4 
ROMAN POTTERY FOUND IN BRITAIN. 
7. Fuming .—Vessels of ordinary brown-red clay (which contains 
4 to 5 per cent, of red iron oxide), or which have been coated 
when in biscuit state with slip containing red iron oxide, are 
fired or re-fired in a smother-kiln producing fumes of carbon 
monoxide (carbonyl gas), whereby the clay body and red iron 
oxide in the slip are reduced to a uniform blue-grey to black 
colour. 
By the last of these methods most of the plain clay utensils in 
ordinary use during the Roman period were rendered impervious 
to liquids and cleanly and antiseptic in use. Such wares are 
accordingly divisible into coated or uncoated, steeped or unsteeped, 
fumed or unfumed ; and according to shape, into rounded (convex), 
conical and upright (straight-sided),—these regular shapes mostly 
of Roman or early Italian origin ; or into hollow-sided (concave) 
S-shaped or ogee-sided, carinated (obtuse angled), acute-angled, 
constricted, cordoned, or into other fantastic forms of Late Celtic 
origin, such as those of the so-called Upchurch ware, which includes 
only a small and well defined series. 
Belgic terra nigra, which is steeped in fine slip, black-coated and 
fumed, is distinguishable from the merely fumed and steeped wares 
by its smooth polish produced by burnishing or steeping in a fat 
clay slip, which gives the under surface a satin-like gloss, and by 
conformity to the well-defined repertory of Belgic forms. Though 
the strictly Belgic technique went out of fashion before the Flavian 
period, a.d. 69, its recurrence in the first half of the IV. century is 
proved by examples found at Cologne in forms belonging to the 
Constantine period. (Lceschcke, Sammlung Nlessen, plates 111 .-IV.) 
Similar late examples are also to be seen in the Provincial Museum 
at Trier. Colchester and Reading Museums (Silchester Collection) 
are depositories of a few specimens of true Belgic terra nigra found 
in Britain, and a saucer with the potter’s stamp from Camelon is 
in the Museum of Scottish National Antiquities, Edinburgh. 
The Upchurch ware so well represented in the Museum at 
Rochester, nearest to the marshes where found, presents a limited 
but definite and distinct range of forms evidently derived from 
the Belgic and identical with the later Romano-Belgic of the 
latter half of the I. and early II. centuries, which is evidenced by 
their various freakish La Tene features, such as the sharp-angled 
bulge, narrow waist, constrictions, concavities, gouged incisions, 
cordons, &c. It differs from fumed wares of the period found 
beside the kilns in other parts of Britain, as at Silchester, Lexden 
