16 - COVERED CUP WITH FOUR HANDLES AND A WHISTLE: probably South Wiltshire, 1718

Summary

Pale red earthenware with incised decoration under dark broum mottled lead glaze. Inscribed round the rim ‘COM GOOD WEMAᴎ DRINK OF ThE BEST IOᴎE [JOAN] MY LADY AᴎD ALL ThE REST 1718’. Height 29 cm. 0.368–1928.

In country districts fashions in pottery changed slowly and homely vessels in late seventeenth-century styles persisted well into the eighteenth, despite the trend for more refined drinking and tablewares. The Fitzwilliam has cups similar to this dated 1692 and 1737, the latter inscribed with the toast ‘DRINK ABOVT AND SEE HOWMERY WE SHALL BE’. It was still common then for a group of drinkers to share a large cup and the provision of several handles made it easy to pass such ‘loving’ cups from one person to another. The whistles which fit into a loop on the side of some cups are said to have been used to call for more liquor, but they often stuck to the vessel during firing and can never have been used.

It is not certain where this class of brown-glazed ware originated. A considerable number of examples were in the possession of families in the Salisbury area in the late nineteenth century and others further south at places such as Ringwood and Southampton. It therefore seems likely that they were made in South Wiltshire or Dorset. Several villages in the district of Alderholt and Verwood in Dorset had potteries which operated from the fourteenth to the early twentieth century, but excavations have so far yielded very little brown-glazed ware.