Earl Fitzwalter's Bottle Tickets

Paul de Lamerie's ledger recording the work he did for Earl Fitzwalter has an interesting entry:

"To mending & added Silver to 3 pieces with Chains to hang on Bottles of Wine."  That description sounds an awful lot like a wine label or bottle ticket.  So why not just identify it by one of those names?

The ledger entry is dated March 21, 1737 - which I believe is a Julian calendar date - so, if I have my calculations correct, March 21, 1737 in the Julian calendar corresponds to April 1, 1738 in the Gregorian calendar.  According to the Google Books entry for the book Wine Labels, 1730- 2003: a Worldwide History by John Salter, "silver wine labels first made their appearance in the 1730s to identify the contents of unmarked opaque glass wine bottles."  N.M. Penzer, in his The Book of the Wine-Label, discusses the Plate Offenses Act of 1738, which set forth the mandatory marks to be applied to plate and included an extensive list of items by name or by characteristic not required to be so marked (34-35).  As there is no mention of wine labels or bottle tickets in this list, Mr. Penzer concludes that these items were unknown at this time (35).  What I believe Mr. Penzer to be saying is that, had bottle tickets been common when this Act was written, in his opinion by reason of their smallness and lightness they would not have been required to be hallmarked, and therefore should have appeared by name in the exempt list along with the other specifically-identified items of plate "connected with the bottle." (Id.).    

Unfortunately, I do not have access to a copy of the Wine Labels book to read about or see photographs of these earliest silver wine labels.  What Paul de Lamerie's ledger entry tells me, however, is that in early 1738, bottle tickets - by any name - were likely not very well known, otherwise Lamerie (or his ledger-keeper) would have used that name instead of the description of the item, e.g. "To mending and added silver to three bottle tickets."  This entry is for a repair, so we also know that the Earl's bottle tickets were made prior to 1738.  It's too bad we don't know exactly when, or by whom, they were made.  So, although not completely unknown in 1738, it would seem bottle tickets were sufficiently uncommon for a prominent maker not to be able to record them by name.

Sources:

Essex Records Office: Estate and Family  Records, D/DM F13.
Penzer, N.M. The Book of the Wine-Label. London: Home & Van Thal, 1947. Internet Archive. Web, 10 July 2015.


 

Earl Fitzwalter's Salt Spoons

Recently I purchased a copy of the inventory of the Earl of Fitzwalter's plate taken by his butler, Henry Longmore, on June 22, 1739 from the Essex Records Office.  Among the entries for five dozen plates, the dozens of "forck's" and several candlesticks, is an entry for "4 wrought Salts Spoons" weighing 2 oz 6 dwts, or 71.5 grams.  I tend to think of salt spoons along the lines of Geoffrey Wills's definition in Silver: early 18th century examples that are miniatures of ordinary spoons (130), which would not seem to distinguish them much from snuff spoons.  In a previous post called Snuff Spoons or Early Salt Spoons, I asked just that question: could the small spoons we call snuff spoons also be early salt spoons?  

Below is a photograph of four small spoons in my silver drawer.  The smallest one is 3 1/8 inches and the largest is 3 5/16 inches.  Two of these spoons are "heavy" for their size, but are only about 9 grams each.  The four salt spoons in the Fitzwalter inventory weigh in at almost 17.9 grams apiece.  Those seem to be some pretty heavy salt spoons.

 

Below is an excerpt from Longmore's inventory showing the entry for the Salts Spoons.  Note also the listing for the mustard spoon weighing 9 pennyweights, or 14 grams.

Does anyone know of any early Irish salt/snuff spoons?  Along with early Irish rattail teaspoons, I have not seen any early Irish salt/snuff spoons.  Early Irish salt trenchers exist (see the photographs in my previous post on my visit to the San Antonio Museum of Art) - though I don't see nearly as many as English examples - so one would assume that early Irish salt spoons also existed at one time.  Same for early Irish rattail teaspoons: there are early Irish tea pots, leading one to believe that teaspoons were made early on, as well.

Sources:

Essex Records Office: Estate and Family  Records, D/DM F12.

Wills, Geoffrey.  Silver: for pleasure and investment. New York: Arco Publishing Company, Inc., 1969. Print.