The Salters' Company arms. The Latin motto means 'Salt Savours All'
Roger Conant's father Richard has been described as East Budleigh's miller, and the village mill house has traditionally been viewed as the family home. Recent research has shown that such stories need to be taken with a pinch of salt. (Sorry!)
It is known that by 1620, when he was living
in London, Roger Conant described himself as a salter. He may well have gained experience of the salter’s
trade in his native Devon.
‘The horrid history of Hugo the
salter’, sculpture by Angie Harlock in Budleigh Salterton's Fairlynch Museum. The display tells how the Prior of Otterton supposedly discovered the body of one of his salt workers who sadly drowned in a barrel of salted herring
Salt had been harvested on the coast since
Roman times, contributing to the prosperity of Otterton Priory. But by the 17th century it was being
imported rather than harvested locally on Budleigh’s salt marshes.
And in any case the trade of a salter had evolved from
merely gathering salt from brine in salt-pans. The term was used to refer to
both employees of a salt works and to specialists in salting fish or meat. By
1726 Daniel Defoe was using it to describe traders involved in the ‘buying of
cochineal, indigo, galls, shumach, logwood, fustick, madder, and the like’.
The modern day association of
the London-based Salters’ Company with chemistry and science can be traced
right back to salters’ use of chemical preparations involving such ingredients
in a variety of industries.
Left: Interior of a bag, purse and glove maker's workshop (woodcut by Jost Amman, 1568); 16th century kid gloves, on loan from Dents Museum, displayed in 2018 at Fairlynch Museum’s Raleigh 400 exhibition
Leather workers were especially
skilled in the art of transforming raw hides into the delicate material used to make these gloves, exhibited as part of Fairlynch
Museum’s Raleigh 400 display in 2018.
Hides
being processed at J. & F.J. Baker’s
tannery
Image credit:
Salt was traditionally used in the leather industry to prevent hides
from rotting before they are tanned. It is still part of the process used at the centuries-old tannery of J.
& F.J. Baker, in Colyton, home to the family of Roger Conant’s mother.
Christopher's, the former tannery in East Budleigh
Image credit: Otter Valley Association
Could Roger Conant have learnt some of the
salter’s skills nearer home? Until the 1830s East Budleigh had its own tannery
at the house known today as Christopher's,
a Grade II listed cob, stone and thatch cottage. For 300 years it flourished as a tannery, supplying
tanned hides for boots, shoes, and saddlery, including, it is said, buckets
produced for the Tudor navies.
In 1609, aged 21, Roger’s brother Christopher Conant
was sent to London, where he was apprenticed to Thomas Allen, a grocer, and was admitted to the freedom of the Grocers' Company on 14 March 1616.
Like the Salters, many members of the Grocers’ Company were associated
with food preservation, important at a time when meat was often so ‘off’ that
it needed spices to make it palatable!
The Pepperers’ Guild, first mentioned in 1180 AD, was a forerunner of
the Grocers’ Company, and was concerned with the import and storage of pepper
and other spices: cloves feature on the Company’s coat of arms, above. Some Grocers
were also apothecaries; indeed in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries, some were prosecuted by the College of Physicians for practising medicine.
Roger also left Devon for the capital to learn a trade, but no similar
documentation exists for him: the records of The Salters’ Company were
destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Top: ‘Men carry meat and other wares through the streets of
London’ - c. 1615–16 Michael van Meer
© The University of Edinburgh; The Fish Market,1568, by Joachim Beuckelaer
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City
During his time as an apprentice salter, Roger Conant
would have learnt further about how salt was used. Before the advent of refrigeration, along
with drying, pickling and smoking, heavy salting was one of the main means of
preserving food. Hard cured fish could be stored for months and sometimes
years.
Apart from the tanning and leather industries, salt
was also used in dyeing fabrics and in the formulation of medicines and
ointments.
Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. One of the roads in the town is named
Tobacco Close
Image credit https://www.cotswolds.info
The diversity of salters' interests can be seen in the case of the London merchant John Stratford, a member of the Salters' Company. In 1619, he purchased spare land in and around Winchcombe in Gloucestershire and
planted tobacco, seen at this time as having medicinal qualities. Unfortunately for him, the Act of Parliament banning
tobacco growing in England was passed in that year, just as the first crop in
Winchcombe was ready to harvest.
The Great Fire of London, depicted by an unknown
painter (1675), as it would have appeared from a boat in the vicinity of Tower
Wharf on the evening of Tuesday, 4 September 1666. To the left is London
Bridge; to the right, the Tower of London. St. Paul's Cathedral is in the
distance, surrounded by the tallest flames.
Image credit: museumoflondonprints.com
Both
St Ann’s and All Hallows Church were destroyed in the Great Fire of London,
along with records of the Salters’ Company
It
was in London, on 11 November 1618, at St Ann’s Church, Blackfriars,
that Roger Conant married Sarah Horton. One might have expected the marriage to
take place at All Hallows’ Church, next to Salters’ Hall in
Bread Street, where most salters attended.
Portrait of William Gouge by Gustavus
Ellinthorpe Sintzenich (1821-1892) Collection of Mansfield College, Oxford
But
St Ann’s was known as a Puritans’ church; William Gouge (1575–1653), was the minister and preacher for 45 years, from 1608.
He was also a member of the
1643 Westminster Assembly of Divines, as was Roger’s elder brother John Conant.
The Puritan tradition remained strong in the Conant family of East Devon.
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