1) This term is on record from the early eighteenth century.
1704 Occupiers of collyer housing, 9s 9d, Bradford: it resulted directly from the Act of 1589 which sought to control the erection of new dwellings in areas of common or waste, by demanding that four acres at least be assigned to any new cottage. There were exceptions, notably in the case of ‘workmen or labourers in … coal mines’ and that allowed coal owners to attract colliers by providing houses for them. It meant that certain types of house came to be associated with mining communities and occasionally that created local tensions. At the Quarter Sessions in 1649, Mr Thomas Stringer was accused of increasing the number of poor families in Crofton by erecting of divers cottages … for the habitacon of his colliers and workemen, a wording which directly reflects that in the Act. Lucy Caffyn identified single-storey cottages in the neighbourhood of Bradford and Huddersfield as ‘the principal type of accommodation’ for colliers from the late eighteenth century, so-called low-deckers. She stated that when John Elwell and John Crawshaw leased the mineral rights at Shelf in 1793, they received permission to build … habitations for workers on the common land of the manor.