The white pottery found at Wroxeter is made of clay from the Severn Valley, and this shows that the Broseley or other clays were worked at a very early period of our history. The Shirlot clay, of which a few pipes were made at Shirlot and Much-Wenlock, is of a coarse texture, and very inferior to the Devon pipeclay, of which most are now made. This might lead us to suppose that the earliest manufacturers of pipes _at first used the clay found in the neighbourhood_, but discarded it for the purer clays which they obtained from Devonshire; but I feel assured the Shirlot and Wenlock pipes are not of very ancient date. In the late Mr. Thursfield’s collection were many with marks on the spur. Some of these marks exhibit the maker’s name in full, some abbreviated, others initials only, and one has a gauntlet on the bowl, with S. D. (probably the initials of Samuel Decon, who was alive in 1729) on the spur; three bowls alone only bear dates, viz., Richard Legg, 1687; John Legg, 1687; and John Legg, 1696. These three are engraved on page 293. “I have carefully examined the Broseley parish register,” Mr. Thursfield informed me, “which dates back as early as 1572, and find in 1575, 17th Elizabeth (ten years before Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco), that Richard Legg had a daughter baptized. I therefore consider him to be the father of Broseley pipemakers, for even at the present day some of his descendants follow the trade in this place--from various causes no longer as masters--and still bear the family names of Richard and John Legg. A stone slab let into the front of a substantial cottage, with the words ‘Richard Legg built this, 1716,’ testifies to the well-to-do position held by the family in the early part of the eighteenth century.” The name of Ben Legg also occurs on a pipe found in Worcestershire. The names of the pipemakers at Broseley, judging from the examples I have seen, appear to commence first as follows:--Clarke in 1647, Roden in 1681, Legg 1575, Darbey 1700, Decon 1608, Evans 1615, Hughes 1641, Hartshorne 1620, James 1600, Jones 1590, Price 1608, Partridge 1718, Overton 1700, Smith 1709, Shaw 1630, Wilksone 1733, and Ward 1700. Other names (Brown, Bradley, Dry, Hart, Harper, Overley, and Roberts, for instance) occur as pipemakers here in the olden time. More than a hundred years ago, the pipemakers began to stamp their names and residences on the _stems_ of the pipes instead of the spurs, the stems being, in many instances, 16 or 18 inches or more in length. They likewise made a small twist or bead mid stem, at such a length from the bowl, that when held between the fingers at that spot, the pipe was balanced.