7
FOREWORD
THIS short account of the Clay Tobacco-pipe is designed to
interest the general reader with a taste for antiquities, and
to give him a means of discovering for himself the type and age of
any clay pipe he is likely to find, with some assurance that he will
be within a quarter of a century or so in his estimate of its age.
The section dealing with Tobacco-pipe Manufacture in East
Anglia and Essex is based on a lecture given to the Essex Field
Club at Colchester on 21st November 1959, together with some
new material recently made available to the Author, and the
whole is now issued as a "Special Memoir" of the Essex Field Club.
It is not intended to supplant the many detailed and
specialised books and articles which have appeared in the past
hundred years on this subject, or to invade the territory so ably
covered by Mr. Oswald in his recent researches into the many
pipe-making families at Broseley in Staffordshire, and elsewhere.
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of museum curators,
of the excellent index and library at the Society of Antiquaries in
London and of the lists of makers given by Oswald and James in
articles published in the Archaeological News Letter during 1951
and 1955; also of the information on Colchester pipe-makers
provided by Mr. Gant, of the Colchester Archaeological Group.
L. S. Harley.
Stoke-by-Nayland.
30th June 1962.