Trade Secrets

[TisILeclerc]

Just when you thought they'd gone, they're back. The Anglo Saxons that is.



Here's a photo of the Venerable Bede hard at work as proof.

Oh, and this photo type thingy of the ground.



Funny thing is, is that it's at Rendlesham. Isn't that the place the Yanks had a bit of a meltdown some time ago over flying saucers and things?

It was obviously the Salt Traders coming back through time.

About 4,000 items, including intricate metalwork, coins and weights, have been found at Rendlesham. About 1,000 of them are Anglo-Saxon, Ms Minter said.

Dr Helen Geake of the British Museum said while the "palace" find was "incredibly exciting", it could be one of a number dotted around East Anglia.

"There would have been quite a few of these palaces or halls dotted around," she said.

"The king [of the time] would have toured his kingdom in order to show his magnificence to his people, so he would have had lots of places to base himself around East Anglia."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-37412519

I'll have to check the Daily Mail for a more in depth coverage of this find. Funny how names seem to follow trades. Minter and Geake sound very auspicious.

[Mick Harper]

The Rendlesham UFO turned out to be the moon rising, if I remember rightly. More moonshine re the Anglo-Saxons who were certainly a reality in East Anglia though not -- if the archaeology is to be believed -- in Jarrow.

[hvered]

Salt is and always has been in short supply in the Baltic so the east coast of Britain would surely have been in constant business.

Describing Sutton Hoo as an "Anglo-Saxon" burial is odd. Aren't ship-graves a Scandinavian custom? Using 'Bede' to bolster a claim that A-S palaces/halls must exist is downright weird. Something smells rottten in the British Museum.

[Mick Harper]

Yes, I should have put 'Anglo-Saxons' in quotes since 'their' existence in East Anglia is real enough eg Sutton Hoo but there is no evidence that they were called Anglo-Saxons eg Sutton Hoo. You will have to explain why salt and the English east coast go together.

[TisILeclerc]

It looks like the Anglo Saxons, with or without quotes, did indeed like their salt.

During the early stages of Anglo-Saxon settlement only coastal extraction appears to have been practised. At this time the sea level was rising, as the Roman coastal defences eroded. As a result extraction sites moved back as the coastline altered, then in time returned to sites nearer our present coastline, as defences were gradually rebuilt. As this happened huge amounts of peat were extracted, creating the area known now as the Norfolk Broads, and this peat was utilised to provide the fuel necessary for evaporation of Common salt out of solution. Coastal saline solution is far less pure and less concentrated than that found inland. Several sand leachings concentrated the solution. This was then boiled, evaporating the water and precipitating the Sodium Chloride leaving unwanted or dangerous metallic salts,which are more soluble, in solution.

Sites on coastal areas are found near woodland sites, and the Doomsday record indicates 64 salt producing villages in Norfolk. In Lincolnshire and Sussex there are 34 villages with multiple salt pans. Giving an estimated total of 360 salinae in the eastern coastal counties.

It seems they even went off to the Severn as well.

http://web.onetel.net.uk/~npwilson/maering/salt.htm

And down in Essex they are still blowing their trumpet for Maldon salt.

By the Domesday Book, 45 salt pans were operating in the Maldon area and hundreds more across Essex as a whole. Salt turns up in place names across the county, the Guild of Saltmakers was founded in 1394 and its sign, the three cups, is still seen in Essex.

But like so many good things, saltmaking was taxed and, eventually, taxed almost out of existence. Except that is for Maldon, the last survivor of the Essex saltmakers and proud standard bearer of traditional high quality salt making.

http://www.maldonsalt.co.uk/The-Story-M ... akers.html

[hvered]

explain why salt and the English east coast go together.

The saltings in East Anglia comprise 30% of the UK's remaining salt marshes.

[Mick Harper]

During the early stages of Anglo-Saxon settlement only coastal extraction appears to have been practised.

Actually nothing appears to have been practised during the early A/S period. According to the bafflingly absent archaeology.

At this time the sea level was rising, as the Roman coastal defences eroded.

Good Lord, has global warming started already? I assume the rising sea-level is eroding the Roman defences not the other way round as this syntax suggests.

As a result extraction sites moved back as the coastline altered, then in time returned to sites nearer our present coastline, as defences were gradually rebuilt.

Aha! Global warming has stopped. Why have the Anglo-Saxons rebulit the defences if they've got a nice little salt business where their coastline already is?

As this happened huge amounts of peat were extracted, creating the area known now as the Norfolk Broads, and this peat was utilised to provide the fuel necessary for evaporation of Common salt out of solution.

This is worth investigating. I just read yesterday that a famous Southern Railway train designer, miffed when his beloved company was nationalised in 1948, went off to Ireland and designed them an engine that ran on peat. Only one was built.

Coastal saline solution is far less pure and less concentrated than that found inland.

So why bother? Just use the inland stuff.

Sites on coastal areas are found near woodland sites,

Not peat then.

and the Doomsday record indicates 64 salt producing villages in Norfolk. In Lincolnshire and Sussex there are 34 villages with multiple salt pans. Giving an estimated total of 360 salinae in the eastern coastal counties ... and hundreds more across Essex as a whole.

I think that's the whole of south-eastern England covered. Except Kent. Worth wondering why not.

But like so many good things, saltmaking was taxed and, eventually, taxed almost out of existence.

Governments aren't generally stupid enough to tax anything out of existence (unless they actually want it out of existence for some other reason) but people going out of business quite often claim it's the government (or whoever) when the actual reason is they just can't compete with newer cheaper producers elsewhere. My guess would be Cheshire salt mines but it really would be a guess.

[TisILeclerc]

Iron Age salt-making on the east coast of England has been much studied, and over many decades. As discussed in Chapter 1, the study of the “Red Hills” found on the coasts of eastern England goes back to the 19th century, and continued through the 20th, with a series of studies shedding light on the matter.

Recent excavation and survey has shed much light on the distribution of sites and the methods of production, thanks above all to the work of Tom Lane and Elaine Morris (2001) in the Fenland areas of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire; their publication of 2001 represents a milestone in archaeological salt studies in England, considering, as they do, not only how and when salt was produced, but also the implications of that production for the economy and society of the areas and periods involved.The study of Red Hills started in Essex (the coastal areas east and north-east of London) (Fig. 3.3). A long history of exploration and study (reviewed in Kinory 2012: 4 ff.) culminated in a systematic, though brief, study published in 1990 (Fawn et al. 1990, with full references to earlier work), updated somewhat in 1995 (Sealey 1995). Over 300 sites are known in Essex alone, and some the other side of the Thames estuary in Kent, though many of these are Roman in date. Modern excavations have been few, so that the knowledge of the internal structure of the mounds is not as good as it might be; but it is clear that they contain hearths (furnaces), pits or tanks for brine storage and settling, flues, and abundant briquetage – containers, supports, “firebars” (part of a griddle arrangement on which the containers were placed), and other small pieces (wedges, “pinch props” – spacer-clips in the terminology of Elaine Morris – and rods). How these were all arranged into an effective brine-boiling system is less clear; in essence they involved creating a structure with fire beneath and supports for containers above, but it must be admitted that the evidence from Essex is much less clear than from corresponding sites on the Continent. The most recent work in the area (Biddulph et al. 2012, Chapter 4) confirms this picture.Typical installations of the Iron Age may be seen at Helpringham Fen in Lincolnshire (H. Healey in Bell et al. 1999). This site produced abundant briquetage in the form of bricks and plates, pyramidal pieces, props, bridges, bars and vessel fragments, associated with rectangular hearths surrounded by ditches, with much ash and other firing debris (Fig. 6.8). The briquetage is similar to that from a Roman site at Holbeach St Johns (D. Gurney in Bell et al. 1999).

At other sites, the standard production method was to create some form of hearth or furnace, typically in an elongated pit, with supports holding up evaporation pans for the boiling of brine. In this there are obvious similarities to what is found in France, though the scale is much smaller. At one site, Cowbit Wash, it appears that both troughs and pans of various shapes were used simultaneously in a multiple firing operation; at this one site alone, 24.5 kg of briquetage was recovered (Lane & Morris 2001: 33 ff.). The site dates to the late pre-Roman Iron Age. Other sites produced comparable quantities of material and enabled the authors to create a systematic typology of the briquetage from the Fenland sites, showing how it changed over time in terms of both form and of fabric, shelly limestone gritted temper being prevalent in the earlier material and organic in the later (Roman) phases, and individual types of container and support assignable to specific centuries (Lane & Morris 2001: 351 ff.

https://www.scribd.com/document/1816882 ... full-ebook

This extract is taken from the publication above dealing with Salt in Prehistoric Europe. It is well worth reading for those interested in salt.

I think it shows that salt was produced in East Anglia although some may disagree. He does go on to mention other areas such as Breen Wells. A bit of a clue in the name I think.

Briquetage is the ceramic ware used in evaporation vessels as Wiki so capably explains

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briquetage

Briquetage is the name for a coarse ceramic material used to make evaporation vessels and supporting pillars used in extracting salt from seawater. Thick-walled saltpans were filled with saltwater and heated from below until the water had boiled away and salt was left behind. Often, the bulk of the water would be allowed to evaporate in salterns before the concentrated brine was transferred to a smaller briquetage vessel for final reduction. Once only salt was left, the briquetage vessels would have to be broken to remove the valuable commodity for trade.[1]

Broken briquetage material is found at multiple sites from the later Bronze Age in Europe into the medieval period and archaeologists have been able to identify different forms and fabrics of the pottery, allowing trade networks to be identified. Saltworking sites contain large quantities of the orange/red material and in Essex the mounds of briquetage are known as Red Hills.

[Mick Harper]

All this seems to indicate that salt could be produced anywhere on the coast since the North Sea (unlike the Baltic) is uniformly salty. But it seems perverse not to use salt marshes where the water is even more saline (or does the salt naturally get left behind?) Knowing the Megalithics I predict that salt marshes -- or something similar -- were artificially engineered and only then did the saltpans get to work.

In support of this idea I offer you the saltpans in Guernsey which are on the north side (the tidal island side) of the tidal inlet called the Braye du Valle. There can be no other reason for siting it here (somewhat inconveniently for the rest of the island) unless the incoming and outgoing tide had something to do with salt production.

[TisILeclerc]

Isn't Essex full of salt marshes? And the Wash is a giant salt marsh pan isn't it?

Not forgetting the north bank of the Tees which was home to Cerebos salt. Marshes all the way to the sea.