In no country is there a district so utterly associated with one trade as is the North Staffordshire Potteries. One even speaks of the Potteries in the singular as of a pure place-name. If you spoke in Timbuctoo or California of the Potteries, none could doubt that you were thinking of North Staffordshire. The reason is not that the district is or ever was given over entirely to pot-banks. Potting was incidental, a pastime in the middle of agriculture; as potting grew, so coal and iron mining grew too. The district is less confined to potting than Walsall to saddlery or Sheffield to knives. Even a thirteenth century reference to Walsall will expose harness; it is difficult to trace pots in the Potteries before 1650; you find only bloom-smithies and sea-coal mines. Potting is neither so ancient here, nor so exclusive as to have made the name. The real reason of the place-name, the Potteries, is that no man who valued time could say Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke and Longton, whenever he wanted to refer to one place—the place where men made pots—and few people outside the five towns ever wanted to speak of them separately, or could even distinguish one from others. The first reference to “the Potteries” will be found in the latter half of the eighteenth century; before that time it was hardly necessary to refer to them at all. The area where pots were made in North Staffordshire has always been peculiarly local and circumscribed. It extends, and extended, in a line from Golden Hill to Meir Lane End. Occasionally, at times, we hear of Pot-works at Red—or Ridge—Street, at Bagnal or at Bucknall, outside this narrow area. They only receded finally from Chesterton during the last century. But, generally speaking, Staffordshire potters have persisted always in making pots just where their fathers made them before, in the hilly land between the Foulhay Brook and the sources of the Trent. There was no need in old times for the people who made pots to specialize in one district. The art of potting is as old and as universal as the art of cooking. In old times it was as simple. Like most modern trades it was practised at first, and anywhere, as a branch of housekeeping. Every family made what pots they required for their kitchen, and one can see such rude earthenware utensils among the miscellanea of any excavation. And like most modern trades the development from the housekeeping to the manufacturing stage meant specialization in particular districts. But why should potting have settled in the Potteries?