340 Notes on the Church Plate of North Wilts. 
The drawings themselves, when complete, it is proposed to deposit 
in the Devizes Museum. 
In this paper, then, I propose to speak only of the northern half 
of the county, to which my own knowledge of the plate is confined. 
But although the area is comparatively small the variety and in- 
terest of the plate is very considerable. 
To begin with, Wiltshire possesses, both in the north and south, 
more than its share of pre-Reformation plate. So clean was the 
sweep made of the accumulated treasures of Churches under Henry 
VIII. and Edward VI. and the subsequent injunctions of Elizabeth, 
under which even the poor remnant of chalices which had not been 
converted “ to the King’s use” were ordered to be melted down and 
re-fashioned into “ decent communion cups,”’— that only about forty 
chalices and double that number of patens of pre-Reformation date 
are known to exist in the whole of England. 
Of these we have in the north of the county the pretty little 
chalice still in use at Manningford Abbots—probably of fifteenth 
century date. This is of silver parcel gilt. The sides of the bowl 
are somewhat straight. The knot has open work and lions’ heads, 
whilst the foot, which is now round, has evidently, Mr. Nightingale 
says, been hammered out of the original mullet or star-shaped base, 
the engraving of the crucifix being still just visible if the chalice is 
held at a certain angle. Possibly this alteration of the base to the 
regulation circular shape of the Elizabethan cup and the effacement 
of the crucifix on the foot was considered to have brought this piece 
into sufficient conformity with the “ decent ” pattern, and so saved 
it from entire destruction. The cover now belonging to it is of 
later, probably Elizabethan, date. The second chalice is the ex- 
tremely fine silver-gilt one at Highworth (No. 1 in the accom- 
panying plate of chalices), bearing the date letter, apparently, of 
1534. This belongs to a type of which the Wylye chalice (vol. xxi., 
p- 888) and that of Trinity College, Oxford, have been hitherto, 
with one other, supposed to be the only remaining examples. So 
that Wiltshire—in addition to the earliest known “ massing” 
chalice, that of Berwick St. James, of the thirteenth century, now 
in the British Museum (see vol. xxi., p. 368)—can claim two of the 
