Boarding schools and institutions of higher learning often boast sets of china distinguished by the school’s name or crest. Some even use the decorative motifs to delineate the wares of one dining hall from another within the same university. Yale University, for example, furnishes eleven of its dining halls with unique sets of dishes. The student who takes meals in the Georgian Palladian setting of one college eats from Fitzhugh-inspired patterned dinnerware, whereas the student who feasts in the Elizabethan setting of another college dining hall eats off plates bordered with grotesque faces. Other sets of dishes used on the campus spell out the name of the hall in which they are used. The College of William and Mary, the second oldest school in the United States, currently uses monogrammed dishes only at special functions, such as those held in the President’s House. But in the recent past the student body ate from dishes that were stamped with the name of the school.
The use of “branded” dining wares is not a new fashion. It has its roots in a long tradition of embellishing dishes and flatware with the names of schools in order to prevent the wares from being stolen and resold. While nineteenth- and twentieth-century ceramic collegiate dining wares are prevalent, surviving examples from the eighteenth century are virtually nonexistent. The exception is the newly rediscovered white salt-glazed stoneware plate illustrated for the first time in figure 1.
The general form of the plate, with its molded gadrooned border, is typical of those manufactured by dozens of British potteries during the 1760s. However, this special-ordered example proclaims in high-molded relief “BARTHOLOMEW FULLER OF TRINITY COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE.” It is one of a handful of molded patterns that have surfaced since my catalog of border patterns was published in Salt-glazed Stoneware in Early America by Janine E. Skerry and Suzanne Findlen Hood.[1]
The dish was found in 1908, beneath a staircase, during renovations at Trinity College’s Old Court at Cambridge University in England. It is mentioned in Bernard Rackham’s 1935 Catalogue of the Glaisher Collection of Pottery and Porcelain in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge but is not pictured and the reference is ambiguous about whether the inscription is molded or painted. An online search for “plates” in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection database and my subsequent visit to the museum confirmed the existence of this rare molded example of white salt-glazed stoneware.
Bartholomew Fuller served as the cook for the Trinity College student body from at least the early 1760s. In 1764 Fuller became a Common Councilman to the Cambridge municipal corporation, which included the university and the surrounding community. The position would have elevated Fuller’s status in the community. Perhaps due to the demands of his new civic post, he took on an apprentice cook that same year. Fuller served as Common Councilman while maintaining his role as cook until his death in April 1770. During his tenure he acquired thirty-two acres of arable land in the parish of Little Wilbraham, conveniently located six miles from Cambridge.
Now exhibited in the Fitzwilliam Museum, this plate is apparently the sole survivor of Bartholomew Fuller’s culinary tenure at Trinity College. Since the special mold for the embossed inscription on the rim of this custom order would have required a considerable effort to produce, many multiples were certainly made. It is plausible that there are other dishes lurking in the homes of the ancestors of Cambridge’s eighteenth-century alums.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to the catering departments and the archivists of Cambridge University, The College of William and Mary, and Yale University. Information on Bartholomew Fuller was gathered from the Cambridge University archives, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the 17th–18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, British Library.
Angelika Ruth Kuettner, Associate Registrar for Collections Documentation and Imaging, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
akuettner@cwf.org
