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.
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