A HISTORY OF ESSEX doubt that substantially the same primitive and laborious mode of manufacture prevailed from early times. 1 Mr. Neilson cites a work published in 1612, in which we read that on the banks of Solway the country people gather up the sand within the flood marke, bringing it to land, and laying it in great heapes, etc., etc. . . . there is made thereof good white salt after the temperance of the weather. This place is called the Salt coats. He also tells us that he saw ' at Saltcoats in Ayrshire, in the summer of 1887, an old deserted saltpan surviving its usefulness by half a century,' that ' reminiscences of these saltworks occur in the place-names of the sea-board parishes ' about the Solway, as in a ' Saltcots ' on the shore of Carlaverock parish, ' Lady Saltcots ' in Ruthwell, and a ' Saltcots ' on the southern or English shore. 2 No apology is needed for dealing in some detail with an industry which, though long defunct, gave its name to an Essex parish the only one of that name in England and of which the memory is preserved by lesser place-names in the county far to the south of the district where alone it flourished at the Survey. 3 The Domesday vineyards of Essex can hardly be included among its industries, as they were only intended to provide wine for the use of the lord himself ; and they are of sufficient interest to deserve separate treatment. In a paper on the subject I have argued that, contrary to general belief, the Normans reintroduced into England the culture of the vine to provide themselves with the drink to which they had been accustomed on the other side of the Channel. 4 The evidence for this proposition is largely drawn from Essex. Domesday proves that the vineyards existing at the time of the great Survey had been often planted since the days of the Confessor ; that they had not, in some cases, yet begun to bear ; that they were almost universally reckoned by ' arpents,' a foreign measure ; and that they are normally found on manors held in the lord's hand and probably containing a lord's residence. By ' lord ' I here mean a ' baron ' or tenant-in-chief. The last of the above four points is well illustrated in Suffolk, where Ixworth, the most northerly point reached by the vine in the east of England, and Clare, on the Essex border, were both the capita of baronies. Of the vine- yards at these two places, that of Clare at least had been planted since the Conquest. In Essex, if not in all England, the most interesting vineyard is 1 Annals of the Solway (1899), pp. 44-51. 2 Mr. Neilson has observed ' holes in the grassy foreshore, from two to three feet deep, a dozen or thereby wide, and six or eight across ; the bottom is black, and either dry or half filled with dark and stagnant water. These are the " kinches " or pits once used in the salt manufacture ... no unfit memorials of a dead industry' (p. 51). 3 In the papers of Mr. W. C. Waller, F.S.A., on ' Essex Field Names,' we detect, in Tendring Hundred, a 'Salters field' and 'Sailers 10 acres' at Great Oakley, and a ' Salcots' at Brightlingsea ; in that of Dengie a ' Home Saltcoats ' at Stow Maries and a ' Salt Coat Marsh ' at Burnham ; in that of Rochford a ' Saltpan Marsh ' at Paglesham, a ' Saltreach field ' at Eastwood, and ' East Salts ' at Waker- ing. There is also a ' Salts ' at Barking (see Essex Arch. Trans, [n.s.] vols. vi. vii.). Dr. Laver states that the Paglesham saltpans were visible down to 1820. 4 Essex Arch. Trans, [n.s.] vii. 249-51. 382
