Looking at the row of old bottles some people might well wonder what possible interest or attraction they might have. Surely the onlyperson likely to collect them would be a dustman!

Yet anyone with a taste for history and interest in old things can find a fascinating quest in old serving bottles— or “sealed” bottles as they are sometimes called. For in many cases it is possible not only to date them but to trace their actual owner anything up to three hundred years ago.

These bottles go back to the time when an establishment of any consequence—a big house or a college—would buy its wine by the barrel, and have it brought to the tables in bottles. At first these bottles, short, round and dumpy, were made of stoneware or delftware and they often bore the initials or arms of the original owner, a date, and sometimes the name of the wine, say Rhenish or Sack.

But in the first part of the seventeenth century a monopoly was set up for the manufacture of glass in England, and as a result of the rapid development of the industry, these earthenware bottles began to be displaced by others in the dark greeny brown of what we now call “bottle” glass. In fact this is the natural glass, before it is “washed” into the clear material used for better quality wares.

Antique Collector MagazineFor many people the attraction of the old bottles lies in their shapes, which are sometimes wonderfully irregular and haphazard, sometimes finely and nobly proportioned. But what draws other collectors to them is the fact that in many cases their original owners carried on—from the earlier earthenware bottles—the practice of having their initials or crest or even names on them, quite often with a date, in the form of a glass “seal” or lozenge. Sometimes the name of the house is given, for example “Picton Castle” or “Boxted Hall,” while a great many towns and villages appear, also the initials of university colleges.

There must still be many of these bottles lurking about in unsuspected places, for I have heard of several being discovered in old cellars quite recently. I myself bought two a year or so ago. One of them has the seal of a baronet, a Sir William Strickland, of Boynton, Yorkshire. As well as his name it bears the date 1809: on looking the gentlemen up I find that this was a year or two after he succeeded to the baronetcy. His bottle cost me 35s.

The smaller one marked “Trelaske” created a great deal of interest when I asked in an article if anyone knew a place of this name. Many correspondents wrote in to point out that it was an old house in Cornwall, and in fact the actual owner, who had recently moved in and was renovating the place, wrote to ask if I would sell him the bottle—which I gladly did. Another interesting development was that a lady living on a farm a few miles away from Trelaske wrote to say that she had found there an old bottle with the seal “Samuel Archer,” this being the name of the family which once lived at Trelaske. Another bottle in the picture, which I borrowed from a friend to make up the “bottlescape” bears the initials “I.W.” I like to think that this was one of those that Izaak Walton carried down to the river with him.

As so many of these bottles are dated, it is possible to trace the evolution of the shapes down the centuries. As already mentioned, the early ones were “dumpies,” little round ones with a long neck. This gradually became modified when people began to lay down their wines for keeping, and needed the bottles to be cylindrical shaped, so that they would lie on their sides.

At least one famous person had his seal. In her book “Sealed Bottles” the late Sheelah Ruggles-Brice not only gave a long list of seals, tracing some of their owners, but quotes the fact that Mr. Samuel Pepys notes in his diary in 1663: “Went to Mr. Rawlinson’s and saw some of my new bottles, made with my crest upon them, filled with wine, about five or six dozen.” It is interesting to see that here the wine merchant is selling the wine not in bulk, but in bottles specially made for the client, and presumably refilled as necessary. Similarly, merchants and inn keepers would also have their own marked bottles, and use them for serving customers either “on or off the premises.”

Eventually, of course, when vintners began supplying wine in bottles for keeping, and decanters were used at the table, the sealed serving bottles of the gentry went out of use. But they must have lingered on a long time in the taverns, for some have dates as late as the 1850’s.

Well, as I say, not everybody will want to fill their lounges with bottles of this kind, and it seems to me that this is one of those collecting subjects for the “den,” or better still, a cellar. The bottles will hardly come to any harm there. But why not do as quite a few people do nowadays, buy your wine in bulk. You can then lay it down in these bottles. I am sure they would be much happier doing their job than standing empty for another century or so.

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