In Cornish mining, the underground workings were known as "the deeps" and the surface works as "the grass". It was on the grass that the bal maidens earned their name. The word comes from the Cornish language, where bal refers to a mine working, so a bal maiden was quite literally a mine girl: a woman employed at the surface, breaking, sorting and cleaning the rock that miners sent up in kibbles.
Their numbers were formidable. By the middle of the nineteenth century several thousand women and girls worked on Cornish dressing floors, particularly in the great mining districts around Camborne, Redruth, St Day, Gwennap and St Agnes. Census returns for some parishes list bal maidens in almost every household. Girls might start as young as eight or nine, learning beside a mother or older sister, and plenty carried on into their sixties. It was hard, noisy, outdoor work, and it kept the tin and copper industry supplied with dressed ore for generations.
The work followed the ore. Rock raised from the shaft was tipped out and then reduced by hand and by simple machines in a sequence that had changed little in centuries. First came spalling, breaking the largest lumps down to sizes a person could handle, followed by cobbing, where bal maidens worked through the pile piece by piece, knocking off worthless rock from the valuable ore. Cobbing was done largely by eye and by feel, and a skilled woman could judge a lump of ore faster than most people could tie a shoelace.
Next came bucking, crushing the cobbed ore into smaller pieces, and then riddling or sieving to grade it by size. Washing followed. Some women stood at a kieve, jigging sieves up and down in water so that heavier ore sank and lighter waste washed away. Others worked with a vanning shovel, testing small samples in water and reading the tin content by the way the grains settled. Farther along the floor came the buddles, circular settling pits where sluiced material separated out by weight. From first light to dusk the floors rang with hammer blows, splashing water and the constant rattle of screens.
Weather was simply endured. Bal maidens worked in rain, wind and frost, their hands raw and their skirts pinned or shortened for safety. Many wore coarse aprons known as towzers, stout boots and a bonnet; on dusty floors, women sometimes tied cloth over the face and shoulders to keep the worst of the grit out.
Most of these tools were made locally. Blacksmiths, carpenters and millwrights who served the mines were themselves part of the same craft tradition that produced the dressing floors, and the skills behind a well-balanced bucking hammer were as closely guarded as any in the trade.
Bal maidens were generally paid by the amount of ore they dressed rather than by the hour, so earnings rose and fell with the price of tin and the richness of the ground. In a decent week a skilled woman might take home a few shillings, often little more than half what a man earned underground, and in lean times the floors fell quiet altogether. Winter was hardest: shorter days meant shorter work, and store credit at the local shop was a fact of life for many mining families.
There was a hierarchy on the floor. Younger girls took the roughest jobs, spalling and carrying; experienced women handled the cobbing and the finer sorting; the most trusted worked the vanning shovel, where judgement mattered most. Widows, married women and unmarried daughters all relied on the wages. Some mine captains recorded the names of their steadiest hands in account books, a rare acknowledgement of skill in an industry that rarely praised it.
The bal maiden's working life faded with mechanisation. As ore-dressing machinery improved through the later nineteenth century, the great hand-dressing floors shrank, and by the early twentieth century the trade had effectively ended. In 2006 the Cornish mining landscape was inscribed as a World Heritage Site, and the dressing floors, engine houses and buddles are now recognised as internationally important industrial archaeology.
The women's influence travelled further than Cornwall. In the mining diaspora of the nineteenth century, Cornish families carried their skills to Australia, South Africa, the United States and beyond, and dressing-floor work went with them. Today the bal maiden survives in place names, in the folk memory of mining villages and in the living crafts that grew around the mines: stonework, hedging, smithing and the careful handwork that once fed tin into pewter, bronze and tinplate. Understanding her day's labour is one of the clearest ways to understand how Cornish heritage was built — not only in the deeps, but out on the grass.
The Tinners shares practical, down-to-earth guidance on cornish heritage, tin mining history and traditional crafts for readers across the UK.
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