Northwich does not come across as one of Cheshire's most obviously attractive or picturesque towns. County guides published in the mid twentieth century generally stressed the theme of subsidence, Arthur Mee calling Northwich 'the town sinking into its foundations' and J H Ingram writing of 'tilted buildings and others propped up with crutches or held together by iron rods' and a general 'appearance of dilapidation', while in the 1970s, Pevsner felt that 'the town had little to attract' and, a touch cruelly, dismissed its modern buildings as 'not at all architecturally valuable'. Some early modern visitors were equally sharp. Thus in the 1530s John Leland found Northwich to be a 'prati market toune but fowle', while in the 1 690s Celia Fiennes noted that 'the town is fill of smoak from the salterns on all sides'. While in no way romanticising Northwich or its history, in this volume Tony Bostock gives us a different and much more positive view of the town in its early modern heyday as an important marketing and manufacturing centre. Focusing on the seventeenth century, the author examines the life, society and work of the town, exploring the themes of continuity and change, and assessing Northwich's role as a semi-industrialised manufacturing centre long before the industrial age.

Some chapters are chronologically structured, reassessing such evidence as we have for the development of the town from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries and briefly examining the town's involvement in the political, religious and military controversies of the early and mid seventeenth century. However, the majority of the chapters are thematic and the book is at its best in exploring the key themes of seventeenth-century Northwich, making full and excellent use of the surviving sources of that era. Thus rich and informative chapters analyse the layout and landscape of Stuart Northwich; the demography and people of the town, exploring lifestyles, economic levels and occupation and making full use of surviving tax records and wills and inventories; the government and administration of the town; and, above all, a full discussion of the source of much of Northwich's importance and degree of prosperity in the seventeenth century, the role of salt making, exploring the structure and operation of the industry, the smoke-belching wich houses which dominated the townscape and the important individuals, institutions and families who owned or ran the salt-making enterprise. The author suggests that, at its height, Northwich was producing up to 5,000 tons of salt per year in a salt-making operation which was tightly controlled and highly regulated and which generally ran from Palm Sunday until Christmas Eve. By the end of the century the first signs that Northwich's own lucrative brine pit was showing signs of exhaustion, the sinking of new brine pits elsewhere, outside the town and its controlling tentacles, and the discovery in Cheshire of deposits of rock salt which could be mined all marked the beginning of the end for the traditional salt-making processes in Northwich and its associated customs which once dominated the town. This is a thoroughly researched, well presented and richly documented account of seventeenth-century Northwich, drawing on and making good use of a wide range of primary sources. The textual analysis is full and clear and both the principal text and the profuse appendices contain a wealth of information. The author and publisher are to be congratulated on producing such an attractive and reasonably priced volume.
PETER GAUNT

Cheshire History, No 44, 2004-2005, pages 127-128

Cheshire History is annual journal of the Cheshire Local History Association. More information can be found on the Assocation on their website www.cheshirehistory.org.uk