Description:
English delft fuddling cup composed of three thrown vessels and pierced to allow liquid to flow from one to the other, making it difficult for a drinker to judge how much they contain. It is now known when they were first called "fuddling cups" but the term was in use by 1791. The Reverend J. Collinson wrote of earthenware made at Donyatt in Somerset, "the chief productions of the Crock Street potteries would appear to have been Jolly Boys or Fuddling Cups." The vessels are linked by twisted handles. The bottom is unglazed. The 'Oxford English Dictionary' defines "fuddle", a word in use by the late 16th century, as "to confuse with, or as with, drink". A fuddling cup has long been used to describe small cups or vase-like containers, usually three or four, joined to each other with intertwined handles and internal openings. The modest size of the containers was probably meant to deceive drinkers, assuming they were unaware of the internal connections between the pots - those intertwined loop handles connected at mid-body by hollow pipes so that the liquid can pass through. Dated delftware examples are known from 1633 to 1649; their popularity continued into the 18th century. Each of the three individually-thrown cups have a cylindrical neck with a band around its base over a round, bulbous body and spreading foot. Earlier fuddling cups have a distinct ridge or cordon between the neck and body that disappears after 1640. A three-part cup in the Taunton Museum, dated 1697, with the inscription "THREE MERY BOYS," has led scholars to suggest that the individual cups were called boys; similarly, a fuddling cup formerly in the Louis Lipski collection is labeled "DRYNCK ALL BOYSE", with a word on each container so that the words can be read in three ways. 'Boy' may be a corruption of the French conjugated verb 'bois', to drink, or may derive from earlier drinking cups decorated with faces on each of the cups. A German stoneware tripartite drinking jug with loop handle and incised faces (1475-1525), excavated from Newgate, City of London, may have served as a model for later English fuddling cups. Fragments of fuddling cups found in Southwark and Rotherhithe potting sites confirm their manufacture in the London area. Undecorated versions of these cups were the least costly and were produced in the greatest numbers. All dated fuddling cups (1633-1649) have a cordon at the junction of the neck and the body suggesting that others with this feature can be dated to the same approximate time period.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+58.057 |
