On the 25th of August the Dean Forest Commissioners presented their
fourth and fifth Reports. In the former, which gives a minute summary of
the rights and privileges claimed by the free miners (derived chiefly
from the evidence taken in 1832), the origin of them is stated to be
involved in obscurity, although no doubt iron was manufactured in the
neighbourhood as early as the time of the Romans, and coal was obtained
in the reign of Edward III. Probably before, and certainly soon after,
the Norman Conquest, the soil was vested in the Crown, and all the rights
of a royal forest were in force. The persons by whom the mines were then
worked could not have been, in the first instance, free tenants of the
Crown. It is more likely that they were in a state of servitude, and
subject, in that character, to perform the labour required of them. The
name of "Free Miners," by which they are and have been for centuries
known, seems to refer to some right or privilege distinct from their
original condition; and it does not appear unreasonable to suppose that
certain persons at some distant period, either by having worked for a
year and a day, or by reason of some now unknown circumstance connected
with the origin of the privilege, were considered as emancipated, and
thereupon became entitled or were allowed to work the mines upon their
own adventure, concurrently with or subject to the right of the Crown to
a certain portion of the product.

Noticing in succession many of the historical incidents attaching to the
free miners of the Forest, the Report states that the franchise of the
mine was unquestionably perpetuated by birth from a free father in the
hundred of St. Briavel's, and afterwards working a year and a day in one
of the mines and abiding within the hundred. Doubt is, however, thrown
upon the necessity of birth from a free miner, the more so as the son of
a foreigner could obtain his freedom after working out an apprenticeship
of seven years with a free miner; and it would be difficult, if not
impossible, at the present time, to confine the title to anything beyond
birth and service, to which particular class of individuals the Court of
Mine Law confined all mining operations.

Entering in the next place into a consideration of the actual claims of
the free miners, the Commissioners declare their opinion as to how their
claims are to be settled, suggesting at once the question "whether they
can be now maintained