Sot Weed and A Little Ladell: Two Tobacco-related Terms of Yore

Ben Rapaport, October 2024
Exclusive to pipedia.org
Welcome to Tobacco and Pipe Terminology 101! Most pipe smokers know what Nicotiana tabacum and Nicotiana rustica are from having read about both tobacco plants with their Latin names. But there are two English-language terms in our lexicon that are not fully understood. I encountered both in the early literature of tobacco but, like most readers, I was not interested then in knowing their relevance or significance; I simply ignored them. I did, however, assume that they were essential terms in the history of pipes and tobacco. At least four important books, George Latimer Apperson, The Social History of Smoking, Charles Malcolm MacInnes, The Early English Tobacco Trade, W. A. Penn, The Soverane Herbe, and Mattoon M. Curtis, The Book of Snuff and Snuff Boxes, and periodical articles, such as “The Pipe as History Tells of It” (The United Shield, August, 1921) and Adrian Oswald, “The Evolution and Chronology of English Clay Tobacco Pipes” (Archaeological News Letter, September 1961), made mention of either or both terms. 
Recently, curiosity got the best of me and I decided to investigate sot weed and a little ladell to learn the role that each had in ye olden tymes. Both are antiquated terms that have no modern counterpart. Fact is, I believe that neither term was useful or explanative then, probably the very reason why they’ve never appeared in our contemporary tobacco glossary. What did they mean? When did they first appear in print? What role did they play in pipe and tobacco history? Inquiring minds would want to know … or would they? It’s not a deep dive, so those who want to know more can continue reading. 
But before you read further, you might ask why dottle isn’t included in this narrative. This term was used centuries ago. Well, there’s no misunderstanding its origin, spelling, or meaning; it’s universally understood: “Originally dossil, from the French word dosil, ‘a spigot or plug in a vessel.’ It became a pipe-smoking term in the early 19th century.” 
=== Sot weed ===
According to AI Overview, “The word ‘sot’ comes from the Old English word sott, which meant ‘a stupid person or a fool.’ It was first used in 1592.” In art, it has been depicted as a ship being saved from destruction. Sot weed is an old term for the tobacco plant, per Francis Grose, The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. “As the colonists around him hunted for fool’s gold, mistaking it for the real thing, or prepared shipments of sassafras root for export to England as a ‘cure’ for veneral [sic] disease, John Rolfe toiled over his tobacco plants, spending four years perfecting the cultivation and curing of his ‘sot weed’” (“The Cultural Roots of the Sot Weed,” Atlantic Noir Theme, 2014). 
Tomatoes and tobacco, also called sotweed, are both in the nightshade family, along with potatoes, tomatillos and peppers” (Kathleen Bauer, “Farm Bulletin: Sotweed, Spuds and Tomatoes,” goodstuffnw.blogspot.com). The Reverso Dictionary defines sot weed more narrowly as “Any plant that grows wild and profusely, esp. one that grows among cultivated plants, depriving them of space, food, etc.” The tobacco plant absorbs more nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, depleting soil fertility; tobacco can give tomato plants Tobacco Mosaic Virus. “Tobacco was called the sot weed and many other ugly names by those who thought smoking and snuff were bad habits!” (Carole Marsh, My First Pocket Guide. Virginia, 2011, 40).
And here’s how it entered our language. Among English colonists in America’s mid-Atlantic region in the late 1600s, tobacco was known as sot-weed and those who sold it were known as factors; factor was the term for a mercantile agent, a middleman who buys something to resell. Ebenezer Cooke’s, “The Sot-weed Factor: Or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr in which is describ’d The Laws, Government, Courts and Constitutions of the Country, and also the Buildings, Feasts, Frolicks, Entertainments and Drunken Humours of the Inhabitants of that Part of America” was published in 1708 (libcat.wellesley.edu). The Sot-weed Factor chronicles the misadventures of an English emigre to the American colony of Maryland and his ignominious return home. The speaker of the poem leaves England to escape from debt and sets up in America as a merchant or tobacco agent. “Our unfortunate sot-weed factor—Cooke—might well have picked up a pamphlet similar to one published in 1616 by George Alsop, who had been an indentured servant in Maryland. It was titled, ‘A Character of the Province of Mary-Land,’ in which it is stated: ‘Tobacco is the current Coin of Mary-Land, and will sooner purchase Commodities from the Merchant, than money’” (Renascence Editions, The Sot-Weed Factor, luminarium.org). 
For years, the most talked-about book is also fiction, John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960); it has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it is an epic poem that recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of a hapless Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father’s tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony. There is some connection between colonial Maryland and a seller of cured tobacco, i.e., a Tidewater tale of a sot weed factor. It’s explained this way: “Tobacco, the craze it had created, and the vast sums of currency paid for its smoke, was the future” (“The Cultural Roots of the Sot Weed," (beautifulswimmers.tumblr.com).
Sot-weed was mentioned in other poems. “d. 1704. Brown, Works, I, 126. When the stew’d SOTWEED in his Mouth has lain So long, till spitting does its Virtues drain. 1705: Ward, Hud. Rediv., I. 2, 22, I scarce had fill’d a pipe of sotweed, and by the Candle made it Hotweed” (John S. Farmer & W.E. Henley [comps. and eds.], Slang and Its Analogue Past and Present, Vol. VI.—Rea to Stozzle, MCMIII [1903], 299). And in the third stanza of “Tobacco and Ale” (Saturday Night, Vol. I, 1824, 176): 
“I love to keep perfectly sober,
Nor can my aversion conceal
To sot-weed, and belch, and October,
Vile odious—Tobacco and Ale.”
Sot-weed continues to be studied. There’s a YouTube video “A Scientific Study of Sot-weed” produced by the Accokeek, Maryland Foundation, Inc. There’s Kate Livie, “The Roots of the “Sot Weed” (The Star Democrat, February 29, 2012; Frederick F. Sigel, “A New South in the Old: Sotweed and Soil in the Development of Danville, Virginia,” a Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1978; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “Ceramics and the Sot-Weed Factor. The China Market in a Tobacco Economy,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring, 1984); a 2001 symposium of the Society for American Archaeology, “The ‘Sot-weed Factor,’: Recent Development in the Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco Pipes”; and the Maritime Museum, Annapolis, “Built on Sotweed: The History and Archaeology of Maryland in the 1600s and its Reliance upon Tobacco,” a lecture on February 29, 2024. 
=== A Little Ladell ===
Why ladell? Traditionally, it means ‘ladle maker or seller’” (thebump.com). What’s its association with tobacco? Nicola White explains: “The earliest written description was in 1573 where a pipe was described as ‘an instrument formed as a ladell’ (sic). No illustrations exist, but it was flat in design and likely inefficient for smoking tobacco other than for ceremonial purposes” (“Pipe Dreams,” tidelineart.com). 
Reporting on Sir John Hawkins’s voyage to the West Indies in 1565, chronicler John Sparke (Sir John Hawkins’s Second Voyage to the West Indies) wrote: “The Floridians when they travell, have a kind of herbe dried, who with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, with fire, and the dried herbs put together, doe sucke thorow the cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, and therewith they live foure or five dayes without meat or drinke, and this all the Frenchmen used for this purpose” (Ivor Noël Hume, “Hunting for a Little Ladle,” slaveryandremembrance.org). 
“Moreover … there is this remark by William Harrison in his ‘Chronologie,’ 1588, that in 1578 ‘…the taking in of the smoke of the Indian herbe called Tobacco, by an instrument formed like a little ladell, whereby it passeth from the mouth into the head and stomach, is gretlie taken up and used in England” (“The Pipe as History Tells of it,” The United Shield, September and October, 1921). “The ‘little ladell’ describes the early form of the tobacco-pipe, with small and very shallow bowl” (G. L. Apperson, The Social History of Smoking, 1914, 14). “A little ladle is an apt description of the early form of the pipe” (Oswald, “The Evolution and Chronology of English Clay Tobacco Pipes,” 55). “At first, the smoke was inhaled from a ‘little ladell’ made of silver for the rich or a half–walnut shell for the poor. Eventually, as a visitor to the Bear Gardens in Southwark notes in 1598, these little ladells or pipes were made of clay” (“The Clay Tobacco-Pipe in Archaeology,” hadas.org.uk). 
Alfred Dunhill offers this simpler explanation: “It seems reasonable, indeed, to go farther, and to suggest that Harrison, writing in 1573, had a pipe of this type in his mind when he described ‘an instrument formed like a little ladell’ (page 41), for such a wording fits these particular clays very well indeed. A somewhat similarly shaped pipe from Broseley is figured by Jewitt (Fig. 201), but no date is assigned to it. It is claimed, however, that the Broseley industry dates back to 1575, and the ‘ladell’ shape may have originated there” (The Pipe Book, 1924, 210). 
Now that you are now fully informed about both terms, the next time you light up with your pipe-smoker friends, impress them with your new-found erudition by casually saying: “Hey guys, I’m about to pack some sotweed into my little ladell” and watch their clueless reaction.
Category:Ben Rapaport