John and Thomas Marshall and the Society for Improving the British Salt Trade: an Example of Trade Regulation

Abstract

T IHE proprietors of rock and brine salt works in central Cheshire from about I790 onwards could usually produce as much salt as customers were willing to buy. The Marshalls of Northwich, perhaps the greatest salt-producing family, have left among their muniments many letters and petitions dating from the years around i 8oo which indicate rising production and increased efficiency at the works, but growing difficulty in finding customers to pay the price demanded for salt despite wartime inflation.1 The Marshalls decided that some action was necessary. The situation probably admitted of several solutions which may well have been discussed, but by i805 the salt merchants agreed to limit salt mining, regulate wages and prices, and force the improvement of waterways and roads to cut transport costs. The union of salt producersprovided from i 805 an example for the whole of English industry of association to promote the good of one trade. It safeguarded the livelihood of merchants and labourers alike. It provided a model for the later Salt Chamber of Commerce and Salt Union. Several districts of England and Wales had produced salt during the early eighteenth century, though naturally the method and profits varied considerably.2 Both natural evaporation by the sun of seawater, tried in Lancashire and the Isle of Wight, and artificial evaporation of seawater over coal-fired furnaces, as practised in North Wales and at Tynemouth, proved expensive. Natural brine springs existed in such counties as Cumberland, Hampshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, and Cheshire. The brine, brought up in buckets or pumped up perhaps a hundred feet, gushed into lead or iron pans which stood above coal-fired furnaces. Transportation costs prevented this section of the industry from destroying its coastal rivals before the late eighteenth century. Finally, in central Cheshire from I 760, rock-salt mining began to produce increasing tonnages each year. So by I790 Cheshire dominated the salt trade of England, and in that county the towns of Northwich and Winsford, some six miles apart in midCheshire, with their rural districts, rivalled all other centres.3 The reasons for the growth of the Cheshire salt trade have been exhaustively treated elsewhere: the improvement of the River Weaver linking Winsford and Northwich with the Mersey and Liverpool from 1732, the opening of the Trent and Mersey Canal I 777-8, with later branch canals, on which lay the biggest of