Figure 9.—Poor-quality mug of probable local stoneware, discarded in the mid-18th century. Found in Williamsburg. Height 13.4 centimeters; capacity 23 fluid ounces.
Before dismissing the John Coke mug as merely an example of wrong slip consistency, it should be noted that this piece has none of the characteristics of the Challis mug; the handle is quite different in both size and shape and is applied without the folded terminal, the proportions are poor, and the template used for the base cordoning is so worn on its bottom edge that the wide upper cordon is more pronounced than the base itself, thus giving the whole vessel a feeling of stubby instability. In addition, the body appears to have been scraped round after the slip had been applied, possibly to remove the excess. All in all, it is a miserable mug, and we may be forgiven for wondering whether it is really a product of William Rogers' operation. Some of his tankards may have been made by apprentice potters, which would account for somewhat varying shapes. But the handle is not an inept creation as handles go; it is simply an entirely different type from that used on the English stoneware that Rogers copied. Even more curious is the question of the template, which should have been discarded long before. While the throwing variations of Rogers' potters may have been overlooked, little can be said for a master craftsman who would allow the use of tools so worn as to mar the esthetic quality of every mug produced. We may wonder whether there was another stoneware potter at work in Virginia in the mid-18th century or whether, after Rogers' death, his factory's standards were allowed to deteriorate to the level of the John Coke mug.
Although the tavern tankards are the most informative of the Yorktown products, numerous other stoneware forms were produced. These are well represented in the National Park Service and Colonial Williamsburg collections. The most simple and at the same time the most attractive of these is a group of hemispherical bowls (fig. 10), two of which were found in the same deposit as the Coke mug.[255] One, which had been dipped into an iron-oxide slip in the same manner as were the tankards, has a pale gray body with a narrow band of brown mottling below the rim. The other Coke bowl has a dirty greenish-gray body, while the slipped band is a heavy purplish-brown with little mottling. The entire bowl is too heavily salted, an infirmity which often may have afflicted these pieces. A fragment of a slightly smaller and even more heavily salted bowl was found in 1961 by Mrs. P. G. Harrison in her flower bed at Yorktown,[256] thus seeming to confirm the Yorktown origin of the Coke bowls.
Figure 10.—Hemispherical bowls of Yorktown stoneware, discarded in the mid-18th century. Found in Williamsburg. Rim diameter of both 17.15 centimeters.
There is no doubt that bottles and jars, some of considerable size, were among the Yorktown factory's principal products, but this does not mean necessarily that all such items found in the vicinity of Yorktown or Williamsburg are Rogers' pieces. Just as the tavern tankards were copies of English mugs, so the bottles and jars had their prototypes among the wares of English, brown-stoneware potters. The difference is simply that the kitchen vessels have rarely attracted the attention of collectors and therefore are poorly represented in English museums. Consequently we have little opportunity to study them and to determine how such pieces differ from those made at Yorktown. At this stage it is possible to be sure only of the Virginia origin of those examples whose clay is clearly of the local variety. Such an identification can be made only when the piece is markedly underfired and retains the coloring and impurities characteristic of earthenwares of proven Virginia manufacture. Fortunately, the large bottles are small mouthed and neither slipped nor glazed on the inside, thus ensuring that, if the piece is underfired the earthenware characteristics will be readily discernible. Fragments of underfired stoneware bottles were among the most common sherds recovered from the colonial roadway at Yorktown, providing invaluable evidence to aid the identification of the Rogers stoneware body composition and color. It must be reiterated, however, that this guide is confined to underfired products and that those correctly burned cannot be distinguished as yet from others of English manufacture.
The globular bottle shown in figure 11 is underfired and consequently not a true "stoneware," but from the outside it bears all the characteristics of a good quality product. This undoubtedly local and almost certainly Yorktown example was found on the John Coke site in Williamsburg[257] in a context of about 1765. The body is evenly potted, the cordoning below the mouth neatly tooled, and the broad strap handle rugged and tidily shaped into a finger-impressed rat-tail terminal. The handle can, perhaps, be faulted, in that it will accommodate only two fingers with comfort, and it is a little wider in proportion to its size than any I have seen in England. The iron-oxide slip which extends to the midsection of the body is well mottled and predominantly of good color. Ignoring the under-firing, this bottle may be classed as a very creditable piece of potting, seemingly quite as good as most such vessels turned out by English potters in the mid-18th century.[258]
Figure 11.—An underfired Yorktown "stoneware" bottle, discarded about 1765. Found in Williamsburg. Surviving height 24.77 centimeters.
Globular-bodied jars with everted collar-like mouths can be proved to have been made at Yorktown on the evidence of a few small under-and over-fired sherds recovered from the old road metaling in front of the Digges House. The best example recovered from a dated archeological context in Virginia is a jar found in a rubbish deposit of about 1763-1772 at the plantation of Rosewell in Gloucester County.[259] But like the well-fired bottles, its Yorktown provenance cannot yet be proved.