SALT in the 17th and 18th Century #Salt #History #Artisan

 by Deborah Swift 

Salt comes from two main sources: sea water, and the mineral halite (also known as rock salt). Salt is something we take for granted nowadays, forgetting that the term for our pay, the salary comes from the Latin salarium, originally denoting a Roman soldier's allowance to buy salt.

Near where I live in Lancashire and Cumbria, there is a long history of panning for salt in the Morecambe Bay. In 1748, William Brownrigg’s The Art of Making Common Salt mentions ‘sleeching’ on Morecambe Bay. Sleeching, I discovered, is scraping up salt-impregnated sand and silt, then watering out the salt to produce a concentrated brine, then boiling in 'saltcotes' –  small huts installed with lead pans over a fire.

But as canals and railways allowed the cheap transport of salt from inland mines and abroad, coastal salt-making gradually faded away, and by the 1860s it had almost entirely disappeared. One of the biggest producers of salt was Lion Saltworks in Cheshire and you can find a wonderful post and pictures,like the one above, about it here.

Norwich, Nantwich, Middlewich

Many towns and cities in England end in –wich  (or wych) and these are traditionally associated with salt production.  The suffix -wich derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning roughly "a dwelling or fortified place" and usually these were places with trading activity on low-lying coasts or on salt marshes, so many of these towns were also active in producing salt, which was a major and lucrative export.

White Gold – Salt from sea water

During the Early Modern Age, salt production from seawater was a profitable industry and soon became Scotland's third-largest export after wool and fish. It was deemed so valuable by the 18th Century that people called it "white gold”. The remains of nine salt pan houses and a windmill can still be seen at St Monans in Fife, Scotland, and the industry remains in the names of places like Prestonpans. The picture below is of salt harvesters in Brittany. 

New Forest Salt

Lymington in the New Forest, on the Solent estuary, is a town that began as an Anglo-Saxon village and is recorded in the Domesday Book as "Lentune". From the Middle Ages and up to the 19th century, Lymington was well-known for its salt making 

On a visit to Lymington in the 1690's traveller Celia Fiennes writes of Lymington as having a few small ships, but “the greatest trade is by their salterns” and she gives details of how the seawater was pumped through pipes into iron or copper pans situated into the salt-houses where it was evaporated away by boiling rapidly over coal fired furnaces. A vast amount of salt could be made in a single pan beneath which the furnace was kept blazing away all day and night (see the picture). By the middle of the eighteenth century there were about one hundred and fifty active salt pans. 

Read more about Celia Fiennes here, on the English Heritage site. The picture of the boiling off of water over a furnace is from National Gallery of Scotland.

A Tax on Salt

Salt was a precious and valuable commodity used the world over, as it is an essential nutrient. In 1641, during the commonwealth period, the previously abolished salt tax was reintroduced to raise money for Parliament. However the tax was revoked on the King’s return in 1660 and not reinstated until 1693 under the reign of William III. The tax was originally set at two shillings a bushel on foreign salt, but only one shilling on native salt to protect English salt workers.

Salt Wars

In the early 17th century, while well-known nutmeg wars were fought between Dutch and English merchants over imported and exotic "East Indian" spices, a different but equally intense rivalry erupted as traders in the Netherlands tried to secure their salt supply for the processing of herrings, butter and cheese.

The Baltic and Poland had extensive salt deposits, but the best supplies were controlled by the Spanish monarchy, in Portugal and the Caribbean, where salt more suited to herring was produced. Throughout the 17th century, the problem of salt supplies determined the Dutch attitude to the Spanish and Portuguese, and affected these empires’ prosperity in the Dutch "Golden Age".

 Want to know more? The history of salt is fascinating and far too big for a single post. Watch this interesting video on the history of salt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFOxbmgr4so

Or read Mark Kurlansky's Salt 

Deborah Swift is the author of  nine books set in the 17th Century, as well as others set in the 20th Century. Find her at www.deborahswift.com or chat with her via Twitter @swiftstory