Clay Pipe

The clay pipe is a pipe type, molded from white-firing pipe clay, in which bowl and stem form a single piece. From the late 16th century, when tobacco reached Europe, until the late 19th century, when cheap cigarettes spread, it remained the continent's near-universal pipe. Smoked everywhere from the tavern to the hearth, this cheap "people's pipe" went unrivaled among pipe bowl materials for roughly three centuries.

Making It and Its Smoking Character

In traditional production, white-firing pipe clay sourced from England or from around Cologne, Liège, and Rouen was hand-rolled into a fillet, the smoke channel opened with a thin wire, the body pressed in a greased metal mold, and the bowl shaped with a conical punch. Trimmed and stamped pipes were then fired at temperatures up to 1050°C. The heel stamps makers applied, along with the relief bowl decoration common between 1725 and 1825, served as the product's signature.

Clay's greatest virtue as a smoke is its neutrality: the material adds no flavor of its own to the tobacco and holds no ghost aroma, which is why tobacco blenders still use clay pipes for test smokes today. The bowl is also effectively burnout-proof; a dirtied pipe could simply be refired in an oven to clean it, and taverns even kept pipes hygienic by baking shared ones on iron grates. On the other hand the body heats up considerably (which is why a clay pipe is held by the stem rather than the bowl), the smoke runs hot and dry, and the pipe itself is extremely fragile. That's why millions of broken clay-pipe fragments turn up in the landfill and riverbed strata of European cities.

The Age of the Clay Pipe: From London to Gouda

The craft was born in England, around the 1580s and probably in London; the London pipe-makers' guild was founded in 1619. In England clay pipes were sold in dozen-count bundles and were often offered free to anyone buying tobacco at a tavern. The long-stemmed form that cooled the smoke went on to become a tradition of its own under the name churchwarden.

The craft was carried to continental Europe by the English who settled in the Dutch city of Gouda in the early 17th century; the two names most associated with this transfer are the English mercenaries said to have arrived in 1606, and William Baernelts, the English master who settled in the city in the years that followed and founded the first pipe workshop. By 1640 Gouda's output had overtaken England's; the pipe-makers' guild founded in the mid-17th century quickly grew to 180 members, and the first Gouda pipe fair was held in 1666. The peak came in the 18th century: 349 pipe workshops were counted in the city in 1749, and roughly half the population made its living from the trade.

A Different Path in the Ottoman World: Lüle

In the same centuries, the Ottoman world gave the clay pipe an entirely different form. In place of the single-piece, stemmed white European pipe, a stemless bowl — the lüle — was made from red clay and fitted onto the long wooden stem known as the çubuk (chibouk). The İstanbul center of this production was the Tophane district, which gave its name to the Tophane lüle tradition. The two traditions are considered two separate material cultures built around the same plant.

Decline and the Present Day

19. th-century, cheap cigarettes and briar pipes rapidly pushed the clay pipe out. Large Gouda manufacturers such as Goedewaagen and Zenith held on into the late 20th century; in the 1920s Zenith developed the double-walled bowl and the "doorroker" (mystery pipe) type, which revealed a glazed image underneath as it was smoked down. Today, clay-pipe making survives in Gouda through a handful of craftsmen; the craft was added to the Netherlands' intangible cultural heritage inventory in 2013. Broken pipe fragments, meanwhile, are a precise dating tool for archaeologists: stem-bore diameter, form typology, and maker's stamps are used to date 17th- to 19th-century strata.