John
It may not be exactly what you are looking for, but there is a letter to Henry
VIII from Christopher Morice, John Ellys and William Monmouth dated 9th
June 1531 describing the visit of Mark Raffel to the kings lead and iron
mines of Llantrisant. They state "He said he would inform your Grace,
before his departure from you, how to tell silver ore, and in the house of
George Mathew, overseer of the mines, tried some ore into fine silver to
take to your grace."
Given what we know of these mines I'm not convinced that this does involve
some sleight of hand! However, it does show investigation of silver content
in the period you mention.
Hope its of interest
Tim
On 11 Jun 2007 at 11:15, John A W Lock wrote:
> My interest was that I have been looking for evidence of a re-assaying
> of the ores in lead mines across England and Wales for their silver
> content in the early 16th century prior to Henry VIII's debasement of
> the currency to support some other research. I know it went on, but I
> have not found anything at a local level to authenticate it saying 'Mr
> X turned up on such-and-such a day and assayed the ore' or some such,
> or indeed any lead-silver assay records from 1530-1550. If anyone on
> the list knows of any such records lurking in local record offices,
> private archives etc I'd be most appreciative... an obvious one
> would be the Bishops of Durham archive. If anyone knows of an expert
> on this sort of thing I'd love to know that too.
>
> I attended the 1-day conference on medieval silver mining in the North
> West held at Nenthead in April 2006 - very interesting it was too -
> but didn't pick up any new leads there.
>
> regards
>
> John A W Lock
>
> I have contacted those who contacted me about the 19th century
> material I saw at the weekend . My view was that the material could
> probably be correlated with material held in the Bishops of Durham's
> estate records, assuming that they have hung on to their
> correspondence files from that date.
--
Dr Tim Young
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Web: www.geoarch.co.uk
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Fax: 08700 547366
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