bronze, Cornwall was of great economic significance in Bronze Age Europe despite its relative isolation. Mining by the Roman Empire led to the Iberian mines becoming depleted by the 3rd century AD, leaving Cornwall and neighbouring Devon the most significant sources of tin in Europe. While it appears from surviving evidence that after the decline of the Bronze Age civilisations copper production ceased in Cornwall, it seems that the tin mines were in continuous operation throughout the Roman period and the Middle Ages.
  The primitive early mines of Cornwall and Devon probably were operated by local extended families, with the men, women and children all working. Men and boys probably worked both above the surface and below ground, and women and girls worked only above ground; there is no archaeological evidence for women and children working underground in Bronze Age Britain, although some mines from the period contain tunnels so small that only children or very short adults could have worked in them.
  At some point between the death of Cnut the Great in 1035 and the death of Edward the Confessor in early 1066, the independent Kingdom of Cornwall was annexed by the neighbouring Kingdom of Wessex, a part of the Kingdom of England. In late 1066 Cornwall, along with the rest of the lands under the control of the English king, was conquered by the Normans and came under the control of William the Conqueror. By the late 12th century the metal mines were brought under the control of the Crown; operation of the tin mines was devolved to the Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and mining of other metals was directly controlled by the Crown as Mines Royal.
caption: Earthworks near Minions left by tin-streaming (gathering clusters of ore from stream and river beds),[d] the earliest form of mining in Cornwall
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