Bring hither, he said, the mazers four
My noble fathers loved of yore.
In regard to some of the prices paid for mazers at auction in London, the following may convey an idea as to rarity. In 1903 a fifteenth-century mazer realized £140. In 1902 a sixteenth-century example brought £170. In 1905 a mazer dated 1527 sold for £500, but in 1908 one dated 1534 fetched the colossal price of £2,300. Certainly this is the highest price paid for maplewood. If the bowl had been all silver, and had been sold by the ounce, the sum paid would have been remarkable. But collectors are no respecters of persons, and as a rarity a mazer makes an appeal which it cannot do as a work of art.
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.
Some Historic Standing Cups