Imagine a time when the only way you could get hot water for a bath or for cooking was to trek several miles down to the nearest stream or river and collect several buckets of water to fill up your manual water heater the good old cauldron. In our modern world we don’t have to rely on these large wrought iron pots, suspended over or set on a big open fire anymore, or at least as much as we used to. Now we rely on boilers and they need checking more than the humble cauldron, all that needs is quick once over for rust. So, it makes good sense to check out a Boiler Installation Gloucester  based company like https://redbridgeandsons.co.uk/heating-systems-gloucestershire/boiler-installation-gloucester/ should you need them. What did we do with the old fashioned cauldron when we didn’t have boilers.

Image credit

The world cauldron comes from the middle ages and, as with many other words it is a distillation of a latin word, suggesting that the use and creation of the cauldron comes from the continent. It is thought to relate to the word caldarium which directly translates as “hot bath”. There is a lot of iron involved in the making of a cauldron and you’d have had to have been pretty rich to have afforded one for the purposes of having a wash. In fact, they were generally a communinal item that was used to cook for, or provide hot drinks, for  the village or settlement.

Image credit

Cauldrons are not as popular as they were, as we mentioned above. They have now entered more into the realms of folklore and myth so that rather than us remembering them as a really big crock pot for a stew for the villagers at the end of a long day in the field we now see them as being something that Witches use to make up spells, potions and to generally plot about things over unearthly an green glow coming out of the cauldron. We can thank writers like Shakespeare for this as they would have been well aware of the cauldron as an implement of the rural population so to see some scheming villains over it would have certainly struck a chord with the audience. It’s also seen as an example of the divine feminine as it represents the womb of an Earth Mother providing warmth, food and general sustenance from it’s innards. In Chinese stories the cauldron is a source of power and a sign of wealth for the owner and there is also tales where the Holy Grail that King Arthur and his Knights searched for is in fact a cauldron and not the cup of Christ.