URL originale : https://books.openedition.org/pufc/25642
11. The Fenland of Eastern England and the Production of Salt
p. 231-253
Résumés
Many hundreds of salt making sites dating from the Bronze Age through to the Romano-British period have been discovered in the Fenland region of Eastern England during surveys over the past 50 years. Lately a small number have been excavated, indicating the use of rectangular hearths flanked by clay-lined pits referred to as « settling tanks ». The surveys and excavations have yielded huge amounts of briquetage, including fragments of shallow ceramic containers in which the brine was heated, the pedestals and clips which supported the containers in hearths or ovens and the fired clay debris from the heating structures. The sites when active were in near-coastal locations on salt marshes fringed on the inland edge by freshwater fens which created extensive peat cover. It is believed that the peat was used to fuel the heating structures. Changing environmental conditions, including variations in sea-level, have left some of the sites many kilometres inland from the modern coast while others are buried by post-Roman flood deposits. Elsewhere sites are known to have been eroded into the sea.
Des prospections effectuées au cours des cinquante dernières années ont permis de découvrir dans la région des Fens, dans l’est de l’Angleterre, des centaines de sites de fabrication de sel allant de l’âge du bronze à la période romano-britannique. On en a récemment excavé un petit nombre, mettant ainsi en évidence l’utilisation de foyers rectangulaires, flanqués de fosses tapissées d’argile connues sous le nom de « cuves de stockage ». Les prospections et les fouilles ont révélé d’énormes quantités de briquetage, y compris des fragments de récipients en céramique peu profonds dans lesquels on faisait chauffer la saumure, les supports et les attaches qui maintenaient en place ces récipients dans les foyers et les débris d’argile cuite provenant des structures de chauffage. À l’époque où ils étaient en usage, ces sites se situaient dans des endroits proches de la côte sur des marais salés, bordés du côté de la terre par des marais d’eau douce, qui formaient une couverture extensive de tourbe. On pense que la tourbe était utilisée comme combustible pour la chauffe. Des changements dans les conditions environnementales, y compris des variations du niveau de la mer, font que certains de ces sites se trouvent maintenant à des kilomètres à l’intérieur des terres par rapport à la côte actuelle, tandis que d’autres sont enterrés sous des dépôts d’inondation post-romains. On sait qu’ailleurs des sites ont été érodés et emportés par la mer.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : Angleterre
Keywords : England
Texte intégral
Salt is the only rock consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from water. It has fascinated man for thousands of years, not only as a substance he prized and was willing to labour to obtain but also as a generator of poetic and mystic meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power and its links with the experience of the sacred.
Margaret Visser
1Sea salt production was carried out extensively on the coastal marshes of the Fenland of Eastern England and along the Lincolnshire Marshland in the Prehistoric and Romano-British periods. Evidence for this activity, in the form of fragmentary briquetage, has been known in Lincolnshire since at least the mid-nineteenth century when Reynardson (1850) reported on « hand-bricks… found in no small quantity washed up… from the beds of black mud off that coast ». Since then, numerous archaeologists have either themselves discovered, or reported on, individual sites in the Fenland, most notably S.J. Hallam (1960 and 1970), Nenquin (1961), Potter (1981) and Simmons (1975a and 1980). Following these reports, many new salt sites were located as artefact scatters during the English Heritage funded Fenland Survey of the 1980s and summarised by Hall and Coles (1994) and Lane (2005a; 2005b). Some excavation of salt sites followed, with the results published extensively in Lane and Morris (2001). On the adjoining Lincolnshire Marshes the evidence for prehistoric and Romano-British saltmaking was summarised by Kirkham (2001) and by the Humber Wetlands Project team (Thomas and Fletcher, 2001).
2Although Reynardson’s identification of ancient saltmaking is often cited as the earliest reference to the industry in the region, there is one which predates it considerably. A recent review (Strang, 1997) of Ptolemy’s map of Britain, compiled from data gathered prior to AD122, gives a location broadly at the junction of the Fenland and the Lincolnshire Marsh for the place Salinae. Given the known density of sites around that location, it may have been the area generally and not a single specific place that Ptolemy referred to. Whatever the accuracy of this early reference, and there are those who argue that Salinae, in fact, refers to the inland salt site of Droitwich in the west of England (eg. Rivet and Smith, 1981, p. 120; Bond and Hunt, 1992, p. 186, among others), there is no doubt that saltmaking was a major activity in the prehistoric and Romano-British periods (and later) in the Fenland region. This paper seeks to summarise briefly this evidence for early (pre-Saxon period) coastal saltmaking. Emphasis will be on the Fenland and Lincolnshire Marsh, but with reference to sea salt making in other parts of the country.
3The Fenland does contain evidence for saltmaking in the post-Roman period, but this is not the subject of this paper. Only a single saltmaking site of the Middle Saxon period is confirmed in the Fenland (at Fishtoft, Lincolnshire), although others are believed to be present (Crowson et al., 2005, p. 207). At the time of the Domesday survey in the early 11th century, many salterns were recorded, a number of them as « waste ». By then the process had changed to one which involved the scraping of mud from the foreshore after the high tides, filtration and evaporation in lead pans by means of heating over peat fires (Hallam, H.E. 1960; Healey, 1993, p. 28). The remains of this process survive in the form of mounds of waste silt which are common on the contemporary coasts and estuaries of the medieval Fenland.
I. The Fenland Geology and Topography
4Extending for some 120 km in length from Lincoln to Cambridge and 50 km in width between Peterborough and King’s Lynn the Fenland encompasses some 4 000 km2 and takes in parts of the modern counties of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk (fig. 1, p. 234). Sediments within this low-lying « basin » have been accumulating over much of the Flandrian period, with a series of marine incursions depositing silts, sands and clays. At the same time freshwater from the many of the rivers draining the English Midlands have flowed into the Fenland promoting extensive peat formation around the landward edges. The overall result of these events has been the creation and continuation of a dynamic landscape composed of, characteristically, wide salt marshes pierced by tidal creeks and fringed by a watery peatland.
5The fluctuating nature of these ancient landscapes through time is evidenced by the interbedded clastic and organic layers which form the Fenland and which have been studied extensively by means of boreholes and the recording of long sections of drainage dykes (summarised in Waller, 1994). While some overall patterns of sediment deposition are clear the localised variations in the below-ground sequences confirm the dynamism of the ancient landscapes.
II. Salterns: Locations and Distributions Through Time (fig. 1, p. 234)
6With its extensive tidal salt marshes and relatively local access to contemporary (peat) fuel supplies, the Fenland has been a prime location for producing salt by means of the evaporation of brine in ceramic containers within hearths or ovens. As the greater part of the Fenland is now given over to arable agriculture, many of these salt producing sites have been revealed as surface scatters of briquetage fragments. Such sites are known in the literature as Salterns and it is this term which is used here to describe this type of site.
7While Iron Age and Romano-British salterns are common in the Fenland there is growing evidence that the industry dates back to at least the Bronze Age. While no evidence exists of Neolithic salt making in Britain, a number of sites in the Fenland are known to date to the mid second millennium BC (Middle Bronze Age). These are all situated on the western fen edge where the rivers Welland and Nene flowed into the Fenland (fig. 2, p. 235). Large areas of the Welland/Fenland junction are covered by river alluvium, while the equivalent position of the Nene is alluviated and partly covered by the industrial areas around Peterborough. Therefore, the opportunities for finding these early salt sites are rare, except by excavation in advance of development.
Figure 1: Location and distribution of Iron Age and Romano-British Salterns in the Fenland

Source: Drawn by Susan Unsworth, Heritage Trust of Lincolnshire (Lane and Morris, 2001).
Figure 2: Bronze Age and Iron Age Salterns on the western fen edge between the rivers Glen and Nene and the contemporary creek systems

Source: Drawn by David Hopkins.
8One location where the pre-alluviated land surface has been exposed is Welland Bank Quarry, on the Lincolnshire/Cambridgeshire border, where mineral extraction revealed the remains of numerous ditches, pits and traces of post-built structures associated with settlement (Pryor, 1998). Although these dated predominantly to the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age (and included substantial quantities of briquetage of that date), one large pit contained quantities of characteristic Deveral-Rimbury type Middle Bronze Age pottery along with contemporary briquetage, chiefly in the form of ceramic containers fragments. No contemporary intact hearths or similar features directly associated with the Middle Bronze Age briquetage were present on the site to indicate how the brine was heated at that time, although the pit contained numerous layers of ash, charcoal and burnt silt/clay interpreted on site as redeposited structural hearth material and rake-out. The amount of charcoal present would suggest wood was the fuel used at that time. Briquetage from this Middle Bronze Age pit chiefly takes the form of fragments of shallow containers with shelly fabric.
9Other Middle Bronze Age sites (fig. 2, p. 235) occur near the junction of the River Nene and the Fenland at Northey (Gurney, 1980) and Peterborough (Pryor, 1980). More recently Middle Bronze Age briquetage has been excavated at Eye (Morris pers comm.). Elsewhere in Britain salt sites of Middle Bronze Age date are rare with only a handful known, for example in Essex (Wilkinson and Murphy, 1995, p. 218) and Brean Down, Somerset (Bell, 1990).
10From the Late Bronze Age (LBA) period a single site is known on the northern fen edge at Stickford and another from the Lincolnshire Marshland at Tetney (Palmer-Brown, 1993). Aside from Welland Bank Quarry, LBA briquetage is known on the western fen edge from Langtoft (Dickens, 2006) and Northborough (Knight, 1998), with Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age material from Dowsby (Trimble forthcoming) and Billingborough (Chowne et al., 2001). Middle Iron Age sites are found at Langtoft, Market Deeping, Deeping St James, Morton and Bourne (Lane and Morris, 2001).
11In the Middle – Late Iron Age an expansion of the freshwater fen around the landward edges caused dilution of the brine sources, resulted in the saltmakers from the Welland/Nene area moving eastward (seaward) on to the marshes. This is best recorded around Cowbit, south of Spalding where an excavated saltern (Lane, 2001) near the seaward edge of the peat yielded evidence of an initial phase using briquetage made on the fen edge from the « upland » Oxford clays and transported to the site, presumably by boat along the Welland creek. Subsequently, use was made of local clay sources for briquetage, including that associated with a hearth/oven structure from which a radiocarbon date of 2098 + 15 (185-95 cal BC at 95 % confidence) was obtained from charcoal lying in the bottom of the flue.
12In the late Iron Age and into the Romano-British period there appeared to be an enormous intensification of salt production in the Fenland and Lincolnshire Marsh. From the numbers of sites known through survey, hundreds were making salt (fig. 1, p. 234). How many of those were operating at the same time is another of the problems that will be difficult to solve. Each briquetage spread (site) could represent no more than a season’s work and, given the changing condition of the natural landscape that is all that may have been possible at certain sites. Evidence in the form of the many rebuilds of the hearths/ovens, settling tanks and associated building at Spalding Site A (see below), however, suggests production there over many seasons.
13Few saltern sites of this (or any) period have been excavated thoroughly but those that have been investigated indicate some common feature-types and layout. Typically, the core area consisted of a surrounding (drainage?) ditch, heating structures, usually only one per site, with clay lined « tanks », or cisterns, situated adjacent (fig. 3, p. 237) (Lane, 2005a, fig. 4). It is assumed that the tanks are to enable the settling out of the sediment in the brine and possibly for an additional phase of brine strengthening before heating and crystallisation in ceramic containers. A slightly different configuration of features is known from the 2nd century AD site at Morton (Trimble, 2001) and the 3rd century site at Denver, Norfolk (Gurney, 1986). Here, tidal ditches delivered brine to « reservoirs », which took the form of short lengths of ditch cut at right angles to the tidal channels. These « reservoirs » filled up naturally during high tides but were constructed in such a way as to prevent the escape of tidal waters on the ebb. Gurney (1986, p. 99) suggested that ceramic containers spanned these reservoirs and were topped up from them to strengthen the brine before being removed to a hearth for crystallisation.
Figure 3: Plans of early Romano-British Salterns at Wygate Park, Spalding

Source: Drawn by David Hopkins.
14The majority of salterns in the Fenland, and indeed elsewhere around the coasts of Britain, are thought to have ceased operating in the late second to third century AD. In Essex (Rippon, 2000a, p. 62) and Kent (Gilman, 1998, p. 14) production seems to have largely terminated by the late 2nd century. In the Somerset Levels of southwest England, however, salterns appeared to continue in use into the 4th century AD (Rippon, 2000a, p. 105).
15One example of sea salt production in the Fenland with a secure 4th century AD date is that excavated at Middleton, Norfolk (Crowson, 2001). Here heating structures and adjacent settling tanks were located. However the most unusual aspect of the site was that no evidence of ceramic containers was found within the briquetage assemblage, leading the excavator to suggest the use at that time of lead pans. While the size of the pedestals found at Middleton would support such a view no lead off-cuts or droplets were recovered despite metal detecting.
16Recent excavations of salterns in the Fenland include two discrete examples on the western periphery of Spalding, Lincolnshire. This is an area not fieldwalked during the Fenland Survey but, even had it been, the site would not have been located as a surface scatter due to post-Roman flooding which deposited up to 0.5 m of overlying silt. The two salterns lie c 250 m apart and were located initially during geophysical survey and trial trenching in advance of housing development. Both sites were of broadly similar design (fig. 3,p. 237), each with a ditch enclosing a core area containing a hearth/oven and « settling » tanks. Archaeomagnetic samples taken from each of the heating structures yielded dates of AD 115 (AD 80 to AD 160 at 95 % confidence) on the more southerly Site A. The date of AD 200 (AD 130 to AD 240 at 95 % confidence) on Site B was thought to be suspect by those collecting the data. Briquetage from the two sites appears broadly similar, although the material is currently undergoing analysis.
17One rare aspect of the Spalding sites is the presence, adjacent to Site A, of the remains of a post-built structure which had undergone several rebuilds (fig. 4, p. XIV). Of the salterns previously excavated only on the heavily ploughed Middle Iron Age site at Langtoft was there evidence of an associated building (Lane and Morris, 2001, fig. 86), although in many cases only the core areas of the actual saltern were excavated. The building at Spalding was possibly for drying or storage of salt, but could equally have sheltered the salt makers. Its floors were composed of the most easily accessible local hardcore material, crushed briquetage. A much later building recorded in documents relating to a medieval saltern at Gedney was described as made of mud, timber and reed thatch (Hallam, 1960, p. 110) and may have resembled the earlier example from Spalding.
18At Spalding both sites went out of use in the 2nd or possibly early 3rd century AD, conforming to a general trend, not only in the Fenland but in many places around Britain’s coasts (Bradley, 1992, p. 43; Rippon, 2000a, p. 105). In the case of Site A, this abandonment was not obviously due to deteriorating environmental conditions as a settlement flourished over the area during the next two centuries. It is possible, though, that the brine supply in the creek had dried up. While reasons for the general abandonment of coastal salterns in Britain are not clear, a number of suggestions has been made. Foremost, are the deteriorating conditions experienced in some coastal areas due to rising sea levels. This may have caused some repositioning of salterns, but in this changing landscape the salt makers may have had a tradition of frequent removal to more fruitful locations.
19Despite this seeming general abandonment, Bradley (1992, p. 44) has pointed out there appears to be no obvious intensification of salt production at the inland brine springs sites to compensate for the overall reduction in salt output from the abandoned coastal sites. What cannot be known is the number of coastal sites that fell victim to the rising sea levels. It is possible that saltmaking in these extreme areas did continue after the 2nd century, but that post-Roman fluctuations in sea levels have either eroded sites or, as in the case of Spalding, buried them under later deposits. Erosion is evident in the Lincolnshire Marshland by the presence of salterns on the present-day beaches (eg. Ambrose and White, 1981) and in other coastal areas such as Essex (Fawn et al., 1990, p. 46). Meanwhile there may be late Roman sites present under the arc of silts that spread inland from the Fenland’s North Sea coast. Certainly, sites of Roman date were identified beneath overlying silts during the Fenland Survey in Norfolk by the presence of briquetage found in the spoil along newly cleaned dyke sides (Silvester, 1988). Many buried sites are also known on the Lincolnshire Marshland from monitoring dyke cutting (Kirkham, 2001, fig. 124) and development such as road building.
20The extent of damage to the salterns in the overwhelmingly arable Fenland varies. While Spalding lay semi-protected beneath later silt deposits, there are many indications elsewhere of the loss of information through ploughing. Early accounts of Fenland salterns tend to describe small mounds of debris. S.J. Hallam (1960), for example, refers to hillocks on sites including Mill Green, Pinchbeck (Ibid., p. 49) and Whaplode, among others, while Nenquin’s (1961, p. 69) reference to « … very clear traces of a ploughed-out hillock which must have consisted of red pulverized baked clay » is not untypical. Some of these hillocks may have been naturally formed « roddons », levees of former creeks (as at Cowbit), although these would have been recognised by Simmons (1975b, p. 35) who noted an Iron Age saltern 1,5 m high at Rippingale in the early 1970s. By the time of the Fenland Survey of the 1980s none of the saltern sites plotted could be described as « red hills », with the possible exception of one example at Elderberry Farm, Pinchbeck.
III. Salterns: Equipment
21Despite the extremely fragmented state of the briquetage recovered from the heavily ploughed fields of the Fenland, it has proved possible to reconstruct some of the forms and their development through time (Morris, 2001 and forthcoming; Percival, 2001; Crosby, 2001a). The briquetage represents the smashed remains of a number of key components of the saltmaking process, predominantly ceramic containers in which the brine is heated and crystallised, pedestals and clips which hold and stabilise the containers within the heating structures (hearths or ovens) and the remains of the structures themselves.
1. Containers
22While no substantial or near-complete containers have been found in the Fenland – just smashed fragments – the Lincolnshire Marsh has a limited number of remains where partial reconstruction has proved possible (fig. 5, p. 241). Jeffrey May (1976, fig. 72) produced a reconstruction of a container excavated under difficult circumstances by H.H. Swinnerton on Ingoldmells Beach in the 1920s (fig. 5, no 1, p. 241). Other briquetage including pedestals also came from what was, at best, a salvage excavation of an area c. 5 m by 4 m (Swinnerton, 1932). Almost 50 years later a storm washed the sand off Ingoldmells, Beach and Ambrose and White (1981) retrieved more examples of similar containers (Crosby, 2001b) (fig. 5, no 2, p. 241). Among the similarities in the vessels were marks on the base which indicated the containers had been subject to heating with a single pedestal holding up the narrow end (fig. 6, p. XIV) (Julich, 2006, plate 9) and two on the wider end. In addition Crosby noted the marks on the rims where clips made of unfired clay had held together two or more containers. The re-use of these containers was evident by the new rims fitted where the unfired clay had fused to the original container rim and it had broken upon removal of the clip. No datable material, such as pottery, was associated with the Ingoldmells material, although attempts to date the briquetage using magnetic inclinations produced a highly plausible date of 200 – 0BC (Borradaile et al., 1999).
23Not enough survives of the Welland Bank Quarry Middle Bronze Age containers to reconstruct their form. By the Middle Iron Age, however, « gutter-shaped troughs », clay cylinders sliced in half when wet with half moon shaped pieces of clay applied to the ends, were identifiable in the Fenland at, for example, Market Deeping (Lane and Morris, 2001). From the briquetage at the 2nd century AD Fenland site at Morton, flat-based and/or trough-like shallow pans were suggested as the container used (Crosby, 2001b). It is not certain what these developments in container manufacture mean in terms of enhanced technology or, indeed, whether they are for different purposes (basic crystallisation or a secondary drying process?). The single excavated Late Roman site from the Fenland at Middleton had no evidence of ceramic containers and it is presumed that lead was used for this purpose, although without certainty.
Figure 5: Late Iron Age briquetage containers from Ingoldmells, Lincolnshire

Source: Drawn by David Hopkins.
2. Supports (Pedestal, bricks and clips)
24No pedestals (clay objects which support the containers in the heating structures) are known from the Middle Bronze Age Fenland sites. Major change in support technology came in the Late Bronze Age, when horned pedestals were replaced by larger « pyramidal » examples and the Iron Age when these substantial Middle Iron Age « pyramidal pedestals » (Lane and Morris, 2001, p. 351) became obsolete as the industry moves seaward. Subsequently, the supports are made on the site by means of squeezing wet, locally-sourced clay into the desired shape by hand (fig. 7, p. 242). These pedestals are supplemented by clips, which are again lumps of handily available clay inserted between containers for stabilisation. Such items are common on coastal saltern sites around Britain and northern Europe.
Figure 7: Pedestals: 1. Late Bronze Age from Tetney, 2. Middle Iron Age from Market Deeping, 3.-5. Late Iron Age from Cowbit

Source: Drawn by David Hopkins.
3. Heating Structures
25Much of the fragmentary ceramic material found on the sites derives from the heating structures. These vary from simple hearths into which pedestals were inserted and containers placed on top, to a more sophisticated indirect-heat arrangement with floors and possibly flues, offering better control of the heat. The date of this development is surprisingly early with the dated phase at Cowbit (185-95 cal BC) providing evidence of an indirect heating system. Most of the known hearth/ovens are rectangular in shape, but most are badly affected by plough damage. That at Morton was little more than a heat-affected patch of natural clay. Even the Spalding Site A structure on a well-preserved site was badly truncated by a later ditch. Nowhere has a substantial superstructure survived to one of these features and it will have to be the role of experimental archaeology to take the known information forward.
IV. Salterns: The Process
26The quantities of briquetage present at the Fenland sites and the association of the sites with the contemporary tidal creeks, fossilised in the Fenland landscape as sinuous bands of silts, serve to suggest that the process involved the capture of brine then crystallisation by means of heating in ceramic containers and not by other methods such as the filtering and heating of salt-saturated muds. The latter process was used extensively in the medieval period and generated large quantities of waste silt, which are still visible as significant mounds in the modern landscape. No such mounds are evident around any of the prehistoric and Roman period salterns.
27The basic process saw channels feed brine into the saltern area, where it may have been stored temporarily and underwent initial evaporation and strengthening in natural pond-like depressions common on the salt marsh. From there, the strengthened brine was tipped into the clay-lined settling tanks before being transferred to shallow ceramic containers where it was heated and crystallised. Little evidence is present on the Fenland sites of what happened subsequently. A separate drying process may have taken place, but it is not clear how and in what type of vessel.
V. Salterns: Fuel and the impact on the environment
28As the conference on which these papers are based sought to highlight the uses of fuel during saltmaking and the impact that had on the environment, that aspect must be considered here. The obvious fuel source for the Prehistoric and Roman salterns in the Fenland region is the peat which bordered the inner edge of the region. It is known that peat fuelled the Medieval salterns in the region from the surviving documentary sources and was used « in immense quantities » (Hallam, 1960, p. 112). This documentary evidence is backed up by the results of excavation (Healey, 1999). These documents highlight not only grants of salterns themselves, chiefly to religious institutions, but other associated necessities such as peat, carts for transport, beasts (presumably of burden) and pasture for them (although the medieval process was different to that in the Prehistoric/Romano-British period and involved the gathering of great quantities of tidal muds for which beasts of traction may have been used). Similarly, peat was used in the Lincolnshire Marshland in the medieval period, both as fuel and in the filtration process (eg. Sturman, 1984, p. 54; Grady, 1998, p. 83). By the later part of the medieval period peat was brought in from the Humber levels when local supplies became exhausted.
29One problem in demonstrating conclusively that peat was the fuel used in the prehistoric and Roman salterns is that peat leaves little trace when burnt and is therefore largely invisible in the archaeological record. Some confirmation of its use comes from Denver, Norfolk, where a charred Cladium nutlet associated with Roman saltern debris was AMS dated and found to be significantly older than the saltern material (Murphy, 2001, p. 381). Elsewhere charred crop remains were often present but such material may only have been used in getting the fire started. Charcoal was present in the hearths at Cowbit, where there was also local access to peat, and at Middleton, in the valley of the River Nar, where wood was easily accessible locally on the valley sides where it also fuelled a Roman iron working industry.
30Indirect evidence of peat use in the Fenland Salterns comes from the surviving remains of turbaries (peat cuttings) near to the excavated saltern at Morton (fig. 8, p. 244) and along the Fen Causeway in Cambridgeshire (fig. 9, p. 245). These turbaries are identified by the silt which, during sea floods, was deposited in the void created by the earlier removal of peat. Now that the surrounding peat has been drained and has subsequently desiccated or shrunk, the locations of these flooded turbaries survive as linear ridges of silt in the still organic Fenland soils. The marine incursion which caused the flooding of the turbaries was suggested as a mid third century event at the Fen Causeway (Palmer, 2002, p. 133), while at Morton its date is uncertain other than post 2nd century AD.
Figure 8: Iron Age and/or Roman peat cuttings at Morton Fen, Lincolnshire, showing as linears to left of plate

Source: Reproduced with permission of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography © Copyright reserved.
31The Fen Causeway peat cuttings cover some 246 ha leading Roger Palmer (2002, p. 130) to speculate that, had the original peat been 3,5 m deep, some 8,6 million cubic metres would have been extracted which, Palmer suggests, may have provided 287 000 person days work. What can’t be known, however, is the extent of peat cutting that had not been, conveniently for today’s archaeologists, fossilised by the marine silts. Evidence for any turbaries situated further inland, or away from the main creeks, would have disappeared as the Fenland either dried out or was artificially drained from the late medieval period. What the flooding of the visible former peat cuttings may suggest is that other turbaries and possible unexploited peat that lay further inland, beyond the range of the marine incursion, may themselves have flooded with freshwater that backed up as a result of the seaward floods. Therefore, the demise of the salterns, in this area at least, may have been partly the result of loss of the fuel source, a loss that was due to flooding rather than over-exploitation.
Figure 9: Roman peat cuttings near March, Cambridgeshire

Source: © Photograph, Rog Palmer – Air Photo Services Cambridge.
32There is one Iron Age saltern in the Fenland, at Norwood, adjacent to March island in Cambridgeshire, where a change of fuel from wood to peat was recognised (Potter, 1981). This is likely to have been the result of the over-exploitation of woodland growing on the small island. A number of the south Lincolnshire landward salterns lay little more than 10 km from the presumed heavily wooded Kesteven upland (Roberts, 2002, p. 80), although there is no evidence of this (moderately distant) resource being used to fire the salterns. The charcoal found at Cowbit was from wetland species Alder and Willow, as was that from Morton, the nearest saltern to the fen edge.
33On the Lincolnshire Marshland, peat may have been more common locally in the Prehistoric and Romano-British periods than is currently evident. It is hard to gauge how far to the east the contemporary coast was at that time and much has since been eroded. Woodland on the eastern slopes of the upland may have been accessible to the Marshland salters. Elsewhere around the coasts of Britain peat is often assumed to have been the fuel but it is seldom confirmed. Rare examples where fuel has been studied come from the Somerset Levels in southwest Britain. Here peat fuel has been confirmed on salterns at Huntspill (Leech et al., 1983, p. 78) and Banwell (Rippon, 2000b, p. 99). Wood or brushwood has been presumed on the Essex Red Hills sites on account of the presence of charcoal and the assumption « that it was the only local fuel » (Fawn et al., 1990, p. 18).
VI. Experiments
34Andrew and Annelise Fielding led a recent experimental saltmaking day on the marsh at Wrangle, which sought principally to re-create the Spalding Site A heating structure (fig. 10, p. XIV). Modern copies of the Ingoldmells containers were used with modern pedestals and clips made on-site out of local clays. At the same time a replica of an Early Iron Age hearth with large pedestals, based on those from Langtoft and Market Deeping, supporting a single gutter-shaped trough, was fired using peat blocks as fuel and with the fire started using sea purslane, a small woody-stemmed plant growing locally on the sides of the marsh creeks (fig. 11, p. XIV). Despite the shattering of the large replica pedestals on the Langtoft-style hearth, salt was made eventually, as it was on the wood-fired multi-container Spalding-type heating structure. It should be noted that, because the work consisted only of a single day demonstration, unrefined brine sourced from the British Salt field at Waringham, Cheshire was used, rather than brine direct from the adjacent creeks. At something like 24 %, the strength of the Cheshire brine greatly exceeded the 3 % salt by weight in solution of the seawater.
35This was a one day experiment and the first of a number, but it will need time to develop strategies to monitor effectively, for example, the quantities of fuel used, the processes involved in strengthening the brine, the time spent on both resource procurement and in standing at the heating structure actually making the salt. It was apparent in the experiment that once the crystallisation process had started on the multi-container Spalding heating structure, there was a need to repeatedly ladle the brine from those containers furthest from the heat source ever nearer the hottest one closest to the fire. During this period on the experimental firing there was little time for the saltmaker to undertake any other tasks, including stoking the fire.
36Obtaining the correct fuel for the experiments created problems, not least those in finding peat fuel supplies in Eastern England. All that could be obtained was in the form of compressed blocks. Useful facts did emerge from the Wrangle experiments. One is the knowledge that surprising quantities of combustible saltmarsh vegetation were washed up on the strand lines (and dried in the hot sun), although it is unlikely that the prehistoric and Roman salterns would have been sited that close to the open sea, or could operate using only such material. Nevertheless, such dry vegetable matter would have been useful in starting the fires. The second fact served to explain the deliberate backfilling of features at the end of the saltmaking season (end of summer?) as recorded at both Morton and Middleton. At the latter site, Crowson (2001, p. 248) noted that the site had been « conspicuously tidied in an orderly fashion » intimating a possible military involvement. In fact, at Wrangle at the end of the day we broke up the hearth and backfilled the settling tanks (we had not had time to dig the characteristic surrounding ditch) to avoid the possibility of the cattle which grazed on the marsh from stepping in the holes and harming themselves. This is also the most likely reason for the « conspicuous tidiness » in the Roman period.
VII. Organisation and control
37There are many things we do not know about salt in the prehistoric and Roman Fenland. We are aware that there are hundred of known sites but know nothing of how they were formally controlled, assuming some overarching control existed. None of the sites appear to have maximised their potential output in that on the sites excavated there has only ever been one heating structure per site (although these may have been rebuilt many times). Why, on a favourable location such as Spalding Site A, is there not another one or more heating structure, enabling the salt makers to double their output. Is that the control – the state only allowing one hearth per family/farm? And what of the use of the salt and its distribution? Elaine Morris has attempted to map the distribution of the salt from the inland saltworks by means of plotting locations of the distinctive prehistoric pottery (called VCP) in which it was transported (Morris, 1994). This known distribution leaves a blank area around the east and south coasts, inland from the areas of greatest sea-salt production and it has been postulated that these areas had their salt supplied by the coastal producers (Morris 2001, fig. 122 and 123; forthcoming). During the Roman period the use of these special containers to transport salt died out (Morris 2001, p. 402), so we know nothing about the distribution of either inland or coastal salt for that period. Access to the sea also means there is a potential for exporting sea salt made in the Fenland and Lincolnshire Marsh easily by boat to locations elsewhere in Britain or abroad. What is evident from the Fenland and Marshland salterns is that the wealth likely to have been generated by this product does not appear to have found its way back to those making the salt as the production sites and their surroundings appear to be devoid of standard wealth indicators. Neither are there obviously traded items present.
VIII. The Power of Salt
38In prehistoric and Roman times salt was a multi-purpose wonder-product and its uses widespread. Its preservative qualities were crucial for salting foodstuffs enabling the population to survive the winters. However, such was its use and importance in preservation and many other aspects of daily life (summarised in Kurlansky, 2002) that its status was elevated beyond that of a simple household product to become the object of veneration used extensively in ceremony and ritual.
39Associations of salt with symbolism and the mystical still abound. For example, those who accidentally spill salt today in Britain still then throw some over their left shoulder (the Devil’s side) to ward off ill-luck. Remarkably, an altercation occurred in the town of Glastonbury, England, in November 2006 when Pagans had « blessed salt » thrown at them by members of the Roman Catholic faith in an effort to « cleanse the town of Pagans ». If salt is still such a strong symbolic force in the 21st century we can only imagine its power and potency 2000 years ago.
40Whether this special status imbued on the salt was transferred to its makers has been questioned (eg. Lane, 2005a; Morris, forthcoming). In the same way that ancient and indeed some modern societies (eg. Morretti, 2005, p. 131) regard metalworkers as a special class – the « magicians » who make metal out of the earth, were saltmakers, with their power to create this essential and venerated product from the ocean, regarded with the same awe, reverence and, perhaps, suspicion? If so there seems to have been a lot of people regarded that way by the time of the Roman period.
Conclusion
41Slowly the details of the prehistoric and Roman period salt sites are emerging. The broad methodology can be interpreted from the fragmentary artefacts and truncated features on the excavated sites. To this information can be added the data from the extensive survey work which involved mapping sites, sediments and creeks and resulted in reconstruction of contemporary landscapes and environments. Although at an early stage, experiments are starting to play their part in elucidating the on-site processes and refining, the interpretations gained from excavation while studies of salt in classical sources, such as those by Cristina Carusi in this volume, helps to add a contemporary perspective to the industry. There is much still to be achieved, particularly in areas such as determining the markets of the finished product, the impact of extensive salt making on the local economy and the mechanisms used in controlling of the industry. The Fenland has many hundreds of sites and while most are on arable land and under no threat from commercial development (only from continued cultivation), there will be some sites, like that at Spalding, which will be excavated in advance of housing or infrastructure schemes. We look forward with great interest to the results of analysis of the recently excavated Spalding site and any future excavated sites. What is crucial to our understanding of the sea salt sites, not just in the Fenland but elsewhere around the coasts of England, is that our studies do not continue in isolation, but that we incorporate the data created by our colleagues such as those contributing to this volume.
Acknowledgements
42I would like to thank all whose work contributed to this paper; Dale Trimble, Denise Drury, Mike Wood and Rachael Hall allowed me to access details of the Spalding site in advance of publication; Dave Hopkins prepared the illustrations with usual consummate skill; Susan Unsworth produced the photographs; salt colleagues such as Elaine Morris, Brian Simmons and Andrew and Annelise Fielding contributed and remained as enthusiastic as ever; Brian Simmons and Dale Trimble read early drafts of this report and improved it immeasurably. Annie Pritchard translated the Summary. Rog Palmer gave permission to reproduce figure 9. Thanks to Phoenix Consulting Archaeology Ltd/Network Archaeology Ltd for allowing me to mention their site at Pode Hole in advance of publication. Not least I would like to thank the organisers and contributors to Sel, eau et forêt colloquium, and especially our interpreter, Michael Templer, who made it make sense.
Bibliographie
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