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ART. III.-1. Hall-marks on Gold and Silver Plate, Illustrated with Tables of Annual Date Letters employed in the Assay Offices of England, Scotland and Ireland, &c. By William Chaffers. 5th edition. London, 1875.

2. Various Catalogues of Plate Sales at Christie's.

T is not so very long ago since two English country-gentle

tive importance of their families, in which one of them rested his claim to superiority on his sideboard of plate. We have no wish to depreciate the merits of that splendid array, which no doubt fully deserved all the veneration with which its worthy owner regarded it; all we wish to observe is, as we are about to write on English plate and on ancient English plate in particular-that if any of the medieval ancestors of the contending parties could have looked down on the sideboard in question, they would in all probability not have exhibited such admiration of its quantity and quality as its fortunate owner evidently entertained; the fact being, that what we in these degenerate days would call a fine collection of plate would have seemed to English lords and knights and squires of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries rather an insignificant amount of paltry pieces. If our reader desires proof of this, let him turn to the inventory of Sir John Fastolf's plate, that old soldier of Henry V.'s wars, who, after his retirement to his native Norfolk, figures as a close-fisted landowner in the 'Paston Letters.' There he will find page after page of great pieces weighed by the pound, and clearly of a form and fashion never seen on a modern sideboard. The inventories of kings and dukes, as those of France and Burgundy, we purposely set aside as exceptional; but the centuries we have named, and to them we might have added the seventeenth, on the authority of Pepys's 'Diary,' were emphatically plate-buying and plate-giving times; all who had any money to invest laid it out in manufactures of silver and gold, so that the schedule of the effects left behind him by any person of rank or station teems with white plate, or parcel-gilt, or whole gilt plate, in thousands of ounces. Such a schedule may still be seen annexed in the Depository of London Wills to the Will of Nicholas Bacon, Queen Elizabeth's fat and witty Lord Keeper, a self-made man, who, besides being the father of Francis Bacon, built Gorhambury, and left a fine estate both in land and chattels to his heirs. Nor were the collections of Church and College plate less important; the treasuries of great abbeys and monasteries were stored with plate; as that of the Shrine of Becket, at Canterbury, carried away in

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huge chests, and the plate at Westminster Abbey, of which the inventory still exists, to make collectors' mouths water at its weight and beauty.

We have reached so far in our inquiry therefore, the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth 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 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 magnificence with which the halls and tables and sideboards of our ancestors were decked on great festive occasions.

And yet, wonderful to relate, there is, some people tell us, abundance of old plate still left. A buyer, if he be not too fastidious, and has money in his purse, may return home, after traversing our great thoroughfares for a day, with a whole cabload of real old English plate. We shall see in a little while how this seeming anomaly is to be explained; but let us first consider a few pieces of old English plate which a buyer, if he longs for them ever so much, cannot buy any day of the year, and bring them home with him in a cab. To do this, however, the reader must accompany us out of town, and allow us to set him down at the door of the house of the President of Corpus, Oxford, that unpretentious little College which stands wedged in between stately Christ Church and medieval Merton, but with both of which foundations it may, like that worthy English gentleman to whom we have alluded, vie, and utterly vanquish in the matter of plate. And here let us linger for a moment to

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say that, Christ Church, of all Oxford houses, ought to surpass her sister foundations in a portion of her plate, for to her it is recorded that Henry VIII., the munificent founder of Christ Church,' as he is called in the old University Bidding Prayer, handed over the Communion Plate of Osney Abbey, which, in the older Saxon times, had been the gift of no less a potentate than King Offa of Mercia. That is the tradition; but if tradition be true, Christ Church has been woefully wanting in respect to Offa, for about the middle of the last century, in evil times, she actually melted down the gift of the great Mercian King, and recast her Communion Plate. This is the fact; and there the plate in question stands on the altar with an eighteenth century hall-mark. We, however, advise no visitor to Saint Frideswide's Cathedral even to hint or to whisper this heresy to the virago who guards-or used years ago to guardthat sacred plate, for at the mere suggestion, we were all but expelled the Church; nor was the wrath of the custodian at all mitigated when we pointed out the London hall-marks on chalice and alms-dish? Get along with your London hallmarks,' was all the answer vouchsafed to us. " This is the very plate given by King Offa to Osney Abbey, and by King Henry VIII. to this house,' for, be it remembered, Christ Church is to her alumni and dependants not a College but a House.

But to return to Corpus and her plate. It is well known that the founder of that College was Fox, one of the last of those great ecclesiastics who, in the reigns of Henry VII. and his son, revived the memory and piety of prelates like Wykeham and Waynflete. It seemed as if the setting sun of the medieval English Church sent up in them an afterglow which shed its beams on the edifice just tottering to its fall. Born in a lowly Lincolnshire manor-house, the career of Fox in some measure illustrates the remark of a distinguished writer on the social state of England in the Middle Ages, when he says that 'the son of a villain could, if fortune or merit favoured him, reach from the hut of his parents to the mitre of a parliamentary abbot, to the crosier of the bishop, to the custody of the Great Seal, to the wand of the Lord High Treasurer, to the princely state of the Roman cardinal.' was, so far as we can learn, not the son of a villain, nor could the manor-lodge of his parents be called a hut; but he quitted it at an early age to be trained for the Church; and clinging to the fortunes of Henry of Richmond, and having amply proved his capacity in his service, was richly rewarded by that monarch, in whose will he was named one of his executors. It was, if we remember right, when he was journeying to his see at Durham-he was Bishop of Exeter, Bath and

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Wells, Durham, and Winchester, in succession-that he turned aside to revisit his birthplace, and told his parents, when they wished him to stay with them, that their homestead would not serve for the kitchen of the house that he was building for himself.' It does not appear that this house was Corpus, which he built in his old age, intending it as a seminary for the monks of St. Swithin at Winchester; till his friend Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, to whom it was given to read the signs of the times, dissuaded him from forming a monastic institution likely soon to perish, but rather to devote his means and exhibit his piety in founding a College for sound learning which would be destined to endure for ages. Thus Corpus Christi, Oxford, arose, and thus it has endured as a monument to the pious churchman. To it Fox bequeathed his crosier, his salt-cellar, his high-standing cups, his silver-gilt low bowl and cover, enriched with a stamped pattern of roses and fleurs-de-lis; his rose-water dish, enamelled in the centre; and his two sets of spoons, one with owls, and the other with balls or knops at the end of the stem. Of these, the crosier and the salt-cellar are among the finest pieces of goldsmith's work in existence. It is true that Oxford treasures up in Wykeham's Chapel at New College the crosier of that magnificent prelate. In its pristine condition, rich with Limoges enamels, and fretted with the finest work, it probably outshone the rival crosier at Corpus; but, as it now exists, it has suffered much, probably more from the constantly cleaning and rubbing of centuries than from wilful ill-usage. It should never be forgotten that the foe of fine old plate belongs almost invariably to its own house. The modern butler, like the medieval manciple, with his plate-powder and wash-leather, has gradually polished and worn down the pieces confided to his care. From whatever cause, the crosier and salt-cellar of Fox have, to a great extent, escaped this enemy. The photographs of both these grand pieces, which are now before us to refresh the memory of many visits to Corpus, show a sharpness of edge, and a boldness of outline and tracery, quite wanting in another photograph of Wykeham's crosier, in its dilapidation and decay, which now lies side by side with them as we write. We wish we could say that we think any of these three noble pieces are of English workmanship. Wykeham's crosier, covered originally with enamels, of which in most cases the matrix alone remains, reveals the hand of a master of Limoges. We have often scanned the crosier of Fox and his salt-cellar to detect an English hall-mark, but in vain. It is possible that in works so highly chased and covered with ornament the hall-mark may have been obliterated by the engraver; but, on the whole, we are inclined to think that they

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are of foreign, and probably of French workmanship, for Fox was well known in Paris, both when he was in exile with Henry of Richmond, and afterwards, when he had risen to the highest offices in the State. If we are to award the palm to either of these pieces, we must pronounce in favour of the saltcellar, which rises from a pentagonal base in tiers of pentagons, relieved between the first and second tiers by a circular band enriched with lions. The cover, which is also pentagonal, is surrounded by a knop or finial formed out of two pelicans in their piety, taken from the arms of the founder, and which are constantly repeated both on the salt-cellar and the crosier. As is well known, the same emblem has been handed down to our time as the arms of the College.

We cannot, however, dwell any longer on these precious pieces. Suffice it for our purpose to have pointed out the spot in which the greatest and costliest collection of medieval plate exists in these kingdoms. Most of the other pieces which Fox bequeathed to his College are London hall-marked; thus his spoons with owls on the stem bear the hall-mark of 1506; his low bowl and cover are stamped with the letter which indicates the year 1515, and his spoons with balls at the end of the stems are of the ensuing year. If we remember right there are a dozen of each set, and when we also remember that a thousand pounds has been recently asked by an eminent London firm for a matched set of Apostle spoons of considerably later date, we may form some conception of the value not only of those two dozen spoons, but of the whole collection of Bishop Fox. If, which Heaven forbid! some new University Commission should resolve that as SO much sleeping capital these noble pieces should be sold by auction to augment the incomes of working Fellows and learned Professors-when that day comes, let some millionaire of the period put some thousands of pounds in his pocket, and see what a cab-load of real old English plate he may, if a cheerful buyer, bring home with him from Christie's.

By this time the reader will probably think that he has heard. enough of Bishop Fox and his plate. Besides, if he is of a captious turn, he may ask, 'But is this collection, rich as it is, all that is left to us of that great store of medieval plate which undoubtedly existed?' We have already answered this question in a general way; but it may be as well to reply to it more particularly, lest the inquirer may be one of those who have acquired any of that choice medieval plate against which we have already warned him. There are other older pieces of English plate than those still to be seen in the lodgings of the President of Corpus, but they are few and far between, and a

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