The properties of cork were appreciated by many ancient civilizations. Romans used it for sealing amphora, making shoes, fishing floats and even insulation for their beehives. The photograph below shows cork soles and a narrow, corked bottle neck discovered in 1911 by Dr. Flinders Petrie in a cemetery of Upper Egypt and dated to the second century AD.
Cork use declined during the Dark Ages in Europe and only regained popularity when glass and stone bottle making took hold in the fifteenth century. It was the French who claimed to have discovered its superiority as a wine bottle sealer over the previous method of using a piece of wood wrapped in cloth. Palsgrave’s French/English dictionary mentions bottle corks in 1530, and bottled beer is supposed to have been invented by Alexander Nowell, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1602. A household advice book published in 1615 gives clear instructions for the home bottling of ale:
“You should put it into round bottles with narrow mouths, and then, stopping them close with corks, set them in a cold cellar up to the waist in sand, and be sure that the corks be fast tied in with strong pack thread, for fear of rising out and taking vent, which is the utter spoil of the ale.”
Cork was also useful for soles and heels of shoes as it was light, warm and waterproof. Shoemakers were probably the first people to learn how to craft the material, some footwear being described as “corkes”. There are records of cork being imported in the late 1400s. In England corkcutting as a specialised trade seems to have appeared some time in the seventeenth century along with the development of glass and stone bottles.