Silver, English (London), 1568-69, maker's mark 'IP' in a shaped shield, unidentified.

Small communion cup, silver, with lipped bucket-shaped bowl, engraved with two bands of arabesque foliage, on round stem divided by a narrow central knop formed of three oval mouldings, leading to a round foot engraved with a band of arabesque foliage.

Lent by from St Mary the Virgin parish church, Chessington, Surrey

The Reformation in England
On the eve of the Reformation, churchgoing in England was a colourful, sensory experience, rich in ceremony. In the 1530s, however, Henry VIII threw off the authority of the pope. Under his successor Edward VI (reigned 1547-53) major changes in worship and church decoration were introduced.

English Reformers wanted a return to a simpler, more direct form of worship. Their boldest move was to reject the Roman Catholic belief in 'transubstantiation', in which the bread and wine are miraculously transformed during the Mass into the body and blood of Christ. They proposed instead a symbolic service of shared communion, conducted in interiors stripped of distracting furnishings and images. The congregation would play an active role in the communion, regularly taking wine as well as bread, whereas before they had been chiefly spectators.

Crown commissioners confiscated or destroyed much of the goldsmiths' work of the medieval church. Some parishes concealed or sold their silver before the commissioners arrived, but by the early 1550s, many were left with just a single cup and paten. Some churches had no precious metal at all.

Consolidation
The success of the Reformation by 1600 owed much to an ingrained culture of obedience to the crown. During the brief reign of Mary I (1553-8) England returned to Catholicism, but under Elizabeth I it swung back to Protestantism, spurred on by state propaganda that Catholicism represented a political threat. Even so, this rupture with the past met with quiet resistance as many people were attached to the old faith and its trappings.

To consolidate this break with traditional religion, the church authorities launched a programme from about 1560 to replace the 'old massing chalices' with 'decent' communion cups of prescribed design. This gave a massive boost to the goldsmiths' trade and the great demand led to the formal establishment of assay offices outside London, at Chester, York, Norwich and Exeter. About 2000 communion cups from the period survive.

This cup was used in post-Reformation Protestant worship to serve the consecrated wine during Holy Communion. Like many other 16th century communion cups, it may have been made from the metal of a medieval pre-Reformation chalice. Since the cup is so tiny, it was perhaps used as part of a travelling set for giving communion to the sick. Small chalices were acceptable in the Middle Ages, when only the priest consumed the consecrated wine, but were not practical after the Reformation, when communion was offered to all churchgoers.

The unidentified maker's mark 'IP' struck on the bowl is found on over a hundred communion cups and patens made principally for churches in the West Country.

LOAN:CHESSINGTON.1