Description

Fabric: Iron-rich clay varying in color from light brown to bright red orange to darker red brown; some of the large and thick dishes exhibit a gray core.

Glaze: Decorated with thinly trailed raised white slip appearing yellow under a rich even ginger brown lead glaze. The glaze on dishes rarely extends over the rim edge. Decoration usually consists of simple geometric and stylized foliate designs with the main design in the center cross-quartered. Texts and dates are sometimes incorporated in the slip-trailed decoration with the dates ranging from 1633 to 1665.

Form: Dishes, drinking mugs or cups, candlesticks, chamber pots, salts, chafing dishes

Metropolitan slipware was manufactured at Harlow, Essex, about seventeen miles northeast of London. The main market was London, where it appears in contexts from 1630-1700, but the ware was sold throughout East Anglia.

Only one archaeological piece is known of in the Chesapeake. This consists of the base of a chafing dish, excavated by the National Park Service at Jamestown.

Sources
Brown, Cynthia Gaskell, ed. (1979) Castle Street: The Pottery. Plymouth Museum Archaeological Series No. 1.

Grigsby, Leslie B. (1993) English Slip-Decorated Earthenware at Williamsburg. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Jennings, Sarah (1981) Eighteen Centuries of Pottery from Norwich. East Anglian Archaeology Report No. 13.

Mynard, D.C. (1969) "A Group of Post-medieval Pottery from Dover Castle," Post-Medieval Archaeology 3:31-46.

Sites
Jamestown, National Park Service

Prepared by Bly Straube