Miners and mineworkers
Miners and Mineworkers is a society codex entry in Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
Codex entry
Medieval miners worked down the mines manually with hammers and chisels, by the light of small hand-held lamps. The rate of progress through the rock was very slow - often just inches per week – though they still managed, by shift work and many years of chipping away, to excavate hundreds of metres of underground tunnels, sometimes as deep as 600 metres below the surface. The mining system mostly consisted of larger and comfortably passable horizontal and vertical shafts, from which radiated out smaller galleries, where the miners literally had to crawl on all fours. The tunnelling work was expedited by setting fires at the ends of the shafts so the heat would crack the rock, making it easier to chip away. Each miner was thoroughly searched every time he left the mine-works. Silver was the property of the Crown and theft incurred severe penalties.
Mining was very dangerous and exhausting, which is why mining wives often became widows up to seven times over. A number of churches and breweries were built in mining communities and no doubt the latter did thriving business. As an old proverb says, ‘the haughty miners in the mountains have drudgery till Saturday, but money only till Sunday.’ The patron saint of miners was Saint Barbara.
