Tankard of globular shape with a band around the neck. The hinge of the lid is in the form of a skull with a firebrand in its mouth. Engraved with the arms of Bolney empaling Wykeham.

Inscribed on the band: Facile contemnit omnia qui semper cogitat se esse moriturum [He readily despises all things who reflects always that he must die]; around the arms: Ex dono Johnanis Bolney quonda[m] de sanguine fundatoris Istius Collegii St. Marie Winton [From the gift of John Bolney sometime Founder’s Kin of the College of St Mary of Winchester]; above arms: A[nn]o d[o]m[i]ni 1614.

John Bolney was a Scholar of Winchester College (1548) and Fellow of New College (1555–58). The Bolneys of Sussex claimed kinship with the Founder as descendants of Alice, the sister of Wykeham’s father. The family crest (granted in 1541) was a skeleton’s head, holding in its mouth a firebrand. In the College accounts for 1613-14 (4^th quarter) is a record of payment of two shillings and sixpence to ‘Mr Bolney’s servant bringing a silver cup’.

The bulbous shape of this piece is apparently unique among early seventeenth-century English tankards. Two pieces of similar form are known from the 1640s (Museum of London, illustrated in Glanville, Silver in Tudor and Stuart England, fig. 150; Charles Poor collection, sold Sotheby’s 26 October 2005, lot. 129), but perhaps the closest comparisons are with Elizabethan drinking pots (Glanville, p. 267). In a later inventory this piece is referred to as ‘the round Pott of Mr. Olney’s Gift’.

The motto around the band (Facile contemnit omnia) is taken from the last line of St Jerome’s first letter to St Paulinus (Jerome’s 53^rd letter in the standard numbering), which was often used as a preface to the Vulgate Bible.

Literature: Percy MacQuoid, ‘The Plate of Winchester College’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 2, no. 5 (July 1903), p. 109, Charles Oman, ‘The Winchester College Plate’, The Connoisseur (January, 1962), p. 29 (illustrated); Michael Clayton, Collectors Dictionary of the Silver and Gold of Great Britain and North America (Woodbridge, 1985), p. 396; Philippa Glanville, Silver in Tudor and Early Stuart England (London, 1990), pp. 263, 266.

Provenance: Gift of John Bolney, 1614

Location: Treasury, Gallery 1