Salt and the salt industry

by Albert Frederick Calvert

It was the custom to repeat the legend either at the beginning or the end of each succeeding list that—

“There is and tyme out of mynd hath been within the Towne of Northwich 112 four leads and one odde lead and noe more; and four leads called the Running Wich-house. Soe the totall is 113 four leads and one odde lead.”

This formula was evidently only a fable. The discrepancy between the figures and the statement was pointed out by a scribe in 1630, who, having cast up the number of leads tabulated in the list of 1589, appended the following note: “These leads answere but unto 308 leads whereas there is 453 leads yearly walled for ut pateat ante: soe that there wanted 145 leads to make up the full accoumpt for 308 leads and 145 leads make but just 453.”

There are about 450 leads accounted for in the next list, which was drawn up in 1593, but the clerk persisted in the assumption that what had been “time out of mynd” could suffer no change, and he formally declared, despite his own figures to the contrary, that “the totall some is 113 four leads and one odde lead, which stand in the Towne rowe as is before written and declared.”

On folio 61 of one of the Harleian MSS., following the list of Northwich salt-owners for the years 1636–38, are undated lists of salt-owners of Middlewich and Nantwich. The clerk admits the incompleteness of the list of twenty-two owners in Middlewich, but he explains that the names he gives are “as manie as I can learne for the p’sent,” and he adds, “But the number of their sev’all and respective howses and leads I cannot learne.” Only five owners appear in the returns for Nantwich, and the meagre particulars that the clerk has been able to acquire respecting the other salt districts of Cheshire are contained in the following note: “There is another Wiche where there is a great store of Salt made in Cheshire And w^ch is of greate Antiquitie called Fulwich, also Durtwich, and my Lo: Brereton is an owner of sev’all wich-houses theire. But whoe are owners of the rest I cannot learne.”

Nantwich was long famous among the Wiches for its production of the finest and best white salt. The Welsh named it Hellath Wen, and the London Magazine, in 1750, translated the words as the “White Salt Town,” but there is no reference to the quality or colour of its output in the present name, which is derived from the Welsh word “nant,” a vale, and the Saxon “wyche.” That its salt was good, plentiful, and of considerable commercial value would seem to be shown by the fact that under the Saxons the supplies were in the hands of the princes and nobles, and William the Conqueror had not been in England more than a year before he divided the salt production of Nantwich between himself and Earl Edwin, who owned some salt-houses in the district.

According to Leland, there were 400 salt works at Nantwich in the reign of Henry VIII, but the number was reduced to 216 under Elizabeth, and in 1624 only 108 were in existence. Nantwich was described in the London Magazine of 1750 as the largest and most considerable town in the county next to Chester, but its salt industry at that period was fast declining. An Act of Parliament which had been obtained in 1734 to extend the navigation of the river Weaver from Winsford to Nantwich, was never put into operation. In 1778 the salt works had been reduced to two, each containing five large pans of wrought iron. The Nantwich salt industry was practically moribund in 1849, but some twenty-five tons per week were produced by one maker until 1856, which is the last year in which salt was made in the district. In 1891 a company was registered for the purpose of acquiring property in Nantwich and manufacturing salt from brine, but the necessary financial support was not forthcoming and the project was abandoned. The decline of the Nantwich salt industry is ascribed in Poole’s History of Cheshire (1778) to various causes, including the frequent destruction by fire of the works in the town—“fourteen of which in the memory of persons living lately, having been destroyed in one day”; to the discovery and exploitation of new salt springs in adjacent localities; and to the superior advantages in the matter of accessibility which were possessed by Northwich and Winsford.

Northwich, described by the Welsh as Hellath-du, became the chief of the Cheshire salt towns in the seventeenth century, and its output of brine is still greater than that of any other district. In 1605, Northwich had 449 leads, against 642 leads at Middlewich and 1,296 leads at Nantwich, but the comparative superiority of the brine pumped at Nantwich over that of her rivals is demonstrated by the relative amount of boiling required to precipitate the salt. In Northwich, the annual expenditure for wood fuel was £2,056; Middlewich, with nearly one-third more leads, consumed wood fuel to the amount of £1,435 yearly; while Nantwich, working twice as many leads as Middlewich, and nearly three times the number operated at Northwich, had an annual wood bill of only £1,728.

In 1670, Winsford, which had only just started as a salt producer, had two salt works in operation on a small scale. In 1675, Lord Brereton ignored the output of Winsford in his calculation of the total annual salt production of the Cheshire works at 26,927 tons. In 1878, or practically two centuries later, the Cheshire output of salt was calculated at 2,055,000 tons, made up as follows: Winsford and District, 1,036,000 tons; Northwich and District, 880,000 tons; Middlewich and District, 21,000 tons; and the newly-developed Sandbach District, 118,000 tons. But while Winsford has surpassed her older competitors in the matter of salt production, Northwich is still the commercial centre of the industry and the greatest producer of brine; whereas, in the case of the other districts, the brine is converted into salt on the spot, the Northwich brine, to the amount of hundreds of millions of gallons annually, is pumped out of the neighbourhood through the Marbury pipe, to be employed in the chemical works of Brunner, Mond & Co., and be manufactured into salt at the Salt Union’s works at Weston Point.

Compared with the other salt-making centres, the record of Middlewich is of slight importance, and although the ancient town boasts an honourable place in the history of the Cheshire Wiches, it now takes a secondary position among the salt-producing districts.