ABSTRACT
What can this humble wooden bowl (Figure 7.1) tell us about early modern history? At first glance the object seems mundane and unremarkable, a plain and practical solution to the quotidian and timeless practice of eating. How can a simple bowl offer evidence worthy of the serious attention of historians? This chapter asks that you never take an object’s apparent worth or significance at face value and encourages you to think in a rounded way about the potential of visual and material sources to inform the writing of history. Even on a surface level it is possible to draw some analysis from the material qualities of the bowl; what is the value of a wooden item like this? Further investigation reveals that wooden items of tableware (called ‘treen’) were the most common in Tudor England. William Harrison’s The Description of England of 1577 identified a shift from treen to metal wares as indicative of a revolution in the living standards of relatively ordinary people over the course of a generation; he describes:
the exchange of vessel, as of treen platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin. For so common were all sorts of treen stuff in old time that a man should hardly find four pieces of pewter (of which one was peradventure a salt) in a good farmer’s house
whereas in Harrison’s time even ‘inferior artificers and many farmers … have, for the most part, learned also to garnish their cupboards with plate’ with a ‘fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard, with so much more in odd vessel going about the house … a silver salt, a bowl for wine (if not a whole nest), and a dozen of spoons to furnish up the suit’.1 So, an understanding of period and social context allows us to situate this bowl within an emerging hierarchy of tablewares, which in turn suggests its economic worth to contemporaries.
