Essex

When researching the history of English saffron the obvious place to start is Essex, home to Saffron Walden. The Elizabethan antiquarian, topographer and historian, William Camden, describes the county as ‘abounding in Saffron’. Essex was also renowned for its caraway, coriander and teasel crops. Caraway and coriander were used in medicine, condiments, distilling and brewing, while teasel was used in the textile industry. In an early twentieth-century study of field names in Essex, local historian William Chapman Waller identified at least twenty-eight parishes in the county where saffron had been grown. Twenty-one of these are situated in north-west Essex and most are within ten miles of Walden (as Kenneth Neale notes the local population did – and still do – refer to the town simply as Walden, only using the ‘Saffron’ prefix when formally referring to the place). The diarist John Evelyn remarked that the saffron of this district was ‘esteemed the best of any foreign country’.¹³