By J. E. Nightingale, F.S.A. 



357 



centuries were rich in plate ; the next question is, what has become 

 of it ? You might as well ask what has become of the last winter's 

 snow, for the answer is the same. Melted, not once, but over and over 

 again; so that our shillings and sixpences may contain the very metal 

 which glowed, richly gilt and beaming with enamels, on Becket's 

 mitre, or his pastoral staff. Sooner or later the golden bowl and 

 the silver beaker go the same way, their end is the crucible and the 

 melting-pot; their form and fashion changes, while the red and 

 white substance remains the same. In four successive centuries old 

 English plate had as many arch-enemies. In the fifteenth century 

 the Wars of the Roses caused many a noble piece to melt ; in the 

 sixteenth, Henry VIII., and the dissolution of monasteries, were 

 even more fatal to gold and silver work ; in the seventeenth the 

 Great Rebellion and the Civil War again swept the sideboards and 

 plate-closets of each side with equal impartiality; and, at the beginning 

 of the eighteenth, the need of bullion, under which William III. 

 laboured, brought to the melting-pot much of the old plate which 

 still remained after the ravages it had suffered in the three preceding 

 centuries. Taking all this into consideration the wonder is, not 

 that so little English plate exists prior to the reign of Anne, but 

 that any of it at all is left to give us some insight into the magni- 

 ficence with which the halls and tables and sideboards of our ancestors 

 were decked on great festive occasions." 



From an early period there has been a peculiar interest taken in 

 the holy cup or chalice. Mediaeval legends delighted in the quest 

 for the " Holy Graal." Throughout the Middle Ages the chalice, 

 or rather, perhaps, the dish or shallow bowl from which Our Lord 

 was said to have eaten the paschal lamb at the Last Supper, was a 

 favorite subject of legendary romance. This holy graal, 1 the name 



1 Bishop Thirlwall, in his " Letters," p. 216, says : — " Saint Graal, the origin 

 of which from Sang Royal is refuted by the Provencal forms, is in the epic 

 poems the dish out of which Christ partook of the Last Supper with his disciples. 

 Nothing, I believe, is more certain than that the name has nothing to do with 

 sang either real or royal. Indeed, if you only reflect for a moment on the 

 wildness of a quest after a liquid, I think you will see that the etymology is out 

 of the question. Littre gives the true one, ' sorte de vase, origine inconnue? 

 There never has been any doubt that it was the name of a vessel. Did you not 



