Colliers' Hall

The colliers' guild of the pits, which pays on a death underground, asks nothing of a man beyond competence and keeps its own workings books. It walls stopped roads, entering them with a date and no reason.

The Sarrum colliers, who hold that the Blackdown Stope collapse of 4606 was an ordinary fall on unsafe ground. The Sarrum hall of the pit trade, which takes boys below ground at fourteen.

Named with it

• Collier Bet Marchant of the Blackdown pits
• Guildmaster Osbert Quill · head
• Marchant · defends the hall's injury policy
• Collier Bet Marchant · speaks for the Blackdown men

Ties

• disagree with the Black Lantern Brethren over Blackdown
• one of the Halls
• at odds with the other halls over the stoppage clause
• hires in competition with the Bank Council
• differs from the Black Lantern Brethren on the Blackdown Stope

In the chronicle

• 4494 · The Articles of the Halls
• 4606 · The Blackdown Stope
• 4609 · Bet Marchant before the Bank Council, 4609

At the table

Of the Blackdown Stope collapse the Brethren hold another view, though they have never set it down in writing. The clause in the Articles requiring fourteen days' notice before a stoppage the hall has never accepted, and it gives notice when that suits it; the common charges, it argues besides, fall too heavily upon its members. A death in the pit it meets with a lump sum; for injury it pays nothing. Twice its guildmaster, Osbert Quill, has walked out of an Articles panel. At Blackdown it keeps a standing bounty for a plan of any working older than 4400, and nobody has ever claimed it. On its own account, and apart from the Bank Council, it hires companies to find out what happened underground. Anniversaries it keeps none.