“What is the manner of their (the salt-makers) work? or what time of boiling the salt water? Whether they use any peculiar thing to make it granulate, and, if so, what that is?” In the course of his reply, he says: “They use for their fuel pitcoals brought out of Staffordshire. These pans are set upon iron bars, bricked in very close. They first fill their pans with brine out of the pit: which comes to them in several wooden gutters: then they put into their pans amongst the brine, a certain mixture, made of about 20 gallons of brine, and two quarts of calves’, cows’, and, chiefly, sheep’s blood. Of this mixture they put about 2 quarts into a pan that holds about 360 quarts of brine: this bloody brine at the first boiling of the pan brings up a scum which they are careful to skim off: they continue their fire as quick as they can till half the brine be wasted, and this they call boiling upon the fresh. But when it is half boiled away, they fill their pans again with new brine out of the ship (so they call a great cistern by their pan sides, into which their brine runs through the wooden gutters from the pump, that stands in the pit) then they put into the pan two quarts of the mixture following: they take a quart of white of eggs, beat them with as much brine, as before was done with the blood; and thus that which they call the whites is made. As soon as this is in, they boil sharply till the second scum arise: then scum it off as before, and boil very gently till it corne; to procure which, when part of the brine is wasted they put into each pan of the size aforesaid, about a quarter of a pint of the best and strongest ale they can get: this makes a momentary ebullition, which is soon over, and then they abate their fires yet not so but that they keep it boiling all over though gently: for the workmen say that if they boil fast here, it wastes their salt. After all their leach brine is in, they boil gently till a kind of scum comes on it like a thin ice: which is the first appearance of the salt: then that sinks and the brine everywhere gathers into cornes at the bottom to it, which they gently rake together with their loots, this they continue till there is but very little brine left in the pan: then with their loots they take it up, the brine dropping from it, and throw it into their barrows, which are cases made with flat cleft wickers, in the shape almost of a sugar loaf, the bottom uppermost. When the barrow is full they let it stand so for an hour and a half in the trough where it drains out all the leach brine, then they remove it into their hothouse behind their works made there by two tunnels under their pans, carried back for that purpose. The leach brine that runs from the barrows they put into the next boiling, for it is to their advantage being salt melted and wanting only hardening.