Potted History; Medieval pottery

Hello I'm Graham Taylor and you're watching Potted History My job is to create replicas of ancient pots and uncover how they were made when they were originally made the tools we used the materials we used everything about how those pots were created And I look at pots from all sorts of differe me periods Today we're going to be looking at some medieval pots—vessels from what used to be called the Middle Ages Often when archaeologists uncover pots they might not be that exciting do you think Sometimes they're just fragments tiny pieces or sometimes just a handle My job is to figure out what they originally looked like made and to recreate them in that manner And in front of me on the table here I have some pots and some shells behind me But when I'm doing that what I try to do is get back into e kind of mind of the potter who first made them imagining myself as a medieval potter So shall we give it a try And welcome to the 14th century I'm going to be making some medieval pottery Here are some examples of pots discovered in this region and housed in this museum Sometimes what's referred to as Humberware is quite plain but other pots like Scarboroughware are often decorated with images such as horses and knights on horseback or occasionally more elaborate scenes Cute little faces made from clay—when the clay is first dug up it's very raw It's quite rough-looking stuff—full of stones rocks and debris hard and solid It truly needs to be prepared with great care and you begin that process by breaking it down thoroughly And to wet it down you immerse it in large pools of water After it has been soaking for a couple After weeks what you can do is get in there and mix it up Fancy playing in the mud And after it has been drying for a while it reaches what we call a plastic state And plastic It simply means pliable and this pliable clay can then be shaped into an entire source of pots And the way medieval potters made pots was on a potter's wheel As I say this is one I have this in front of me now—this is what's known as a stick wheel with the clay prepared and ready to go on the wheel So let's get started Place the clay onto the wheel and there it is—a lump And what I'm What I'm going to do is start spinning this wheel with the stick and keep it spinning That heavy heavy car wheel will keep spinning for a little while won't it And the start shaping the clay What I'm doing first is centering the clay which means I'm pushing it firmly and evenly to align it perfectly in the center of the wheel pulling the clay toward the center so I can begin shaping the pot and as you can see it's quite firm Work Off we go nice and fast Now what I'm going to start doing is putting a hole down the middle because that's going to be the opening in the pot As you can see it keeps spinning And requires a significant amount of force so at first it slows the wheel down quite rapidly but as I continue working on it It gets a bit easier because I want to apply significant pressure to the clay each time So let's get this going First I'm going to create a tall pitcher What's known as a polyester jug I'll begin by shaping the clay upward I'm trying to make this cylinder as tall as possible—see how it's growing One of the most renowned pottery centers in Yorkshire during the medieval period Scarborough produced exceptionally fine and high-quality green-glazed pottery But in places such as Beverley Cowick Potter Newton and Potter Brompton Tell you what you really need to know don't I Raise that clay up again Now every time I do this the wall of the pot gets a bit thinner And the pot is getting a bit taller but it still takes quite a while to pull it up During the medieval period there were large settlements and bustling towns emerging And those Large towns had enough residents to justify the presence of potters using potter's wheels and kilns of course The thing is once you've shaped your pot on the potter's wheel Clay is a soft moist substance that can be molded easily To make it durable enough to last a few hundred years it needs to be what we call fired And by fired I mean it's placed in an oven and heated to the point where the pottery hardens glow bright yellow—well over in many cases a thousand degrees Celsius—and that was achieved In kilns fired with wood—wood is fed into the bottom front of the firebox and the flames rise upward into what's known as the chamber where the pots are placed Now what I'm going to do with this before it's finished is I'm going to put it back onto the Potter's wheel and flip it upside down Right let's get this off the wheel Round we go Trim off the bottom And how am I going to cut it off With a piece of string—twisted tucked beneath the bottom threaded through underneath Then I can lift the pot off the wheel and place it on the bottom side here This pot has been drying for a bit now It was thrown on the wheel yesterday so I'm going to turn it upside down onto this That'll do the job Many potters don't really aim for much beyond that Whether they center the clay perfectly or not they'll shape them in a fairly rough-and-ready manner And if you look at pots in museums you'll often see that medieval pots are slightly wobbly a bit uneven Here we go Let's just make sure it's centered It is—perfectly positioned near the middle I'm going to pick up the pace a bit but I don't want it to go too fast this time If I go too fast it might easily come off the wheel and I don't want that to happen A little water and now I can start lowering it like this Keep it nice and centered so it rotates smoothly and evenly around the middle of the wheel without any wobbling As I've said medieval potters often didn't concern themselves too much with that There we go now And it creates a much taller and significantly lighter pot Now I've got a small knife here to do the job—I'm just going to clean up the top edge of this Or perhaps I should say the very bottom edge since that's what it is now of course The bottom edge of the pot and that needs to go on a full surface so I'm going to flip it over I have another board and another piece of clay this will form the base of the pot Grab it There we go It's quite soft so I need to be careful with it Over it goes And then I'm going to be gentle and place this right here What I'm going to do is go around and I'm going to press it in place to seal the bottom shut which also creates a small ridge as I move around a decorative element—do you see that Getting it all connected together and pressing the clay into place then I'll trim it up a bit So once more My knife Around we go Trim it nice and close to that spot That's good Remove the excess clay This is one of the pots I made on my potter's wheel—I've slightly modified its shape bit at the top I'm finishing it off because I want it to look like what's known as the Eton Vase which is housed in the Pole Museum and the Eton Vase visible in the corner of the screen right now It is a pot dating from the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th century And it's a green glazed pot—technically a jug though people often call it a vase pitcher And actually it has a spout This one is from Dublin—a replica of one that’s found in Dublin and this one also has a spout—you might be able to see it's shaped like a dragon's head in this case but the Eton Vase has a spout so I'm going to start by putting o That spout But before I do that I'm just going to dampen it a bit here And I'm going to scratch it a bit There we go This is just to help my pot stick together nicely I'm going to put Some clips go there and I'm going to attach this small piece of clay right here— you'll see why a few minutes and I'm going to push it back really push it in and leave my fingerprints there to decorate just like we discussed earlier on the bottom of the pot while I was working on them on the wheel I've done it up there around there like that And I think I'm going to chop that off Around there Let's just cut it off like that We'll leave it hanging for a moment Since I need a spout I've fashioned a flat slab of clay—here it is my flat slab of clay What I'm going to do is wrap it around a stick— in this case the handle of a spoon I'll use a wooden spoon because it's a nice straight stick for wrapping around And I'm just going to start joining those edges together a bit I'm going to trim the bottom end and then I'm also going to do this right here Make a hole so this jug can pour Scratch it like that and wet it like that Talking about wetting and sticking I'm going to apply it there like that As it becomes slightly more upright it says it's firmly bonded together And we'll have that decorative element at the bottom once more And all of that will smoothly flow into the spout Then to shape it into the spout I'm going to push it now Round it Pull it out Then on this side there will be a handle Once again perfectly aligned with the spout positioned so it reaches right here and on the ethan vase the spout extends all the way dow Here A little water to make it sticky Take a piece of clay I've prepared for the handle Here Now I'll have to stand up for this again There we go Up there Push that in place And then once it's on there I'll have to draw it back out again so that it makes a nice Long handle to fit onto this jug Plenty of handle there There we go In place and I'll slide my hand right down inside to keep from squashing the pot as I do Press it firmly into place and it will adhere to the side like this smoothly and securely fixed And the final step We'll go around and reapply those fingerprint impressions The potter who made this clearly had a real fondness for finger marks Imprinted into the clay—and it's their kind of signature left behind for all time Hundreds of years later you can still return and see where the potter once worked I pressed it into the clay with my finger And I’ve got another pot I want to show you how to make This time it's a slightly more elaborate pot a bit more intricate But there's a part of it I'd like you to try The other pot I want to show you is this one A somewhat heavier rounder pot than the other one I made but we're going to add some figures to it This one You see this unusual pot standing next to me It's called an Aquamanil And an Aquamanil is a water pitcher specifically used for washing hands Not that your hands were clean because of germs—because we know that's a good idea now don't we Because you had to have clean hands before saying your prayers and you said your prayers before eating your food so this was a washing jug to ensure your hands were clean when you prayed prayers An Aquamanil A truly excellent word But it's shaped like a knight Now that's what we're talking about I'm going to attach the handle to this jug first And then we'll place a knight right here So I have a lump of clay—I'm going to dampen it now I'm going to give this a little scratch There we go Same up there Make it a bit sticky Push that in place I'm going to have to get up for this Hold that there for a moment Work the clay until it's nice and moist I'm going to shape this one fairly flat I'm going to shape this into a fairly flat handle A bit more water and then I'll place it down there Perhaps something like the Eton vase—just a touch of decoration around the edges Make that handle nice and neat All right The whole museum has a few loose ends Scarborough Ware Decorated Scarborough Ware featuring faces and various motifs What I'd like you to do is watch what I'm about to do and think it over because I think it would be a good idea at the end of this if you have some modeling clay or play-do or some air-dry clay or even regular clay if you know someone who has for you to have a try at possibly creating your own knight Not the entire jug—just a knight to place on it possibly a face to go on the jug—the kinds of things that happened here But I'm going to star by placing a knight on this jug in the same manner that potters once did in medieval times So I'm going to dampen this surface a bit to make it slightly sticky There we go Just a little layer of water Get it onto the surface there Because with regular clay with the right kind of clay it's the water It's the stickiness of the surface that holds it together If you're using plasticine or you're I'll be using air-dry clay or clay that likely doesn't require soaking You probably don't need to use all the water available but for this I do Okay let's go I've got some a great deal of clay here and the knights they frequently depict on these jugs along with the horses they add The jugs the knights were riding on rarely resemble either horses or knights in appearance o be perfectly honest they look a little cartoonish so we'll do it our way I'm going to Begin with a lump of clay that I'm going to roll out and shape into the body of a horse and the neck of a horse Now that I have my jug here what I need to do is get my arm inside there and I need to make sure that as I press this in I don’t end up denting the jug So what I’m What I'm going to do is bring that up there—that'll be my horse's neck and my horse's head They’ve got some legs—horse legs Sometimes when you look at the original ones you wonder if the people who made them had never seen a horse which is unlikely since they had plenty of exposure to them and countless horses I'm certain—galloping on like that and then I've got these small tools here I have some wooden tools pieces of antler fragments of bone—items that could serve as medieval tools You can use whatever you can get just make sure you're doing this at home make sure there's an adult who's happy for you to use whatever it is you're using and I'm I'll give it a bit of a mane and maybe an eye too There we go that's quite good—let's do an armored knight So there we go we've got a body It really does need to sit high on the horse doesn't it High on the horse like that and then very Some of them have extremely long legs—so long they nearly touch the ground We'll give him long long legs and perhaps a pair of little pointed elongated shoes and then he needs a helmet What kind of helmet should we get Well let's go with one of those styles d of shaped a bit like a bucket shall we Can you tell it's a helmet Well Make a slit for the eyes and we'll add some air holes to the front and maybe a row of rivets at the top to secure the helmet's crown and perhaps some running down the sides to hold the helmet together and he'll need a shield and they often have quite long shields so I'm just going to make a display like that with an arm holding the shield Let's have an arm coming back here and going forward over there on top of that we'll place his The other arm and sword The last thing I'm going to do is give this horse a slight touch of a tail That's pretty much the knight set What do you think I've placed the other knight on my jug now so we've got one on each side but there's one thing I wanted to do It was just to finish off this handle because there's something on some of the jug handles in the museum in Hull and a bit quirky—they have two small rings up there right in the middle of Those rings are little dots and then here a small round button like that and then a tiny mouth and a beard because these are quite jolly little faces And there we are jug complete Knights on both sides face on this one knight on the other Now that I've made my pots I've got to let them dry Then they need to be coated with what we call glaze and then placed in the kiln Now the glaze applied to these will create a stunning green hue Green-colored pottery and the glaze is made from some intriguing ingredients Set that aside It's partly made from this—this is what's known as lead ore or galena These dark fragments here These dark specks in the rock are what would become lead if processed in a furnace and if you melted it down you'd get lead which is a toxic metal so lead is poisonous so you must be handled with great care but they used to grind it down and once it's been ground dow you're left with a very fine dark grayish powder and that will melt clay So if you mix it with powdered clay and combine the two what you get is a mixture that can be shaped and fired into a durable form get is you get a glassy surface on the pots but it's somewhat clear leaving the pots appearing grayish brown So what medieval potters used to do was add to some copper but copper's another metal isn't it Copper's a shiny shiny metal but if it' s left wet for a long time especially if it's a bit acidic with things like vinegar then gs like that start to corrode begin to loosen slightly and what you're left with is copper oxide and when that copper oxide breaks down you're left with something called carbon at's all very complicated science isn't it but what it means is that from shiny golden metal you end up with a greenish sort of powder and if this greenish powder is mixed with this crushed-dow and is mixed with clay applied to the surface of the pot then heated glows a vibrant orange in the kiln reaching over a thousand degrees centigrade and what you end up with is a stunning green glaze—and that's exactly what will happen Now how about you see what you can do I bet you can make a better knife than I did Here's George six years old crafting his own version of a horseback