Costrels, horn cups and harvest jars

A costrel is a portable flask designed to be carried by a person doing physical work. The coopered wooden form — small staves bound with hoops, flattened on one side to sit against the body, with lugs for a cord — is the type most associated with English harvest work, and examples in cider districts are common enough that the vessel and the drink are effectively linked in museum interpretation.

Stoneware and leather versions did the same job. Stoneware is impermeable and keeps the contents cooler; leather is light and survives being dropped; wood swells tight when wet and is repairable in the field. Each material trades against the others, and which predominated in a district was largely a matter of what was made locally.

The capacity is the informative feature. A costrel holds an amount one person can carry and drink over a working session, not a day’s supply, which tells you that the daily allowance was fetched in larger vessels and decanted. The costrel is the last stage in a chain from cellar cask to hand.

Horn beakers were made by heating and shaping cattle horn, which produces a light, tough, waterproof cup that will not break when dropped in a field and costs almost nothing where cattle are kept. They are common in West Country collections and appear in accounts of orchard and harvest drinking throughout the period.

Horn also has a specific advantage in this use: it does not conduct heat, so a horn cup does not warm a cool drink as quickly as metal and is not unpleasant to hold in cold weather. For a drink consumed outdoors across the whole year, that is a real property rather than an incidental one.

The horn is also the object most heavily loaded with later romantic association, appearing in twentieth-century revivals and at modern orchard customs as a piece of costume. Its presence at a wassail today should not be read as evidence of anything about the wassail; it is a real historic vessel being used as a signal.

Larger vessels carried the allowance out to a gang: coopered wooden jars, stoneware bottles of a gallon or more, and buckets. These were filled at the cask, carried to where the work was, set in shade or in a hedge, and drawn from through the day.

The whole arrangement — cask in the cellar, jar to the field, costrel on the belt, horn in the hand — is a distribution system, and it is worth seeing it as one. It was designed to move a bulky perishable liquid from a fixed store to a dispersed and moving workforce, over a working day, without refrigeration and without waste. The objects are efficient answers to that problem.

The system disappeared with the thing it served. When the allowance ended and mechanisation reduced field gangs to individuals in cabs, there was nothing left for a costrel to do, and the vessels went from working equipment to museum objects within a generation.