On a visit to England in 1961, I encountered an important and early English delftware dish in a Dorchester antique shop. Belonging to the class known as “blue dash chargers” and dating from about 1640, the dish was decorated in polychrome with the figures of Adam and Eve. Although cracked and riveted, it was a tremendous find—and a bargain to boot (Fig. 6). To its back was glued a faded paper label reading as follows: “The figures on this dish are drawn in the main with anatomical truth, and have been vigorously conceived by the painter. The trees are shown as detached clusters of leaves joined by bare branches, a method which perhaps distinguishes the Lambeth versions of this theme from those of Bristol. Rackham & Read, p. 48.” Two days after I found the Dorchester dish, I came upon another in the Portobello Road; though later in date and much cruder, this, too, bore a label on the back written in the same hand as the first and again quoting Rackham and Read. Both references were to the same page in Bernard Rackham and Herbert Read’s classic, English Pottery, first published in 1924. A trip to the book revealed that both dishes were illustrated in it as type specimens showing the evolution of the Adam and Eve design on English delftware. The captions added that the chargers were then in the collection of W. M. Beaumont.
Because most well-known collections eventually end up on the auction block, and because Sotheby’s of London is the best-known British firm specializing in the sale of ceramics, I wrote asking whether the Beaumont Collection had passed through its rooms. It was my guess that as two pieces from it had turned up simultaneously in different parts of England, the collection must recently have been sold. I was right—or partly right. Sotheby’s had indeed auctioned the Beaumont Collection, but that was in 1931! The records showed that sixteen items had not been sold, having failed to command bids higher than the reserves, and the two Adam and Eve dishes were among them. Where they went for the ensuing twenty-nine years, and why they surfaced again at points 120 miles apart, I shall probably never know. But I do know that the odds against my finding them both were long enough to choke a computer.
The dice are so heavily loaded against the survival of any aging object (be it of fragile pottery or of sturdy oak), that it is miraculous that only nine-tenths of everything manufactured in the last three hundred years has been destroyed. Works of art generally stand the best chance of survival, for being intended for admiration rather than use, they will endure as long as they are liked. Pictures, furthermore, are more readily recognized as the product of creative talent than are utilitarian objects, and consequently one thinks twice before destroying them. The artistry of the cabinetmaker, the potter, or the glassblower, on the other hand, enjoyed that kind of protective respect only when its products bore a date sufficiently far removed for them to be recognized as old by anyone with the ability to read four digits. A classic example was provided a few years ago by a resident of Williamsburg who had no interest in antiques, but who owned a Bow porcelain tea bowl with the name “A Target” and the date 1754 painted on the bottom in red enamel (Figs. 76a, 76b). She did not know where it came from, beyond recalling that it had been in her family as long as she could remember, a family that originally came from England. To her the bowl was simply something to have around, and it made a nice ashtray—until it was knocked off a table and broken in half.
76a & b. This Bow porcelain tea bowl of the first importance saw service as an ashtray in a Virginia home until it was dropped and broken. Decorated in underglaze blue in a chinoiserie bamboo and peony design, it was then enameled in green, yellow, purple, and red, the same red used to mark the base (Fig. 76b, below) with the date and the name of the purchaser. 1754. Diameter 3 inches.
There are, as far as I know, only ten earlier pieces of dated Bow porcelain on record, most of which were brought together for a special exhibition at the British Museum in 1959. It also included three examples dated 1754; one of them, a bowl, was inscribed “Thos: Target 1754,” while an ornamental flowerpot was marked “Thos. & Ann Target July 2th 1754.” Clearly, therefore, the tea bowl was made for Mrs. Ann Target; furthermore, its enameled chinoiserie decoration is similar to that of the third 1754 example in the British Museum exhibition, a cream pitcher inscribed “W Pether May 10, 1754.” Although nothing is known about Thomas and Ann Target, that in no way detracts from the little bowl’s importance as a rare, documentary addition to the chronicle of early English porcelain. Had its existence been known in 1959 there is no doubt that it would have been offered an honored place in the exhibition. But it was not known, and it is unlikely that it would have survived even in its ignominious role as an ashtray (let alone being glued together after it was broken) had it not been for the date on the bottom that cried “Keep me!”
The reasons why some things survive and others do not are of paramount interest to the archaeologist, and in seeking the answers he is likely to unearth some improbable villains. It is no secret that the church deserves to be roundly hissed as his archenemy. The victory of Christianity has left a multitude of losers in its wake, an alphabetical roster beginning with Aztec and ending at Zulu, and which includes archaeologists among the “A’s.” Most non-Christian cultures thought it necessary to send their dead into the next world properly equipped for the journey, and so the graves contained whatever the survivors thought appropriate; the wine in bottles and the food in metal or ceramic vessels. Thus the mourners were inadvertently providing future archaeologists with cultural time capsules and a source of intact objects which, under any other circumstances, would have been unlikely to survive. It is no overestimation to claim that two-thirds of all the intact ceramic and glass vessels that have come back to us from the pre-Christian world have been retrieved from graves. Fortunately for the art and antiquarian fraternity, the looting of non-Christian graves has long been recognized as a legitimate cultural pursuit to which nineteenth-century Anglican clerics took like Burke to Hare. Paradoxically, however, disturbing the Christian dead is called desecration and can land you in jail. Fortunately the temptation is not great, for the vast majority of such burials contain nothing of archaeological interest. This is less true today than it was in earlier generations, for beginning in the nineteenth century it became fashionable to transform the corpse into an exhibit, attiring it in its best clothes. It is a practice that was specifically barred by English law in the reign of Charles II, when an Act of Parliament required that the dead should be buried only in woolen shrouds, with the possible addition of woolen caps and gloves. No linen was permitted nor any use of thread. The statute’s purpose was not religious but was intended as a stimulus to the English wool industry—just as fish on Fridays had been cooked up centuries before to help a floundering French fishing trade.
One of my least enviable duties while archaeologist for the Guildhall Museum in London was to record details of burials removed from bombed city churches in the course of their restoration. Although I examined the contents of hundreds of coffins dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only one of them contained anything that might remotely be described in archaeological parlance as “grave goods”—not counting a man with a wooden leg. The exception was found in the churchyard of St. Martin Vintry, one of the churches not rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666 but whose burying ground continued to serve the parish. The coffin contained a skeleton with a delftware plate inverted on its pelvis, the hands resting modestly over it. The plate proved to be one of the best examples of late-seventeenth-century delftware unearthed in London and is decorated with the characteristic “Chinaman and rocks” motif borrowed from Ming porcelain (Fig. 77). I had half expected to find the plate covering some precious object, but when I turned it over, all that was revealed was a tuft of hair clinging to the underside and indicating that the plate had rested directly on the corpse rather than having been placed on top of the shroud.
77. A London delftware plate decorated in blue with a pseudo-Ming motif typical of the 1670s; what was not typical was its discovery in a coffin inverted over the pelvis of the occupant. Diame
ter 9 inches.
I could discover no immediate explanation for the plate’s presence, but later a colleague drew my attention to an exchange of correspondence published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1785 following the finding of a similarly entombed plate in St. Mary’s churchyard at Leicester. The first correspondent sought an explanation for “the custom of putting a plate of salt on the belly of a deceased corpse.”6 The scholarly response (politely ignoring the redundancy) was not particularly revealing, but it did state that in the late eighteenth century it still remained a Leicestershire custom “to place a dish or plate of salt on a corpse, to prevent its swelling and purging.”7 John Brand in his Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain (1849) went further, explaining that the salt was intended to discourage the swelling which in turn caused “a difficulty in closing the coffin.” He also quoted other statements suggesting that the salt represented the incorruptible human soul. Thus, in Scotland, relatives laid on the deceased’s breast “a wooden platter, containing a small quantity of salt and earth, separate and unmixed: the earth an emblem of the corruptible body, the salt an emblem of the immortal spirit.” There was also the possibility that the salt helped to keep Satan at bay, for, as Brand pointed out, “the devil loveth no salt in his meat, for that is a sign of eternity, and used by God’s commandment in all sacrifices.”8
In May, 1972, sixteen years after I found the London plate, another was discovered, this time in Wedgwood-style cream-ware, interred beside the left thigh of a man buried at Green Park in Jamaica. A newspaper report of the find described another discovered in 1967 in a partially robbed eighteenth-century burial vault. In that instance the container was a white saltglaze saucer. Groping for an explanation, the newspaper suggested that the occupants of the coffins “might have overeaten, and the contents of those two dishes being the last straw that caused their demise, they were buried with them. Or,” the writer went on, “in each case the dish might have held the owner’s favourite treat, eaten at the last repast he or she enjoyed on earth.” The paper added that the consensus of popular opinion was that the plate and saucer had contained food to accompany the dead on the journey into the next world in case “he arrived after hours, and the pearly gates were locked for the night, there was the handy snack.”9 This last observation carries us back to the pre-Christian era (or sideways into the non-Christian world), and one wonders whether it may stem from the blending in Jamaica of African and Anglican funerary traditions. The evidence, however, does not support that explanation. Both burials were unquestionably those of white colonials and date from the second half of the eighteenth century before black and white cultures began to merge. Much more reasonable is the conclusion that the deceased came from parts of Britain or Scotland where the salt tradition persisted.
I should add that I am not promoting assaults on cemeteries in pursuit of collectable goodies; I mention these discoveries only as another example of those chains of coincidences whose links fit together to tell us something about the past—something which might so easily have been lost. Had not the Jamaican discoveries been made by a careful amateur archaeologist, and had the London plate been found by a builder’s laborer, the plates would have been destroyed or would have entered the antiques market robbed of their significance. As for the coincidence, I cannot help but be uneasy at the prospect that some unknown arbiter prompted the Jamaican archaeologist to write to me about his strange discoveries and that they should so closely match my hitherto unparalleled London discovery—unparalleled or unrecorded, that is, since the Leicester plate was unearthed in 1784. Had I not been in St. Martin Vintry’s churchyard at the right moment on the right day, the delftware dish would not have told its story, and without it I would never have learned about the salt custom, and the Jamaican plate and saucer would have been dismissed as the residue of handy snack packs for after-hours arrivals at the pearly gates.
NINE
History in a Green Bottle
MY INTEREST in collecting glass grew accidentally out of my work on the London bomb sites. As I have earlier admitted, my original concern was for the preservation of the history and relics of the Roman period, and had it remained so neither my career nor this book would look at all as it does. But once I began my battle with the bulldozers I found myself in the presence not only of Londinium but all those other Londons that came after it. Furthermore, and as I mentioned in the last chapter, I was to have more difficulty finding museum specialists able to help me date the artifacts of the more recent periods than I would those of the classical centuries. I knew at once that I needed the same kind of closely datable artifactual signposts for the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as I had for the Roman remains. As the most common artifact of the later centuries seemed to be broken bottle glass, I decided that I had better try to establish a viable chronology of shapes. I was not the first to attempt it; that credit belonged to E. T. Leeds of the Ashmolean Museum, who in 1914 had made studies of tavern bottles excavated in Oxford. I may, however, have been among the first to see wine bottles as a major archaeological tool, but if so, it was through no genius on my part; it was simply that few archaeologists were then paying any attention to the post-medieval centuries.
The history of the glass wine bottle as we know it today began in the mid-seventeenth century, and right from the start a small percentage of them were embellished with a glass seal attached to their shoulders and impressed with the sign of a tavern, the arms of a nobleman, the mark of a merchant, or the name or initials of anyone wanting the prestige of “personalized” bottles. More important, though least commonly, some of the seals also bore a date, usually that of the year in which the bottle was made or filled. Just as dated ceramics stood a better chance of surviving, so dated bottles were more likely to be retained as curiosities than were those whose age could be recognized only by specialists. Consequently the number of dated specimens now in private and museum collections gives a totally false impression of the numbers that were so marked. Second only to the survival chances of bottles with dated seals were those having seals of any sort. Together they formed a minuscule percentage of the total British bottle output in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the vast majority of which lived and died as bottles, functional to the last. Nevertheless, it was the sealed specimens that survived to be studied, and it was they that provided the means of dating the silent majority.
Valuble assistance in determining who owned what, and where, had been provided by Sheelah Ruggles-Brise in her book Sealed Bottles (1948), including as it did a listing of the specimens in the most important British and American collections. Today we know that the list was woefully incomplete; but it was a good start, even though it was much more concerned with genealogy than with the all-important evolution of bottle shapes. In those days so little was known about shapes that a dealer sent me a price list for a collection of unmarked specimens in which he put the highest value on examples dating in the 1780s and the lowest on another of about 1660—needless to say, the latter is now in my collection. Nowadays, however, the majority of dealers have a working knowledge of bottle evolution and ask prices for unsealed examples that a decade ago could have been commanded only by dated specimens.
Naturally enough, the highest prices are generally obtained by bottles having the earliest dated seals, followed by those bearing names that are well known or are of shapes and sizes that are unusual. One’s chances of landing such prizes without paying through the nose for them are slim at best—but it does happen. In 1954 a large collection was auctioned at Sotheby’s in London, among them some obviously high-bid specimens. As is common when a large collection of comparable objects is sold, many of them were put up in lots of from two to seven items, with only the prime pieces being described in the catalogue, the rest lumped together as “and five others” or whatever the number might be. It was in one such anonymous group that I spotted what, to me, seemed to be the most desirable specimen in the entire sale; dating from about 16
60 and in immaculate condition, it was of an almost unique half-bottle size and adorned with the seal of a Rose Tavern and the WHM initials of the landlord and his wife. On the bottom was a paper label reading “Dug up in Mrs. Anstey-Perks garden, Breaston, Derbyshire” (Fig. 78). I attended the sale ready to secure the bottle at almost any price, hoping to get my money back by reselling the more obviously desirable specimens. But something went wrong. I had assumed that all the bottles in each lot would be carried round the auction room before the bidding opened, but only those described in the catalogue were paraded, and I waited in vain for “my” bottle to appear. Having failed to bid on the lot, I stayed until the sale’s end and tried to learn the name of the buyer, but by the time I found out, he had left. I did learn, however, that he was bidding for an American client. So that seemed to be that.
The next day I received a phone call from another dealer reminding me that two years earlier I had visited his shop in Kent (though he, himself, had been away at the time) and had left my card, asking to be advised of any bottles that might come his way. He had subsequently moved his shop to London and had brought my card with him, and now he had some bottles to show me. Had they come from Sotheby’s sale? I asked. He did not think so. But when I got to the shop, there was “my” bottle, and I could have it for three pounds—a fraction of what I had expected to pay for it at the auction. The explanation for the bottle’s reappearance was as simple as it was improbable: the American customer was only interested in dated specimens and had instructed his agent to dispose of those that were not, never realizing that there might be a cygnet among his undated ducklings.
All the Best Rubbish Page 17