The specimens remaining after centuries of vandalism which have come down to us from the early days differ in character. The mazer is reminiscent of Scandinavian drinking customs. To this day the Dane in drinking your health says “_Scol_.” Etymologists with fine imagination have linked this with skull, and sought to infer that the old Norsemen drank out of skulls. It is a myth as old as the upas-tree. Dekker in his _Wonder of a Kingdom_ says:
Would I had ten thousand soldiers’ heads, Their skulls set all in silver, to drink healths To his confusion first invented war.
We may agree with the sentiment, and we could fittingly drink confusion to a modern intriguer to like end, but, for all that, the derivation is wrong. The _scol_ of the Dane has reference to little wooden spoons used with the bowl to ladle out the liquor, much in the same manner as the punch ladle of many centuries later performed the same service. The word scull, the oar of a shallop, is the same word. Byron, wishing to pose as a wicked person, gathered a crowd of wayward spirits at Newstead who drank out of a skull.
Contemporary with the mazers are magnificent standing cups and covers, such as the “Anathema” Cup, of the date 1481, at Pembroke College, Cambridge, or the Lynn Cup, a century earlier, in possession of the corporation of King’s Lynn. It must be remembered in the contemplation of our art treasures, and more especially the plate that is left to us, that the data upon which we may form conclusions are very slender. Happily much that is superlative is left to us, unscathed through centuries of civil war and plunderings and meltings-down; but often two pieces of the same period represent extreme types. One may be a merely ordinary common vessel and the other may be of most exquisite and beautiful work, which reached the summit of excellence even in its own day. Comparisons are odious. But it is as though in five centuries hence all else were swept aside and all that the twenty-fifth century had upon which to pass judgment on the eighteenth century potter were sundry ornate Wedgwood vases and certain crude cottage figures.
With London hall-mark for 1499. Richly ornamented in Gothic style. Having inscription on bands of blue enamel in letters of silver. The second earliest cup known with a hall-mark.