Footnotes

1. Randle Holme, An Academie or Store House of Armory & Blazon, vol. 2 (Chester, 1682; reprint, London: the Roxburghe Club, 1905), p. 2. The “looking glass” sobriquet remained in use into and through the eighteenth century. Nathaniel Bailey’s Etymological English Dictionary, vol. 2 (1737) cites it in its collection of “Canting Words and Terms,” and in 1811 a new edition of a Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (reprint, London: Bibliophile Books, 1984) defined “looking-glass” as “A chamber pot, jordan, or member mug.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s first reference to chamber pots occurred in 1570 in a Durham inventory listing “Fyue chamber pottes of pouther vs.”—five chamber pots of pewter, five shillings.
2. Before you remind me of all the pots I have omitted, it may be helpful to understand that this survey focuses primarily on the European evolution of the form beginning in the Netherlands and transferring to Britain and Virginia in the early seventeenth century. The spectrum of wares produced by virtually every American redware and stoneware pottery through the nineteenth century remains a rich field for another writer to plow.
3. The pseudonymous P. Amis in his pioneering paper “Some domestic vessels of southern Britain: a social and technical analysis,” Journal of Ceramic History, no. 2 (1968): 7, noted that in the Greek colony of Sybaris in southern Italy, the well-heeled inhabitants were “the first people to invent chamber pots which they carried to parties.” Dr. Amis was citing Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, XII, 519e. However, in 1825 the Reverend Thomas Dudley Fosbroke in his Encyclopedia of Antiquities had another explanation, stating that the Sybarites “would not be at the trouble of moving.” Cited by Lucinda Lambton in Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 8. There are several references to chamber pots in classical literature, e.g. Flavius Arrianus’ commentaries on the books of Epictetus (ca. A.D. 95–180) wherein the philosopher asked whether it was beneath a man’s dignity to hold another’s chamber pot. Slightly earlier was Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon (Chap. V) wherein he described games in the reign of Nero and noted that one elderly ball player had a eunuch on hand “clutching a chamber pot of solid silver.” We have to remember, however, that a vessel quite unlike the standard post-medieval chamber pot may have been so termed by the translator to equate with the Latin or Greek for a urinal.
4. Ivor Noël Hume, “Medieval Bottles from London,” Connoisseur 139, no. 560 (March 1957): 105, fig. 2.
5. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), 1807 ed., vol. 2, p. 751, cited by the Oxford English Dictionary.
6. An illustration derived from Der Geistliche Auslegung des Lebens Jesu Christi, Ulm, ca. 1480–1485 was republished by P. Amis in “Some domestic vessels of southern Britain,” p. 14, fig. 8.
7. The earliest pewter example found in Britain was recovered by Dr. Margaret Rule from the wreck of the Mary Rose (1545) and published in Country Life (May 24, 1979): 1638.
8. A bag-shaped pot in this gray ware, with a similarly located handle, is illustrated in H.J.E. van Beuningen’s Verdraaid goed gedraaid (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1973), pp. 70–71, fig. 384, and there attributed to the first half of the fifteenth century. Another vessel with a comparable ear-like handle is made as a bird’s nesting bottle. It dates from the seventeenth century and is illustrated in E. M. Ch. F. Klijn, Lead-glazed Earthenwares in The Netherlands (Arnhem: Netherlands Openluchtmuseum, 1995), p. 290.
9. A black-glazed redware vessel of chamber pot shape was found in a ca. 1730–1775 deposit of kiln waste in Albion Square, Hanley, and although described as such, its handle was attached at the girth and not at the rim, suggesting that this, too, was a dipper. F.S.C. Celoria and J. H. Kelly, A Post-medieval pottery site with a kiln base found off Albion Square, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, Archaeological Society Report no. 4 (Staffordshire, Eng.: City of Stoke-on-Trent Museum, 1973), p. 27, no. 128, p. 68.
10. Ibid., p. 94, ca. 1700.
11. Ibid., p. 248. Examples with conventional rim-attached handles are attributed to ca. 1475–1525.
12. No. 1 was found near Amsterdam, and the rest in Rotterdam.
13. Ivor and Audrey Noël Hume, The Archaeology of Martin’s Hundred (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2001), pt. 1, p. 166, pl. 63.
14. Leiden, Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Paardenveld in Utrecht, and unrecorded.
15. The London fragment’s foot is smaller than those of the larger Dutch chamber pots (but comparable to others) and lacks the overall lead glazing characteristic of most Dutch chamber pots.
16. Sarah Jennings et al., “Eighteen Centuries of Pottery from Norwich,” East Anglian Archaeology, Report no. 13 (Norwich, Eng.: Norfolk Museums Service, 1981), pp. 137–38, no. 954. This “cauldron” is overall half an inch smaller than the Dutch chamber pot shown in fig. 6, no. 2.
17. Ibid., pp. 134–36.
18. There are moments when one doubts one’s sanity at debating so abstruse a point and wonders whether this exercise is perhaps the apex of pointless pedantry. In short: Who gives a damn whether sixteenth-century chamber pots had frilly bottoms? The answer, of course, is that ceramic history and research are fascinating fields of discovery for those of us whose daydreams are set amid the antimacassars of 221b Baker Street .
19. It may well be that British archaeologists knew much more about the dating of their ceramics finds than became available through their publications. It remains true, nonetheless, that the earlier writers were generally content to describe the vessel, show a drawing of it, and state on which site it was found. Such dating as is afforded (and often there is none) stems from undocumented opinions or conventional wisdom (which may well be valid) rather than from stratigraphic associations. In consequence, one has to be cautious about relying on such potentially sand-seated evidence.
20. Noël Hume and Noël Hume, The Archaeology of Martin’s Hundred, pt. 1, pp. 40–41.
21. A chamber pot of Martin’s Hundred type was found in Structure 110 at Jamestown in a stratum attributed to ca. 1630–1650, but lay adjacent to Structure 111 believed to have been associated with potting in the period 1620–1650. John L. Cotter, Archaeological Excavations at Jamestown (Washington, D.C.: U. S. National Park Service, 1958), pp. 102–12.
22. A redware chamber pot of this general type was found in a pit while rebuilding the deanery of Westminster Abbey in 1951. Published nine years later, the pot was said to have been deposited around 1525, making it one of the earliest known. However, drawings of other vessels from the same group suggest a date in the first years of the seventeenth century, and point to the hazards of reliance on dating arrived at when knowledge of post-medieval ceramics was still in its infancy. J. G. Hurst, “A Late Medieval Pit at Westminster Abbey,” The Antiquaries Journal 11 (July–October 1960): 293–94, fig. 3, no. 16.
23. Coarser than the white clay “border ware” pots, the London pot’s ridges are sharper and therefore less pleasingly undulating.
24. Another found in London and described as “stoneware chamber-pot; grey internally, brown externally,” was published with the comment that “most archaeologists consulted wisely insist that a date range of ‘18th–19th cent’ is the only one possible.” Amis, “Some domestic vessels of southern Britain,” p. 20 and p. 28, no. 26. David Gaimster has drawn my attention to yet another found in Canterbury’s Linaire Gardens (1979), now in the collection of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, No. 115.542, and attributed to Frechen.
25. Advertised on eBay, Oct. 24, 2002, by Groupe Union Française de Gestion.
26. See note 6.
27. These pots had been bought at auction and were in the Frank Thomas Collection in 1952. They were culled from it and given to the author as being culturally unworthy of a place in a collection of Rhenish ceramic art.
28. Evidence of template chatter is to be found on most, if not all, Westerwald hollow wares after ca. 1680 and is indicative of mass production.
29. The white slip appears yellow beneath the redware’s overall lead glaze.
30. J. E. and Edith Hodgkin, Examples of Early English Pottery Named, Dated, and Inscribed (London, 1891), p. 9. Wolf Mankowitz and Reginald Haggar in their The Concise Encyclopedia of English Pottery and Porcelain (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), p. 149, state that at the time of writing, dated Metropolitan slipwares ranged from 1638 to 1659. They cited also an undated chamber pot in the Hanley Museum inscribed earth i am et tes most tru disdan me not for so are you.
31. This pot, once in the Guildhall Museum, is now in the Collection of the Museum of London.
32. The combed slip decoration on the illustrated pot is a technique one usually associates with Staffordshire beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century. However, comparable fragments from Donyatt kilns reportedly date as early as the fourteenth century. See R. Coleman-Smith and T. Pearson, Excavations in the Donyatt Potteries (Chichester, Eng.: Phillimore & Co., 1988), pl. 2.
33. Ibid., pp. 306–11.
34. Ibid.
35. Merry A. Outlaw, “Scratched in Clay: Seventeenth-Century North Devon Slipware at Jamestown, Virginia,” in Ceramics in America, edited by Robert Hunter (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2002), p. 34. As the inscribed pot was found in a Jamestown ditch and not at the governor’s Green Spring home, one wonders how and why it strayed so far from the Berkeley bedroom. The pot was first published by C. Malcolm Watkins in his “North Devon Pottery and Its Export to America in the 17th Century,” United States National Museum Bulletin 225 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 38, fig. 15, where he interpreted the initials as WR and suggested a royal relationship.
36. Jan Steen painted several versions of another bedroom scene titled The Morning Toilet, each with a metal chamber pot beside the bed. One of these paintings is in the British Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace. Dutch Pictures from the Royal Collection, The Queen’s Gallery Buckingham Palace (London: Lund Humphries, 1971), No. 38. In using paintings as parallels, it is important to remember that while shapes can be relied on (at least in general), old varnish and the accuracy of photographic reproduction can darken and significantly distort colors.
37. Jaqueline Pearce, Border Wares (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1992), early: pl. 11, bottom left; late: p. 33, fig. 13, right.
38. The only means of narrowing dates is to find examples in tightly sealed and reliably datable archaeological contexts. But even then there is no certainty of the pot’s age at the time it entered the ground. All that can be said with confidence is that it was discarded at a date no later than that of the deposit, in archaeological parlance, a terminus ante quem.
39. A second chamber pot appears in the lower left corner of the latter engraving. Its curiously squat shape suggests that Hogarth had not taken great care in its rendering and with posterity not a concern, it was enough that the object should be recognizable as a chamber pot. This is a point worth bearing in mind whenever we look for stylistic nuances in the works of painters and engravers.
40. Amis, “Some domestic vessels of southern Britain,” p. 25, nos. 20 and 21.
41. Rims of this type and wares of this color are present among sherds from a French wreck of ca. 1760 off the coast of Bermuda. For contextual details see Ivor Noël Hume, Shipwreck! History from the Bermuda Reefs (Hamilton, Bermuda: Capstan Publications, 1995), pp. 18–24.
42. Amis, “Some domestic vessels of southern Britain,” p. 25, no. 19, with pewterer’s mark TM 1716. Resembling the 1545 Mary Rose pot, another dished and everted rim form is to be seen on a pewter chamber pot recovered from the wreck of the Dutch ship Batavia that foundered off the west coast of Australia in 1629. Myra Stanbury, Batavia Catalogue (Perth, Australia: Dept. of Maritime Archaeology, Western Australian Museum, ca. 1975) p. 34, no. 3031, there described only as a “round pewter pot.”
43. Frank Britton, “The Pickleherring Potteries: An Inventory,” Post-Medieval Archaeology 24 (1990): 61–92.
44. The notion of painting or printing the faces of unpopular people on the interiors of chamber pots was to continue until World War II when portraits of Adolph Hitler accompanied such inscriptions as have this on “old nasty” and another violation of poland, Po being one of many sobriquets for chamber pot. Another on the side reads nO 1 “jerry,” Hitler being the number one German. Lambton, Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight, p. 151. An unlikely place to find another, but there just the same, is the ZAM (Center for Unusual Museums) in Munich, Germany.
45. Cited in Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Further evidence of the ubiquitousness of chamber pots is illustrated by the fact that a temporary tavern built on the Thames during the great Frost Fair of 1696 was named the Flying Piss Pot. An anonymous tract titled Christ Exalted, and Dr. Crisp Vindicated (1698), p. 63, asks the question “Hath not the Potter power over the Clay, of the same lump, to make a hundred Chamber-pots, and but five drinking Vessels?”
46. John C. Austin, British Delft at Williamsburg (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1994), p. 290. There are no examples in Michael Archer’s Delftware (London: Stationery Office City, 1997), a catalogue of the collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This may demonstrate their rarity on the one hand or, on the other, previous curators’ reluctance to find artistic merit in anything so humble.
47. Purchased on eBay from an Italian dealer.
48. “An Indian Ware of the Colonial Period,” Quarterly Bulletin, Archeological Society of
Virginia 17, no. 1 (September 1962): 9. The term has since been corrupted to “Colono Ware” meaning any pottery made by non-whites in the colonial era.
49. Ivor Noël Hume, “Collectors’ Notes,” Antiques 90, no. 4 (October 1966): 521.
50. A Catalogue of the Genuine Household Furniture . . . Late the Property of a Noble Personage (Deceas’d), Fryday December, 5, 1766, p. 7, lot 24, that sold for £1.2s.0d. Two more pots were sold on that day, described as “Two ower chamber-pots and covers” (p. 3, lot 14) that fetched 15s.0d. The material was not identified, but they may have been oral-decorated delftware. The unidentified owner evidently had been in the East India trade and had spent time in Bengal as a person of consequence.
51. Christie’s, The Nanking Cargo, Amsterdam, April 28–May 2, 1986, lots 1094–1221.
52. Impressed mark M. MASON. Mankowitz and Haggar, The Concise Encyclopedia of English Pottery and Porcelain, pl. 65b.
53. Pots of this type continued to be made into the 1880s at the Garrison Pottery in Sunderland, albeit with less ribald inscriptions. See Lambton, Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight, p. 81.
54. Recalling the Metropolitan slipware chamber pot slip-inscribed be mery and wise and peff. See note 32, and Ivor Noël Hume, If These Pots Could Talk: Collecting 2,000 Years of British Household Pottery (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2001), p.78, fig. IV. 3.
55. On a MetropoIitan slipware jug. Hodgkin and Hodgkin, Examples of Early English Pottery Named, Dated, and Inscribed, p. 53, no. 193.
56. Lambton, Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight, p. 117. Another example (p. 121), also of mid-nineteenth century date, is inscribed around the rim: fill [?] me up and use me well and what i see i will never tell. hand it to me my dear.
57. Two small, false-fronted “antique” stores are all that remains of Nevadaville.
58. Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary (1983), variation of “goggle-eyed.”
59. The suggested dating is based on the similarity of lettering found on several anti-Hitler pots of the early 1940s.
60. Klijn, Lead-glazed Earthenwares, p. 57, fig. 48; p. 247, top.
61. Noël Hume, If These Pots Could Talk, p. 89, figs. IV. 23–24, there described but not identified.
62. Klijn, Lead-glazed Earthenwares, p. 235.
63. Britton, “The Pickleherring Potteries: An Inventory,” pp. 70–71.
64. M. Chomel revised by Mr. R. Bradley, Dictionaire Oeconomique or The Family Dictionary (London: D. Midwinter at the Three Crows in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1725).
65. Noël Hume, If These Pots Could Talk, p. 170, fig. VIII.8. Late English delftware decorated with GR medallions in the manner of debased scratch blue stoneware were made for the London purveyor William Wyatt and stenciled under the glaze prepared mustard. Supplied with pairs of horizontal shell-shaped handles, they bear no resemblance to chamber pots. Alec Davis, Package & Print, The Development of Container and Label Design (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1967), fig. 3, following p. 112.
66. Geoffrey A. Godden, Encyclopaedia of British Pottery and Porcelain Marks (New York: Crown Publishers, 1964), p. 598, no. 3713. The recorded mark differs from that on the pot which reads R. S. & W rather than R. S. W.
67. In 1841 the name was changed yet again, this time to the Eastern State Asylum. See Shomer S. Zwelling, Quest for a Cure: The Public Hospital in Williamsburg, 1773–1885 (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1985), p. 30.
68. Zwelling, Quest for a Cure, fig. 3.
69. Beginning in 1850, Trenton was to become America’s principal source of white granite wares for sanitary use, and by 1883, more than twenty potteries were producing it. The New Jersey factory of Thomas Maddock and Sons continued under that name until 1923 when it was acquired by partner D. William Scammell and became the Scammell China Company.
70. Chamber pots came en suite with ten or eleven other pieces comprising one large water pitcher, one basin, one slop jar (two handled with lid), one chamber pot with lid, one small water pitcher, one shaving brush vase, one mug, and one soap dish in three parts. In 1899 prices ranged from $4.00 to $16.50 per set. Higgins & Seiter Catalog, New York (1899; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Pyne Press, 1971).
71. A chamber pot with similar characteristics is illustrated in Manfred Klaunda, Geschichte und Geschichten vom Nachttopf (Munich: Zentrum für Anssergewöhnliche Museen, 1992), p. 26 and described as “stoneware with a kitschy painting of an ‘evening mood,’ North German, around 1930” (trans.)