Staffordshire pottery and its history

by Josiah C. Wedgwood

Again, in discussing the great dairy produce market at Uttoxeter, at which the Cheesemongers of London had thought it worth while to set up a “factorage,” Plot says:—“the factors many mercat days (in the season) lay out no less than £500 a day, in these two commodities [butter and cheese] only. The butter they buy by the pot, of a long cylindrical form, made at Burslem in this County of a certain size, so as not to weigh above 6 lbs. at most, and yet to contain at least 14 lbs. of butter, according to an Act of Parliament made about 14-16 years agoe, for regulating the abuses of this trade in the make of the pots and false packing of the butter.”[13]

Later on, too, he describes how the lead ores are “dug in a yellowish stone, with cawk and spar, on the side of Lawton Park;[14] where the workmen distinguisht it into three sorts, viz. round ore, small ore, and smithum.” He describes how the ores are cleaned; “which done, it is sold to the potters at Burslem for 6 or 7 pounds per tun, who have occasion for most that is found here for glaseing their pots.”

For a contemporary inventory of a nascent industry Plot’s account is extraordinarily full and accurate. It is so important and so unique, that no apology need be made for quoting it at length.

The pot-oven described by Plot would be surrounded by a wall of clods of turf to keep in the heat, or by a “hovel” with walls of broken saggars, roofed with boughs and clods of earth. Each pot-works consisted of a hovel such as this, some thatched open sheds for drying the ware, and an open tank or sun-pan in which the clay mixed with water was evaporated. These sun-pans or sun-kilns were 12 to 20 feet long and wide and about 18 inches deep. One portion partitioned off, and deeper and lined with flag-stones, was used for mixing. Here the clay was “blunged” by a man with a long pole or paddle, and thoroughly mixed with the water. The mixture was then poured through a sieve from the blunging vat into the sun-pan.

A pot-works of almost exactly this description is to be seen to-day at Garshall Green near Stone, for making flower pots; even here, however, a pugmill has taken the place of the blunging pole.

It was a very raw industry in 1677. What led to the artistic development of pottery in England as a whole was the trading contact with the advancing civilization of Holland and Germany. The English were learning all through the reigns of Elizabeth and the Stuarts to adapt pottery to drinking and eating purposes; and the London and Bristol potters were learning to copy the tin-enamelled dishes from Delft, and the stoneware drinking mugs from the Rhine. The ideas which Holland and Germany had passed on to London, found their way at last to North Staffordshire. In that narrow area were to be found the requisites needed for a manufacture;—the clays to make, the coals to fire, the men with experience. All that was still needed was the artist and experimental chemist. It might even be said that the artists were already there and in a sense they were.

Probably the commonest production of the North Staffordshire Potteries in 1677, after the redoubtable butter-pots, was the marbled ware that Plot mentions. This method of decoration consists of laying on lines or splashes of the different coloured slips, and then combing or sponging them together. This marbled ware remained popular for a hundred years, and was the legitimate precursor of the solid agate wares of Whieldon and Wedgwood.

A later historian, Simeon Shaw, writing in 1828, tells us on the authority of tradition that, besides makers of the butter-pots, and the mottled and marbled ware, and the slip-decorated ware, there was in 1685 a potter, Thomas Miles of Shelton, who was even then making from a local clay, mixed with white sand from Baddeley Edge, something which he calls “stone-ware.”[15] Certain it is, as will be shown later, that Aaron Wedgwood and his sons Thomas and Richard and also Matthew Garner were making brown stoneware and red teapots in Burslem in 1693. Stoneware, as we understand it, is so hard and dense that it requires no glaze to make it impervious to water, because it can be fired at such a high temperature as to partially fuse the body of the ware. This stoneware, afterwards glazed with salt, was to be the most distinctive product of North Staffordshire.

These peasant potters “fired” and “drew out” one oven a week. They drew the cold oven on Monday; refilled it with new ware about Thursday, and fired it on Friday, giving it a last stoking up on Saturday morning, after which it cooled till Monday again. The ordinary ware was at this time only fired once, and only fired to a moderate temperature, just sufficient to melt the dusted lead ore and fuse it into a glaze on the surface of the ware, thus making it impervious to water. Though the native potters were even then trying to improve their craft from the German or Dutch potters employed in London, yet, as M. Solon has shown, they owed very little to the science or knowledge of the world, even the limited knowledge of that period. The colouring properties of Copper Oxide were known and employed throughout England at this period, yet there is no trace on the wares of the North Staffordshire potters till the eighteenth century is well advanced of the distinctive blue given by this invaluable colouring material.