In January 1874 the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle fantasised about resurrecting a long-dead churchman. How would it be, the newspaper wondered, if Hugh Pudsey – the twelfth-century Prince Bishop responsible for the Church's first grants of land and coal rights in 1180 – could be taken to the highest tower of Durham cathedral and invited to look at the social and environmental repercussions of his initial piece of business?

Of course, the Chronicle was not an opponent of coalmining per se: it would have had too acute an awareness of the centrality of the industry to the lives of the vast majority of its readership. But it was a newspaper that was alive to the social cost of coal, and the price of its extraction that was daily being paid in the quality of human life. In a series of articles entitled ‘Our Colliery Villages’, which ran from October 1872 to April 1874, the Chronicle reported on the living and working conditions of the region's mining families and described, more often than not, a scene of social and spiritual crisis. At least part of the crisis was attributable to the shifting rootlessness of the migrant coalfield population, for whom senses of identity and belonging seemed at once threadbare, yet ineffably complex.