The wooden bottle, 1700-1900

This article describes the terminology and construction of the wooden bottle, that is, the small coopered container used by farm workers to carry beverages into the fields. It also traces the history of its use from the eighteenth century, through its heyday, to its decline at the end of the nineteenth century. TERMINOLOGY: The terminology used to describe the wooden bottle is varied and owes much to regional and local speech, where the pronunciation of even the same dialect words may change over a very small area. Perhaps at one time regional terms did exist in a rigid pattern that could be traced to a given locality, but with constant movement of rural workers to seek work in other counties, the localized forms of speech were lost or ‘fused’ with words introduced by these migratory workers.