A specialty of the North Devon potteries was the manufacture of ovens made of the same gravel-tempered clay as the kitchen utensils. The appearance of these ovens and the method of making them remained virtually the same from the 17th through the 19th centuries. At Jamestown, a wholly reconstructed oven reveals typical North Devon traits throughout, while a fragment of an oven from the John Howland House site near Plymouth displays, under a microscope, the same qualities of paste and temper as in a fragment of an oven obtained in Bideford by the Smithsonian Institution. Sherds of gravel-tempered utensils from several American sites also match the oven fragments. Paste characteristics, exclusive of the temper, are the same in the sgraffito ware, the gravel-tempered ware, and the ovens. Furthermore, the gravel-tempered ware occasionally is found with a plain coating of slip, which, under the glaze, has the same yellow color as the sgraffito ware, while an undecorated variant of the sgraffito ware also occurs with a similar plain slip.
Figure 35.—Baker’s portable oven in a woodcut from Ulrich von Richenthal’s Concilium zu Constancz, printed at Augsburg, Germany, in 1483. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.
Figure 36.—Detail from De Bry’s engraving of Le Moyne’s painting of Fort Caroline, depicting an oven on a raised platform under a crude shed. Fort Caroline was a French Hugenot settlement established in Florida in 1564. Rare Book Room, Library of Congress.
All these wares, including the ovens, are interrelated—the specimens found in America having been shipped in a busy North Devon-North American trade. The North Devon towns, moreover, were an important pottery-making center for export markets in the West of England, Ireland, and North America. Thousands of parcels of earthenware were shipped to the American colonies from Bideford and Barnstaple during the 17th century. Any doubts that ovens were among these overseas shipments are dispelled by the knowledge that they continually were being shipped in the English coastwise trade, and also by intrinsic and comparative evidence that oven sherds found on American sites are of North Devon origin.
The only known counterparts of the North Devon ovens are Continental. A 15th-century example appears in an Augsburg woodcut, and a 16th-century specimen is depicted in De Bry’s engraving after Le Moyne’s painting of Fort Caroline, the Huguenot settlement in Florida. There are many suggestions of Huguenot and Low Country influences on North Devon pottery. Bideford and Barnstaple both were Puritan strongholds in the 17th century, and both became French Huguenot centers, especially after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
The style of sgraffito decoration changed radically after about 1700. After that date, decoration was confined mainly to harvest jugs and presentation pieces. Gravel-tempered utensils and ovens continued to be made, but the North Devon trade with America ceased by 1760.
Archeological evidence indicates that gravel-tempered ware was used in America between about 1675 and about 1760. An isolated example of sgraffito pottery, distinguished by crude design and glaze, dates from before 1640. The typical sgraffito ware is illustrated by specimens found in the fill under and around the brick drain in the May-Hartwell site at Jamestown. This ware dates between 1677 and 1695. No other sites provide a more certain dating than this. Sgraffito ware found at Bridge’s Creek, Virginia (John Washington house site), may date as early as 1664, but may be as late as 1677 or a few years thereafter.
The May-Hartwell oven was also found in the drain fill, so presumably it also was used before 1695. The oven fragment from the site of the John Howland house dates between about 1630 and about 1675, the lifetime of the house. The oven in the Bowne House is no earlier than 1664, the date of construction.