Tile, stove tile

Stove tile with a yellow-lead glazed earthenware body of Border ware, bearing the Royal Arms and ER Cipher for Elizabeth I with the Tudor Rose. When the traveller and diarist Baron Waldstein visited England in 1600, he observed that the queen had a tile-stove fired by sea-coal in her bathroom at Hampton Court. Archaeology has shown that smokeless stoves made from ceramic tiles were imported from western Germany into southern England from the middle of the 15th century. Besides being a radical innovation in terms of domestic heating technology, their architectural form, intricate moulded relief and colour-glazed surfaces injected a new visual dimension into the pre-Reformation English interior. By the reign of Henry VIII the native pottery industry began producing stove-tiles moulded with the royal arms of England, the emblems of the Tudor dynasty and the cypher of the ruling monarch. Royal palaces form the principal locus for these elaborate stoves. Tiles moulded with the HR cipher of Henry VIII were found during excavations at Whitehall Palace in 1539 in association with a bathroom, suggesting the stove was employed to generate steamy conditions in the manner of a Turkish bath. The link between the smokeless stove and royal Tudor bathroom is reinforced by contemporary witnesses, knobbly William Harrison in his Description of England (1587) who notes that 'As for stoves...they now begin to made in diverse houses of the gentry and wealthy citizens, who build them not to work and feed in as in Germany, but now and then to sweat in, as occasion and need shall require it.'