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 214 l SHIRE-HOUSE' AND CASTLE YARD April town ditch, ' and the destruction of the houses to make room for it is thus explained '. There is no mention by Mrs. Armitage of that exclusion of the castle area from the borough on which Maitland insisted, although her view of the castle's position requires definite exclusion from the town, while his did not. J. H. Round. The Etymology of 'Bay-salt' The word ' Bay-salt ', which is often found in an English form from the fifteenth century onwards, has been interpreted as salt from Bayonne, salt from the Bay (of Biscay), or salt obtained from bays of the sea in general. 1 It can, however, be more precisely denned. The Patent Roll for 1364 contains a large number of licences to export cloth or money, and to bring back cargoes of salt from ' La Baye ' or ' La Baie ', which they all describe as in Brittany. 2 I venture to suggest that bay-salt means salt from the Baie de Bourgneuf in the department of the Loire-Inferieure. The identification of La Baie with this particular bay was proposed by Sir Harris Nicolas in 1847, 3 and repeated by Kervyn de Lettenhove and Simeon Luce in their editions of Froissart. 4 Of the shore of the small bay of Bourgneuf, situate just to the south of the estuary of the Loire, and shut in and sheltered from the Atlantic by the island of Noirmoutier, the northern and southern curves are in the departments of the Loire-Inferieure and La Vendee respectively, corresponding to the south-west corner of Brittany and the north-west of Poitou ; whilst the town of Bourgneuf itself, situate near the middle of the bend of the bay, is just on the north or Breton side of the border-line between the two departments. Bourgneuf and its bay were so near the confines of Brittany and Poitou, that the Patent Rolls seem to indicate a doubt whether ' La Baye ' was to be described as being in Brittany or in Poitou, and more often they leave its 1 See the New English Dict.,s.v. Since this note was sent to the printer, the writer has learned that a work on Der Baienhandel was published by the German scholar Agatz in or about 1908. He has also been referred by Professor W. E. Collinson to F. Kluge, Seemannsprache (Halle, 1911), p. 59, s. v. 'Bai', where Eng. 'bay-salt', Germ. ' Baisalz ', and Dutch. baaizout ' are derived from the name of the port of La Baie. This suggestion was not made in Kluge's earlier Etymologisches Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache (1894), nor is it made in Weigand's more recent Deutsches Worterbuch, 5th ed. (1909). 2 Col. of Patent Rolls, 1361-4 (1912), pp. 492, 507, 508, 511, 514, 515, all of the year 1364. The thirteen licences on pp. 514 and 515 are also in Foedera, Record ed., in. ii. 739, 740, with the heading : De moneta usque la Baye in Britannia, pro sale emendo., ducenda. 3 Hist, of the Royal Navy, ii. 138. 4 Kervyn, xxiv 1877), 62 ; Luce, viii (1888), p. xix.