1. The straight sides, so rapidly tapering from the base upward that in a height of only six inches the base diameter of four and three-eighths inches tapers to a diameter of no more than two and one-half inches at the rim.
2. The nearly straight spout, furnished with a flap or shutter.
3. The true cone of the lid.
4. The thumb-piece, which is a familiar feature upon the tankards of the period.
5. The handle fixed at right angles to the spout.
| Lantern Coffee Pot, 1692 | Folkingham Pot, 1715–16 |
Mr. Ellis, in a paper before the Society of Antiquaries[361] on the earliest form of coffee pot, says:
If coffee was first introduced into this country by the Turkey merchants, nothing is more probable than that those who first brought the berry, brought also the vessel in which it was to be served. Such a vessel would be the Turkish ewer whose shape is familiar to us, the same today as two hundred years ago, for in the East things are slow to change. And throughout the reign of the second Charles, so long as the extended use of coffee in the houses of the people was retarded by the opposition of the Women of England, and by the scarcely less powerful influence of the King's Court, the small requirements of a mere handful of coffee-houses would be easily met by the importation of Turkish vessels. Reference to the coffee-house keepers' tokens in the Beaufoy collection in the Guildhall Museum shows that many of the traders of 1660–1675 adopted as their trade sign a hand pouring coffee from a pot. This pot is invariably of the Turkish ewer pattern. It is true that there is nothing to show that the Turks themselves ever served coffee from the ewer, but it is scarcely conceivable that the English coffee-house keepers should have adopted as their trade sign, their pictorial advertisement, so to speak, a vessel which had no connection with the commodity in which they dealt, and which would convey no meaning associated with coffee to the public. But as soon as the extended use of the beverage created a demand which stimulated a home manufacture of coffee-pots, a new departure is apparent. The undulating outlines beloved by the Orientals, bowed as their scimitars, curvilinear as their graceful flowing script, do not commend themselves to the more severe Western taste of the period which had then declared its preference for sweet simplicity in silversmiths' work, such as we see in the basons, cups, and especially the flat-topped tankards of that day. The beauty of the straight line had asserted its power, and fashion felt its sway. Such was the feeling that produced the coffee-pot of 1692, the straight lines of which continued in vogue until the middle of the following century, when a reaction in favour of bulbous bodies and serpentine spouts set in.
