Drinking-horns are represented on the Bayeux tapestry, and in the magnificent collection of antiquities in the British Museum there is a capacious specimen of one formed of the small tusk of an elephant, carved with rude figures of that animal, unicorns, lions, and crocodiles. It is mounted with silver; a small tube, ending in a silver cup, issues from the jaws of a pike, whose head and shoulders inclose the mouth of the vessel, on which the following legend is engraved:--
Drink you this and think no scorne All though the cup be much like horn.
The horn was not long before it had rivals: the commonest of these was the Mazer-bowl, a utensil which, with its cover on, resembled two saucers placed together rim to rim, with a topknot on the upper one. It was usually made of maple wood, from which it is supposed to have derived its name--_maeser_ being Dutch for maple. Of this shape was the early and famous wassail-bowl. When these bowls, which in process of time were made of costlier materials than maple, were large, they were lifted to the mouth with both hands; when small, in the palm of one hand. Our ancestors were much attached to their mazers, and incurred considerable expense in embellishing them, in embossing legends admonitory of peace and good fellowship on the metal rim or on the cover, or in engraving on the bottom a cross or the image of a saint. Spenser, in _The Shepherds Calendar_, thus describes a vessel of this kind:--
"A mazer ywrought of the maple warre, Wherein is enchased many a fayre sight Of bears and tygers, that maken fiers warre; And over them spred a goodly wilde vine, Entrailed with a wanton yvy twine.
"Tell me, such a cup hast thou ever seene? Well moughte it beseeme any harvest queene."
The Mazer continued in use to the seventeenth century, when it was still a favourite with the humbler classes. But on the tables of the rich it gave place to new vessels. There was the Hanap, a cup raised on a stem, with or without a cover. Besides the Hanap, a sort of mug or cup, called the Godet, had also come into vogue; then there were the Juste, used in monasteries to measure a prescribed allowance of wine; the Barrel, the Tankard, the "standing-nut," or mounted shell of the cocoa-nut; and the Grype, or Griffin's Egg, probably the egg of the ostrich. These vessels, except of course the nut and the egg, were ordinarily of silver, and sometimes of ivory, but rarely of gold; and still more rarely of glass, which did not obtain for drinking cups until the close of the fifteenth century. They were for the most part embossed or enamelled with the armorial bearings of their owners, parcel-gilt--_i.e._ where part of the work is gilt and part left plain; set with jewels and elaborately designed with dances of men and women, with dogs, hearts, roses, and trefoils.