Cistercian ware

Cistercian ware is a type of earthenware pottery manufactured in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Archaeologists had found it at major Cistercian abbeys in Yorkshire and assumed that it belonged to the period before the abbeys were dissolved (1540), but the Wrenthorpe pottersHamlet on the Wakefield Outwood, now known as Wrenthorpe, where small pot works were built. were producing Cistercian ware well into the 17th century.^[1]

Cistercian-ware pots have a reddish-coloured fabric, covered inside and out with an almost black lead-based glaze.^[1][2] The potters at Wrenthorpe made Cistercian-ware vessels including cups, cisterns and bowls with an internal yellow glaze. Evidence suggests that the wares were fired in saggars in multi-flued kilns. Some early Cistercian wares were decorated with white pipeclay motifs. Large numbers of unique forms from small rounded cups with flared rims, tall cups and tygs,^[a]A tyg is a cup with more than one handle. some very large, were made.^[2]