was two cups, not two handles. He applies the same term to a drinking vessel of a very different form, found with several others in the Third City. This is a sauce-boat shaped vessel[1] of gold, made with a lip for pouring or drinking at either end, and with two loop handles. This equals those previously mentioned in originality of form; with it were found others of gold, silver and electrum (i.e. 4 parts of gold to 1 of silver). Of these three were shaped like 18th-century coffee cups but wanting handles. In the Sixth City appear forms more nearly approaching those of later times, particularly prototypes of the cantharus and scyphus.
These discoveries in the various strata of Troy may be taken as the analogues in the Mediterranean and hither Asia of the later Stone and Bronze Ages of northern Europe, with an allowance of some centuries of greater antiquity for the former.
It is not proposed in this article to deal with the ceramic and metallic drinking vessels of the Greeks and Romans, of what is generally known as the classical period (see Ceramics and Plate). It may be mentioned, however, that both on the Rhine and in various places in Britain, notably at Castor in Northamptonshire and in the New Forest, were factories where large numbers of pocula or drinking cups were made; those made on the Rhine and at Castor bearing legends to indicate their use. Many of these are to be seen in the British Museum and in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne.
After the decline of Roman power, the Gothic and Scandinavian races who replaced the Romans in central and northern Europe brought with them their own forms and types of drinking vessels. These, from about the 4th century, replaced the well-known Roman vessels. The northern barbarians were Gothic and Scandinavian types.as great drinkers as fighters, and their literature recites with equal zest the richness of their drinking cups as the power and deadly qualities of their arms. Fortunately the practice of burying with the dead warrior all his property, or at least as much of it as he would be supposed to need, has preserved to our day the actual vessels in use by the pagan northmen who pervaded northern Europe from the 4th century onward. Saxon graves in Britain have furnished great numbers of drinking cups and horns, in many cases quite unbroken. From the remains, of which the chief series are in the British and Liverpool Museums, we can learn a great deal to amplify the references in literature. The richest single interment that has yet been found was within the present churchyard at Taplow. Here under a huge mound lay buried a Saxon chieftain surrounded by his belongings; arms defensive and offensive, his drinking cups, and even his game of draughts. The drinking vessels consisted of five cows’ horns and four glass cups. The former were of great size, 2 ft. long, richly mounted at the mouth and at the point with silver bands embossed and gilt. The glasses also were of great size and of a type familiar in Saxon interments. Each was of a trumpet shape, with a small foot, while the sides were ornamented with hollow pointed tubes bent downwards, and open on the inner side, so that the liquid would fill them. Such a plan is most unpractical, and it must have been very difficult to keep the vessels clean. Glasses of this uncommon form have not been found elsewhere than in Saxon graves, either in England or in the north of the continent. Other types are perhaps nearly as characteristic, though of simpler construction. One of these is a simple cone of glass, sometimes quite plain, at others ornamented with an applied spiral glass thread, or more rarely with festoons of white glass embedded in the body of the vessel. A third form is a plain cup or bowl widely expanded at the mouth and with a rounded base, so that it could only be set down when empty, in fact a true “tumbler.” This feature is in fact a very common one in the drinking vessels of the Saxon race. There are many other varieties, plain cylindrical goblets, generally with ornamental glass threads on the outside, and a more usual type has a rounded body somewhat of the shape of an orange with a wide plain mouth. Many of all these classes were found in the famous cemetery known as the King’s Field at Faversham in Kent (the relics from which are now in the British Museum), at Chessel Down in the Isle of Wight, and in the cemetery within the ancient camp on High Down, near Worthing. In Belgium, France and Germany the same types occur, and even as far north as Scandinavia, where they are found in association with Roman coins of the 4th century. On the continent, however, additional types are found that do not occur in Britain—one of these is a drinking glass in the form of a hunting horn with glass threads forming an ornamental design on the outside. From the wide distribution of these types, it seems certain that they sprang originally from a common centre, and the slender evidence available on the subject seems to point to that centre having been somewhere on the lower Rhine. Although glass seems to have been popular and by no means rare as a material for drinking vessels, other materials also were used. A large number of the smaller pottery vessels would serve such a purpose, and in one grave at Broomfield in Essex two small wooden cups were found which, from their small size and thinness, were no doubt used for liquid.
Of the later Saxon domestic utensils nothing remains, the habit of burying such objects with the dead having ceased on the gradual introduction of Christianity through the country. Manuscripts are our only resource, and they are not only of great rarity, but in the main rudely and conventionally drawn in their details. In those of the 9th to the 11th century various simple forms are seen, some resembling our modern tumbler in shape, others like a dice box. Horns as drinking vessels certainly retained their popularity at all times, surviving especially among the northern nations, and many of the vessels of this form were no doubt actual horns, though horn-shaped vessels were often made of other materials. Until we come to the 13th and 14th centuries there is an absolute dearth of the actual objects used in domestic life. And here we begin with plate used in the service of the church.
The drinking vessel possessing the most unbroken history is doubtless the chalice of the Christian Church.[2] Like other ceremonial objects it was no doubt differentiated from the drinking cups in ordinary use by a gradual transition, and in the early centuries it is unlikely that it differed either in Church vessels.form or material from the ordinary domestic vessel of the time. Figures of such vessels, apparently with a symbolic intention, are found upon early Christian tombstones, and it has been contended that the vessel indicated the grave of a priest. While this may be the case, the similarity of the vessel represented to the ordinary non-liturgical form renders the conclusion somewhat weak. Among objects found under conditions which lend colour to their specific use as chalices are the bottoms of glass vessels found inserted in plaster in the Catacombs at Rome; but here again the Jesuit Padre Garrucci was unable to find any evidence to support such a conclusion. It is not in fact until the 6th century that the sacred vessel would appear to have assumed a definite form. From about that time date the lost golden chalices of Monza, representations of which still exist in that city; and the famous chalice of Gourdon in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is probably of about the same time. All of these are two-handled with a vase-shaped body and supported on a high foot; and thus quite unlike the more recent medieval types. Two glass vases of exactly this two-handled form are in the Slade collection at the British Museum, and may well have been chalices. Another chalice, in the same collection, of the 6th or 7th century, was found with a silver treasure at Lampsacus on the Hellespont. It is of silver, with a cylindrical body and small expanding foot; with it were found a number of silver spoons and dishes, the former inscribed with the names of Apostles, Greek hexameters and lines from Virgil’s Eclogues. No doubt the whole was the treasure of a monastery, buried and never reclaimed. So far as evidence exists for the form of the chalice, the vase-shape with two handles seems to have been mainly succeeded by a goblet with straight sides and without handles; these latter in great part disappeared. Then came the rounded cup-shaped bowl as seen in the well-known Kremsmünster chalice. An
