One of my favourite Irish placenames is New Twopothouse, a crossroads near Mallow. Like everyone else who has ever passed through it, I wondered if there was also an Old Twopothouse nearby. And of course there is, or at least used to be. Old Twopothouse still exists on maps, although in the real world, disappointingly, it’s now called Hazelwood.
According to a local historian, the late Seán Crowley, the root of both names goes back to at least 1783, when maps record the existence of a coach station on the Cork-Limerick road called “The Two-Pot-House Inn”.
Over time, the name extended to the crossroads. Then in the 19th century, when a new road from Mallow to Buttevant created a second junction, this had to become “New Twopothouse”, to avoid confusion.
The pots originally referred to are presumed to have been of the beer-holding kind. That being so, there was an interesting recent variation on the theme when, in 2013, gardaí found a “very sophisticated” cannabis-growing operation in the area. It led to a rare appearance of the name “Twopothouse” in newspaper headlines, and threatened further inflation, to “Threepothouse”. But the risk seems to have passed.
There are, it should be said, competing theories about the original pots, not all involving alcohol. One suggests they were water troughs for horses.
Another, plausibly but without supporting evidence, claims Irish parentage for the name, via “both”, meaning hut, so that Twopothouse would be a form of “Tigh an dhá bhoth”.
But our old friend, the 1930s schoolchildren’s folklore project, now on dúchas.ie, records the existence there then of a working forge at least 200 years old. The blacksmith family lore recalled a local tavern with a sign on either side of the door featuring a hand holding a pint pot of ale. So two hands, two pots. That would seem to clinch the argument.
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Going much further back in history, today's date marks the 489th anniversary of the death of John Skelton, an English poet now little read but very famous in his time.
According to Chambers Book of Days, he expired on the summer solstice of 1529. But in early life, he had been tutor to one Prince Henry, later Henry VIII. And despite a spell in jail for reasons now unknown, he appears to have enjoyed royal favour most of his life, thanks to such specialties as writing satires about priests and bishops. Being a clergyman himself, however, supposedly celibate, he created scandal by having a common-law wife. In general, some of his parishioners thought him better suited to the stage than the pulpit.
And for those at the receiving end, his satire was too sharp for comfort, so he made many enemies.
After a promising start, in which his fans included the Dutch philosopher Erasmus, who called him “the light and glory of British letters”, he came to be considered a bit vulgar, even by himself. But in one respect at least, his work has aged well. The typically short, punchy, sentences, without much structure but with obsessive rhyming, have been likened by one modern critic to “hip-hop”.
The classic of his genre may be a scatological epic written 500 years ago under the title The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng. Rummyng was an ale-wife, or bar keeper, who "tunned" her own produce, supposedly "in a certain stead/Beside Leatherhead".
And among other things, suggests Skelton, she was of daunting appearance: “Her loathly leer/Is nothing clear,/But ugly of cheer,/Droopy and Drowsy,/Scurvy and lousy;/Her face all bowsy,/Comely crinkled,/Wondrously wrinkled,/Like a roast pig’s ear,/Bristled with hair”.
She was nevertheless popular with customers, despite (or because of) her brewing techniques. One of these, the poem records, arose from having her chickens roost directly above the vats. She removed only some of the droppings that fell in. The rest added flavour.
In the aforementioned Book of Days (published 1869), the entry for June 21st features the poem and a suitably frightful illustration of Elynour, hands spread with a pint of ale in each. But Chambers also recalls the existence of an 18th-century pub near Cambridge whose sign featured two pots of ale in the identical position, minus the ale-wife.
She may have been simply painted out, says the writer. Alternatively, "the sign of the Two-pot House – for so it was called", could have been a thing in itself. Chambers suggests the sign may have referred to a double-cupped drinking vessel from ancient Greece, as used by the mythological Nestor, and mentioned in Homer's Odyssey.