By W. Cunnington, F.G.S. 207 
This is plainly the “C ” of 1540-1. The date of the Braikenridge cup 
is 1534-5. 
At equal distances from each other on the same part of the band 
are engraved the crests of the three families through whom it has 
descended, viz. :—1, of the Perrot family, a parrot; 2, of the Lowrys, 
two branches of laurel, with the motto “ virtus semper viridis” ; 3, 
the crest of the Barnwell family, the present owners, a wolf’s head, 
with the motto “ Loyal au mort.” 
Nortz.—From the able and exhaustive paper “ on English Medi- 
eval drinking-cups called Mazers,” by W. H. St. John Hope, M.A., 
communicated to the Society of Antiquaries, and published in the 
Archeologia, vol. L., 1887, I select the following explanatory notes 
on the nature and use of mazers. 
“ Of all the drinking vessels in use from the thirteenth to the 
sixteenth centuries, none were so common or so much prized as those 
known to us as mazers. Under whatever name it appears in ancient 
documents it is quite clear that the same vessel is meant, viz., a 
bowl turned out of some kind of wood, but by preference maple, and 
especially the spotted or speckled variety which we call bird’s eye 
maple. Although the term mazer is applied to a drinking bowl, it 
is from the material out of which it was formed, and not the use it 
was put to, that the name is derived. Professor Skeat says the word 
is of Low German origin, and merely an extended form of the 
middle High German mase, old High German m4s4, meaning a spot 
—whence our word measles. (The German Maser is a spot, speck, 
or the grain of the wood; maser-holz is veined wocd, and maserle, 
maple wood, or the maple tree.—Cripps’ Old English Plate,3rd edit., 
p. 203.) A mazer is therefore so called from being a bowl of 
“spotted” wood. During the medieval period mazers were used by 
all classes of persons, from the king downwards. The inventories of 
the religious house bear witness to the same fact : thus at Canterbury 
in 1328 there were in the frater no fewer than one hundred and 
eighty-two mazers; at Battle in 1437 there were thirty-two; at 
Durham in 1446, forty-nine. It is unfortunate that, in spite of 
