Early wine bottle, about 1740

Eleven early wine bottles, mallet shaped (shape popular c. 1740)

Glass bottles emerged in the fourteenth century, and the standard form of bulbous body and tapering neck scarcely altered before the middle of the seventeenth century, by which time a ring neck had been introduced to allow a stopper to be tied down. Retail sale of wine was illegal in Britain and buyers provided their own bottles for the importer to fill. These needed identification and a glass wafer or "seal", moulded with the owner's initials was applied to the bottles. By the end of the seventeenth century the corkscrew had been invented and corks were in use. English factories produced large numbers of bottles for both domestic and continental markets. During the eighteenth century bottles became more cylindrical to assist storage, and the use of seals continued into the nineteenth century.