Open-pan salt making from lead using wood as a fuel. In Britain they established towns for salt production at Droitwich in Worcestershire, and Nantwich, Middlewich and Northwich in Cheshire. In the early Middle Ages these developed into the 'wich' towns of Cheshire. Small 'wich' houses containing several lead pans to evapourate the brine into salt, clustered around brine springs within each of the towns. The open-pan process continued largely unchanged throughout the medieval period. A 17th-century German wood-cut by Georgius Agricola shows the process in detail. Excavated evidence has uncovered wooden rakes to draw salt crystals to the side of the pan, and
Economics of English Mining in the Middle Ages major technical step forward in metal smelting, was created in 1496 in Newbridge in the Weald. Economics of English Mining in the Middle Ages The Economics of English Mining in the Middle Ages is the economic history of English mining from the Norman invasion in 1066, to the death of Henry VII in 1509. England's economy was fundamentally agricultural throughout the period, but the mining of iron, tin, lead and silver, and later coal, played an important part within the English medieval economy. William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, defeating the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of