Bal Maiden

A bal maiden, from the Cornish language bal (mine) and the English maiden (young or unmarried woman), was a female manual labourer in the mining industries of Cornwall and the bordering areas of 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 in coal mining elsewhere in Britain sometimes worked both on the surface and underground, the bal maidens of Cornwall and Devon worked only on the surface. It is likely that Cornish women worked in metal mining since antiquity, but the first records of female mine workers date from the 13th century. After the Black Death of the 14th century mining in the area declined, and no records of female workers have yet 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 area's mines from about 1720, processing the ore sent up by the male miners underground. The discovery of cheaper sources of copper in North Wales in the 1770s triggered a crash in the copper price, and many of the mines closed.

As the Industrial Revolution began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Welsh metal mines declined and mining in Cornwall and Devon became viable once more. Women and girls were again recruited in large numbers for work in ore processing, with women and children accounting for up to half the workers in the area's copper mines. Although machinery was capable of performing much of the work done by bal maidens, the industry grew so quickly that the number of women and girls working grew steadily even though their numbers fell as a proportion of the workforce to 15–20% by 1850. At the peak of the Cornish mining boom, in around 1860, at least 6000 bal maidens were working at the region's mines; the actual number is likely to have been much higher. While it was not unusual for girls to become bal maidens at as young as six and to work into old age, they generally began at around age 10 or 11 and left work once they married.

From the 1860s Cornish mines faced competition from cheap metal imports, and legislation introduced in the 1870s also limited the use of child labour. The Cornish mining system went into terminal decline, leading to a collapse of the local economy and mass emigration both overseas and to other parts of the United Kingdom. In 1891 the number of bal maidens had fallen to half its peak, and by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 very few remained in employment. In 1921 Dolcoath, the last mine to employ bal maidens, ceased operations, bringing the tradition to an end. Other than some women recruited for ore processing at Geevor owing to labour shortages during the Second World War, and a very limited number of female workers after the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 banned the practice of recruiting only male mineworkers, women never again performed manual labour in Cornish mines. The last surviving former bal maiden died in 1968, and with the closure of the South Crofty tin mine in 1998 Cornish metals mining itself came to an end.