Malcolm Bell

“ Of recent years pewter has taken its place among the articles sought after by collectors, and its cost has so materially and rapidly increased that the manufacture of vessels, guaranteed of course genuinely antique, bids fair to become once more a paying industry. Unfortunately the various enactments compelling each maker to stamp his ware with a definite touch mark seem at all times to have been very generally evaded or ignored, and experience alone is therefore the only safe guide to distinguishing new from old. ”

“ PEWTER, a general name used to denote a number of alloys of various metals in diverse proportions, the sole common feature of which lies in the fact that tin is always the chief constituent The etymology of the word is doubtful, but it is probably an English modification of spelter, which was adopted with more or less local alteration by the continental European nations, who at an early period were eager purchasers of the ware, becoming peauter in Dutch, peutre, peautre or piautre in French, peltro in Italian and peltre in Spanish. ”

“ Confined at first to the more wealthy classes, we can trace as time goes on its extension lower and lower in the social scale, until at the end of the 17th century its use was almost universal. Thenceforward its vogue steadily declined. ”