• Source: Society of Mines Royal

      • The Society of the Mines Royal was one of two English mining monopoly companies incorporated by royal charter in 1568, the other being the Company of Mineral and Battery Works.


      History


      On 28 May 1568, Elizabeth I established the society by letters patent as a joint stock company with 24 shareholders:

      Haug, Langnauer & Company, Augsburg
      Sir William Cecil
      Thomas Thurland, Master of the Savoy
      Edmund Thurland
      Roger Wetheral
      Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester
      William Humfrey of the Mint
      Benedict Spinola
      Cornelius de Vos
      Jeffrey Duckett
      Richard Springham, alderman
      James Blount, 6th Baron Mountjoy
      John Dudley
      William Winter
      George Needham or Nedham
      William Patten
      Jeffrey "Wolcheton"
      Lionel Duckett, alderman
      John Tamworth
      Matthew Field
      Edmund "Worschopp"
      Anthony Duckett of Grayrigg, Westmorland
      William Burd (treasurer to the company)
      Thomas Smythe, customer
      William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke
      Richard Barnes, alderman
      The establishment of the society may have been the result of the Queen's success in the Case of Mines. The new society was granted a mining monopoly for base metals in several English and Welsh counties, including some, where there were recoverable mines. It worked mines in Cumberland and had a smelting plant near Keswick in Cumberland. It also opened a copper smelting plant near Neath.
      In the 1670s, the society associated itself with the Company of Mineral and Battery Works, but perhaps only informally. Its monopoly disappeared under the Royal Mines Act 1688 (1 Will. & Mar. c. 30). In the 1690s, some of its mines were leased to another mining syndicate known as Mines Royal Copper, and that enterprise subsequently became the London Lead Company.
      For the later history of the company, as amalgamated with the Company of Mineral and Battery Works, see that article.


      Further reading


      M. B. Donald, Elizabethan Copper.


      Notes




      References


      Carr, Cecil T. (1913). Select Charters of Trading Companies A.D. 1530–1707. London: Bernard Quaritch. Retrieved 3 November 2013.
      Collingwood, W.G. (1912). Elizabethan Keswick. Kendal: Titus Wilson. Retrieved 2 November 2013.

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