Jewelry Pearls

When we consider the powerful incentives which have contributed to the destruction of old plate, we cannot but be grateful to those who, from diverse and often obscure motives, have helped to preserve what remains. If we owe much to the indolence and lack of economic sense which urged some of our ancestors to cling to their old plate or that of the community to which they belonged, we must also allow that certain of them laid a certain value on the historic associations connected with some of their treasures. The fact that an object was a gift from some celebrated person of the past was unfortunately not always enough to secure its preservation. Those who felt some compunction at the destruction of a piece with historic associations were often content to compromise with their consciences and whilst consigning it to the melting-pot, to register a vow to replace it with a piece of similar value (which meant weight) when the opportunity occurred. It not at all infrequently happens that a piece which is inscribed as having been presented on some particular occasion is demonstrably of later date and may even be found to bear a hall-mark perhaps even of the nineteenth century. The earliest surviving instance of this practice is the Pusey horn, of which we shall have to speak, but the instances of this species of falsification in more recent centuries are innumerable.

After an examination of a quantity of medieval wills and inventories, it will be found that on the whole the range of utensils made in the precious metals was comparatively small. In nearly every inventory of the plate of persons of exceptional wealth unfamiliar items will be found but ordinarily the plate of baron and merchant differ from each other only in quantity.

Drinking-vessels form the largest item (beakers, bowls, cups, goblets, godets, hanaps, mazers, peces, etc., - names about which it is not always safe to dogmatize). The rest usually consists of rosewater ewers and basins, salts, spoons, candlesticks, dishes, pots and spice-plates. As there are no surviving examples of the last four items we shall not be troubled with them.

The form of most of the drinking-vessels in use during the Middle Ages may be classified roughly into two classes-those deriving from the beaker and those deriving from the bowl.

It has been suggested that the beaker originated from the use of a straight section of an ox-horn with one end stopped up. The use of beakers can be traced in this country to the eleventh century by means of manuscript illustrations. By the fourteenth century they appear to have become very popular and several are depicted in the Louttrell and ‘Queen Mary’ psalters. Beakers are mentioned in a York will of 1346 and in the accounts of the treasurer of Edward Prince of Wales in 1348.

Since this book first appeared the writer has helped to show that the mark on the beaker given by Bishop William Bateman (d. 1354) to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, proves that it was made at Avignon. The number of medieval beakers is therefore three, since a recent attempt to claim an English origin for the ‘Founder’s Cup’ of Oriel College must be resisted.

All three English beakers belong to the close of the Middle Ages and differ in pattern. The earliest is in the possession of Lady Louis Mountbatten and bears the hall-mark for 1496. It is a delightful little vessel of silver-gilt, standing only 3¼ inches high and having the lower part of the side decorated with curious projecting vertical ribs.

Of still less ambitious proportions but equally attractive is the small beaker 2! inches high, which formed part of the Pierpont Morgan Collection. Its exterior is decorated with the scale pattern popular about the time when it was made in 1525.

The only medieval beaker of ambitious proportions is the one of 1507; which was one of the rich pieces of plate with which Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, endowed Christ’s College, Cambridge, which she had founded. It stands 9t inches high, and consists of a shaped base formerly set with precious stones, a spreading drum engraved with a trellis studded with marguerites and enclosing Tudor roses and portcullises, and a cover similarly decorated and surmounted by a knop framed by six portcullises from which sprout four marguerites.

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