Terra-cotta Works were established here about 1850, by Mr. Edward Betts, who discovered a valuable bed of plastic clay on his estate in the neighbourhood. At the Exhibition of 1851 Mr. Betts exhibited a terra-cotta vase (Fig. [663]) made at Aylesford from this native clay, from a design furnished by Mr. John Thomas, the architect.
Fig. 663.
Exeter.
That tobacco-pipes were made in Exeter in 1654 is curiously proved by the following case of supposed witchcraft:—“12 August, 1654. One Diana Crosse, a widow, suspected of being a witch, was ordered by the judge of Assize to be committed for trial at the city sessions. Mr. Edward Trible, a tobacco-pipe maker, one of the victims of the witch’s arts, deposed that Mrs. Crosse on one occasion came to his house for fire, which was delivered to her, but for the space of one month afterwards he could not make or work his tobacco-pipes to his satisfaction—they were altogether either over or under burnt. The witch, too, cast her evil eye upon a boy in his employ, and ‘affirmed’ that he should never be well, and thereupon the boy ‘grew into a distracted condition, and was much consumed and pyned away in body.’”
Lincoln.
A very interesting discovery of potter’s moulds, for heads for impressing on earthenware, was made a few years back in the parish of St. Mary-le-Wigford, Lincoln. The discovery consisted, according to the last edition of Marryat (edited by my friend Mrs. Pallisser) where the relics are described and carefully engraved, of the remains of a potter’s kiln with numerous fragments of glazed pottery, among which was one piece bearing the head impressed from one of these moulds. One of them, engraved in Marryat’s highly interesting volume, represents a male head, probably that of Edward III., both beard and hair curled at side as on the coins of that monarch and the first and second Edwards, and the other the head of a lady, probably Queen Philippa, with the characteristic square-topped reticulated head-dress. These moulds are in the Trollope collection. A potter’s mould of a head, of the Romano-British period, found by myself at Headington, is in my possession, and is engraved in Vol. I., Figs. 166, 167.
CHAPTER XII.
Irish Ceramics—Early Pottery of Ireland—The Cairns—The Crannogs—Mediæval Pottery of Ireland—Dublin—Delamain—Stringfellow—Grants by Irish Parliament—Donovan—Delft Ware—Brown Ware Manufactories—Belfast—Leathes and Smith—Delft Ware—Coates’ Pottery—China Works—Florence Court Pottery—Coal Island Pottery—Youghall Pottery—Captain Beauclerc’s Terra Cotta—Larne Pottery Works—Castle Elspie Pottery—Belleek China and Earthenware Works, &c.
The early pottery of Ireland, although bearing a general resemblance in many of its characteristics to that of England and other nations, nevertheless differs from all others in some of its features, both of form and decoration. As in other countries, the great bulk of examples of early fictile art that remain to us in Ireland, and upon which we have to found our knowledge, are the cinerary urns—the clay vessels in which, when cremation was in vogue, the ashes and burnt bones of the dead were placed for burial in cairns or otherwise—and food and drinking-vessels found (when inhumation was observed) in the grave-mounds of the people. But, in addition to this, the “crannogs,” or lake dwellings of the Irish people, afford a vast fund of information upon the form and decoration of the domestic vessels in use in former ages.