John Hatcher's work on the British coal industry highlighted the rapid take-off of coal exports in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries from Newcastle, as ‘we are driven unerringly to the 1570s and 1580s as the turning-point’ in the history of the coal trade. Between the late 1560s and the 1590s shipments of coal rose fourfold for the sea trade alone. In the ensuing twenty-five years shipments virtually doubled again to reach an average of over 400,000 tons a year in the early 1620s. It was at this time that power over the coal industry was passing into the hands of a ‘few rich men of Newcastle’, who had obtained a ‘plain monopoly or staple of coal’ and, through the Grand Lease, had ‘dealt a final blow to the aspirations of the bishops of Durham to share in the coal trade’. The Newcastle Hostmen, or Lords of Coal as they were christened by the local inhabitants, were a small group of Newcastle merchants, led initially by Henry Anderson and William Selby, who formed an oligarchy at the pinnacle of Newcastle society in terms of both office-holding and wealth. How far did the increasing mercantile wealth derived from this precocious development of the coal industry find its way into the Durham countryside and so disrupt the balance of lay landownership outlined in the preceding chapters?

Nef described these merchants as frequently acquiring ‘great estates and set[ting] up as country gentlemen, allying themselves by marriage with the local gentry, and eventually retiring from direct participation in the trade of Newcastle’. He then reeled off a whole host of such examples: