with some of them on the subject. They and their children had been heritable fixtures to the spot. They could neither leave at will, nor change their profession. In short, they were in a sense slaves. I feel it. to be curious,” he continues, "that I should have seen and spoken to persons in this country who remembered being legally in a state of serfdom ; and such they were till 1799, when an Act of Parliament abolished this last remnant of slavery in the British Islands.”
That the delivery of the Joppa salters from such a miserable condition, was one which they understood and appreciated, we are told that for at least twenty-five years afterwards they observed one day every year as a holiday or festival to commemorate the event. At the end of last century, from 1788 till 1808, the salt works belonging to the Earl of Abercorn in the parish were leased by Mr John Thomson of Priorlatham at a rental of £90 per annum. This gentleman, in addition to being an extensive merchant in Leith, farmed Duddingston Mains and the parks over which have since been built the greater part of Portobello.
The Joppa Salt Pans are still carried on with continued success. Under the management of Messrs Alex. Nisbet & Son, who entered in occupation of the works after the late Mr John Grieve some thirty years ago, the works were enlarged and improved. They were in 1889 bought over by the Scottish Salt Company, by whom they have since been wrought along with the salt pans of Pinkie, Prestonpans, and Charleston.
The uncertainty as to when salt first began to be made in the Parish of Duddingston equally applies to the use of coal, either for domestic or manufacturing purposes, The large consumpt of fuel needful in the process of salt-making made it necessary that in olden times the supply should be within easy reach. Formerly the supply of wood was sufficient for this and other purposes, but in time it began to fail, and as early as the thirteenth century the depletion began to be felt. Chalmers, in his Caledonia, states that "as iron works in modern times waste the woods, so in those early ages the salt works thinned the forests." We find, accordingly, in many of the grants which the kings and barons made of salt works to the abbeys, they gave them also the right to supply themselves with fuel from the woods.
There seems to be evidence that the valuable properties of coal were not unknown to the Romans and the early Saxon invaders,
