ESSEX BRICKS 249
All other evidence of size I regard as quite misleading and in-
deed it must always be remembered that 21/2in. bricks were made in
Tudor times, and that 2in. bricks were used for special purposes
by Wren and later architects.
There is, of course, a special trap for the unwary; modern
bricks having no traditional manufacture to stabilise them, can be
made for special purposes to any size, texture, or colour and many
a Tudor or "pseudo-Tudor" fireplace is built of bricks made yes-
terday but by no means readily distinguishable from their genuine
counterpart. Today it is difficult and expensive to make bricks in
quantity differing from one another in all the irregularities of
colour, surface texture, and size, which happened so readily four
hundred years ago. Any one brick may look authentically Tudor
(or Georgian, as the case may be—these two periods are those
most usually copied) but its neighbours are so similar, ad infinitum,
that this uniformity gives them away.
A quite different uniformity is sometimes seen, usually on
eighteenth-century red bricks in a course. The wooden mould had
become worn by constant use, and a thin strip of leather was
tacked on to make good the deficiency. This resulted in a band
across the face of the brick along one edge, often repeated on many
of the bricks in a wall, showing that they all came from the same
mould two centuries or more ago. Another kind of band is due to
stacking the bricks in the drying clamp too heavily on the laths
separating the bricks from the ground.
We have dealt with size and its few peculiarities; what of colour
and texture? These, though less easily measured and defined, are
really more reliable guides than is size to the period of manu-
facture.
The colour of Roman brick and tile is a clear bright red, which
does not reappear in bricks until the close of the Tudor period,
and their texture was usually fine and smooth, apart from firing
cracks.
The earliest medieval bricks were rough-surfaced and deep red
or dark brown in colour; for example, those at Little Coggeshall.
The so-called Flemish, or Flemish-type, bricks of 1260 and later
medieval buildings were often streaky in appearance, light whitish-
yellow through lemon to pinky-grey. These light tones seem to
have been due to the use of chalky mud containing little iron. The
same colour is often seen in the hard floor-tiles of the seventeenth
century (these were imported from Holland and were known as
"Klinkarts"). The texture of the earliest Flemish-type bricks was,
however, soft and friable—somewhat like a soft sandstone—quite
unlike the almost metallic seventeenth-century floor-tile.
Early Tudor times saw a light red, or muddy yellow, soft, pebbly
brick give place, slowly, to the bright, harder red brick which