In no country is there a district so utterly associated with one trade as is the North Staffordshire Potteries. One even speaks of the Potteries in the singular as of a pure place-name. If you spoke in Timbuctoo or California of the Potteries, none could doubt that you were thinking of North Staffordshire.

The reason is not that the district is or ever was given over entirely to pot-banks. Potting was incidental, a pastime in the middle of agriculture; as potting grew, so coal and iron mining grew too. The district is less confined to potting than Walsall to saddlery or Sheffield to knives. Even a thirteenth century reference to Walsall will expose harness; it is difficult to trace pots in the Potteries before 1650; you find only bloom-smithies and sea-coal mines. Potting is neither so ancient here, nor so exclusive as to have made the name. The real reason of the place-name, the Potteries, is that no man who valued time could say Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke and Longton, whenever he wanted to refer to one place—the place where men made pots—and few people outside the five towns ever wanted to speak of them separately, or could even distinguish one from others.

The first reference to “the Potteries” will be found in the latter half of the eighteenth century; before that time it was hardly necessary to refer to them at all.

The area where pots were made in North Staffordshire has always been peculiarly local and circumscribed. It extends, and extended, in a line from Golden Hill to Meir Lane End. Occasionally, at times, we hear of Pot-works at Red—or Ridge—Street, at Bagnal or at Bucknall, outside this narrow area. They only receded finally from Chesterton during the last century. But, generally speaking, Staffordshire potters have persisted always in making pots just where their fathers made them before, in the hilly land between the Foulhay Brook and the sources of the Trent.

There was no need in old times for the people who made pots to specialize in one district. The art of potting is as old and as universal as the art of cooking. In old times it was as simple. Like most modern trades it was practised at first, and anywhere, as a branch of housekeeping. Every family made what pots they required for their kitchen, and one can see such rude earthenware utensils among the miscellanea of any excavation. And like most modern trades the development from the housekeeping to the manufacturing stage meant specialization in particular districts.

But why should potting have settled in the Potteries?

So long as all that was wanted was clay and firewood, almost any place would do. In England, it was about the year 1600 that the time arrived when brushwood became rare and costly; clay and coal were then found to be the necessaries of a “potteries.” North Staffordshire had both. Burslem, and it is Burslem alone which one need consider in this problem of the first cause, had something more than clay and coal. The land was split up into a great number of small copyhold owners, and immediately after 1600 the copyholds were enfranchised. There were no demesne lands. The people were independent, both of big farmers and of great landlords. There was security of tenure, and every opportunity for initiative—initiative which could not then take the shape of intensive cultivation.

So we find in Burslem and Tunstall at the beginning of the seventeenth century clay, coal and the opportunity. By the end of that century the next requisite was to hand—skilled workmen. By the end of the next century the last requisite of trade was in place—the cheap water transport of the Trent and Mersey Canal.

It is well known that the safest way to test the presence in early days of particular trades or forms of employment is to study any local lists of the surnames of common people of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We find our first such list for the Manor of Tunstall (which included Burslem) in 1299.[1] Not a single name that one can associate with potting is to be found. A similar list for Audley of the same date shows a Robert le Pottere, Thomas Potinger and Richard le Throware. Probably most similar lists for that date would provide some such solitary reference to so common a trade, and I do not jump from this to the conclusion that Audley was the real mother of the Potteries. There are Subsidy Rolls giving Tunstall taxpayers in 1327 and 1333; still no Potter is to be found. We have also now available a varied selection of the Tunstall Court Rolls. The earliest, 1326, has nothing that one can twist into a reference to potting; but then we can collect in subsequent years the following:—

In several of the leases of land by copy of Court Roll of the fifteenth and sixteenth century the right to dig marl or clay (argillium or luteum) is conceded, but I suspect it was usual even then to use such marl as manure. The filling in of pits or lakes (laca) in the roads is also a constant cause of trouble in these Rolls, but they may have been due to honest wear and tear and not to the temptations of a cheap raw material.

It should be mentioned however that we have hardly one quarter of these early Tunstall Court Rolls, and must not assume that these few casual notices of clay or pots is exhaustive. We now skip a century and pass to:—

So far still no mention of potting. Various leisured people began now to describe England, relating what they saw and heard. Many of them dealt with Staffordshire, but they notice no special and curious feature about the North Staffordshire moorlands. Leyland in 1537, Camden in 1586, Erdeswick in 1590, say nothing of a “Potteries.” Speed’s list of the Shire products in 1625 omits pottery.

It is just possible that some of the impetus for the local manufacture may have come from the dissolution of the monasteries. There is reason to believe, judging from the remains at the Cistercian Abbey of Hulton, that the monks there made such encaustic tiles as are to this day called Cistercian. Now Hulton Abbey and the Abbey’s grange of Rushton both lie in Burslem parish. Some rudimentary practice in the art and mystery of potting may well have come from the seven[2] scattering brethren of this dissolved monastery, and may account in part for the development which was to come.

For now we begin to find potters thick on the ground in Burslem.

In legal documents the practice grew of adding after any man’s name, his trade; leases, depositions, wills, all show this. After 1600 one would certainly expect to find some trade description, and at last, in 1616, we find our first “potters.”

1616. Richard Middleton demises to Thomas Danyell of Burselem senior, potter, a pasture called Brownehills and another pasture called The Hill in Burslem containing 3 acres, with right to dig claye, “ffillinge upe the pitts after him,” for 21 years at a rent of 4s. He demises also to John Leigh 3 acres in Withiemore, with liberty to dig clay in the Withiemore when need be. (Tunstall Court Rolls.)

Next year, 1617, William Adams of Burslem describes himself in his Will as “potter”; and among the depositions of witnesses in the Chancery suit of “Mainwaring v. Shaw” of 1640, one of the witnesses, Ralph Simpson of Burslem, aged 80, is described as “potter.” Thereafter every reference to Burslem or Tunstall is replete with “potters” or “earth-potters,” and men trained to the trade were acquiring the skill necessary for the localization of the coming industry.

The men were ready. The clay and coal are found together cropping out in the country of the Staffordshire Potteries. The clay, though not now used for earthenware, is, and always has been, suitable for the saggars in which the ware is packed while being fired, and for the fire-bricks of the kiln in which the ware is baked. The coals were so cheap that, in 1680, they cost apparently only 16d. a ton at the pit’s mouth, and although such coal had to be carried usually on horseback, yet it never had to be carried more than two miles to reach the pot ovens.

One other raw material was wanted—lead. It was the most expensive, almost the only part of the master potter’s equipment that required capital. The ore was got at Lawton Park, six miles to the north. The capital stock-in-trade of the early potter is shown by the Will of John Colclough alias Rowley, of Burslem, who died in 1656, leaving “to Thomas Wedgwood of the Churchyard of Burslem ... all my pottinge boards and all other necessary implements and materialls belonginge to the trade of pottinge (lead and lead orre onely excepted).” This same Thomas Wedgwood was great-grandfather of Josiah Wedgwood, and he, as well as two of his brothers, Aaron and Moses, also describe themselves in their Wills as “Potters.”

Burslem was by 1670 full of potters; making no doubt butter-pots or the commonest of ware.[3] A little further off, in the valley of Tinkersclough, Thomas Toft was actually attempting decoration. The Toft dishes are well known. They are signed with the name, Thomas Toft or Ralph Toft, written in liquid slip clay upon the plate. They are made of red, buff or yellow clay, and other coloured slip-clays are dribbled over them through a quill, so as to make pictures of Charles II, or Queen Anne, or a pelican picking its breast to feed its young. Then the whole is dusted over with powdered lead ore, and fired till the lead fuses into the plate and forms a rich yellowish glaze.

Some of these productions, of what has come to be called the Toft school, are dated. There is a candlestick, very elaborate, dated 1649, and claimed for Staffordshire. Shaw mentions two dishes marked, one “Thos. Sans,” and the other “Thos. Toft,” each dated 1650.[4] M. Solon had seen a slip dish, in a cottage in Hanley, bearing this inscription scratched on its back, “Thomas Toft, Tinkers Clough, I made it 166-.”[5] A dish with the picture of a soldier bearing a sword in each hand, and inscribed in slip “Ralph Toft, 1677” is also mentioned by M. Solon.[6] Another, marked Ralph Toft, and bearing the image of a very wasp-waisted lady is in the Salford Museum, dated “1676.”[7]

Other makers of this school were Thomas and William Sans, Ralph Simson and William Taylor. They made two-handled drinking mugs called “tygs” with similar decoration; and small model cradles made in clay and slip—presents for young married couples, according to their local custom. Puzzle Jugs were another “freak” production, speaking the humour of the time. The jug was so contrived with multiple spouts and hidden passages as to spill however one tried to drink from it. A sample of these puzzle jugs in stoneware bears the inscription “John Wedgwood 1691.”[8] This man was the eldest son of the Thomas Wedgwood previously mentioned, and did not pot himself. I think this jug was made for him by his nephew, Richard Wedgwood, to whom he both leased the Overhouse Works and married his daughter and heiress. Several pieces are marked with the name “Joseph Glass,” who is known to have been a potter in Hanley in 1710-15.

All these early master potters were handy men of many trades. They made their pots in sheds at the “backsides” of their dwelling houses, alongside the cow-shed. They dug their own clay, often in front of their own front doors. The Wedgwoods at least owned and dug their own coal, wherewith to fire the oven. It was a peasant industry, carried on by the family, among the pigs and fowls; and when they were not making show pieces for presentation they made butter-pots, in which farmers might market their butter at Uttoxeter—at least so says Dr Plot.