In 1243 Henry III. ordered four silver basins, fitted with cakes of wax with wicks in them, to be placed as lights before the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury.  The great gold shrine of Becket appears to have been chiefly the work of a goldsmith, Master Adam.  He also designed the Coronation Chair of England, which is now in Westminster Abbey.

The chief goldsmith of England employed by Edward I. was one Adam of Shoreditch.  He was versatile, for he was also a binder of books.  A certain bill shows an item of his workmanship, “a group in silver of a child riding upon a horse, the child being a likeness of Lord Edward, the King’s son.”

A veritable Arts and Crafts establishment had been in existence in Woolstrope, Lincolnshire, before Cromwell’s time; for Georde Gifford wrote to Cromwell regarding the suppression of this monastery:  “There is not one religious person there but what doth use either embrothering, wryting books with a faire hand, making garments, or carving.”

In all countries the chalices and patens were usually, designed to correspond with each other.  The six lobed dish was a very usual form; it had a depressed centre, with six indented scallops, and the edge flat like a dinner plate.  In an old church inventory, mention is made of “a chalice with his paten.”  Sometimes there was lettering around the flat edge of the paten.  Chalices were-composed of three parts:  the cup, the ball or knop, and the stem, with the foot.  The original purpose of having this foot hexagonal in shape is said to have been to prevent the chalice from rolling when it was laid on its side to drain.  Under many modifications this general plan of the cup has obtained.  The bowl is usually entirely plain, to facilitate keeping it clean; most of the decoration was lavished on the knop, a rich and uneven surface being both beautiful and functional in this place.

Such Norman and Romanesque chalices as remain are chiefly in museums now.  They were usually “coffin chalices”—­that is, they had been buried in the coffin of some ecclesiastic.  Of Gothic chalices, or those of the Tudor period, fewer remain, for after the Reformation, a general order went out to the churches, for all “chalices to be altered to decent Communion cups.”  The shape was greatly modified in this change.

In the thirteenth century the taste ran rather to a chaster form of decoration; the large cabochons of the Romanesque, combined with a liquid gold surface, gave place to refined ornaments in niello and delicate enamels.  The bowls of the earlier chalices were rather flat and broad.  When it became usual for the laity to partake only of one element when communicating, the chalice, which was reserved for the clergy alone, became modified to meet this condition, and the bowl was much smaller.  After the Reformation, however, the development was quite in the other direction, the bowl being extremely large and deep.  In that