This round wooden plate or ‘trencher’ is one of a set of 12 held in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and it bears a hand-coloured printed image of the Persian sibyl, an ancient prophetess. Such objects have traditionally been neglected by historians, and yet they were central to the sociable exchange that characterised an after-dinner banquet from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Decorated trenchers are specialised dining plates, brightly painted and gilded with pictorial designs and accompanying inscriptions and are believed to have been used to serve sweet confectionary such as dried fruits and miniature marzipan figures to banquet guests. Decorated on one side only, it is presumed the plain side would be placed face up on the table in order to serve the dainty confections. Those made in early modern England are remarkable for their depiction of diverse subjects, including biblical figures and parables, erotic tales, the labours of the months, anti-papal propaganda and controversial political events such as Charles I’s execution.
Inexpensive and widely available prints offered an accessible source of imagery to inform the decorative arts, and the application of hand-coloured prints to trenchers was presumably a more affordable option compared to their richly gilded counterparts. Prints made especially for trenchers were sold in the 1650s by the London printseller Peter Stent, whose clientele was among the lower and middling ranks of society (Globe 1985). On the Fitzwilliam Museum trencher, the print has been cut around its Latin motto and adhered onto the plate. A hand-written English inscription in black ink encircles the uneven edges of the print, which are immediately conspicuous: ‘The Persian sybill letts us knowe, that Christ should come to us before, and riding on an asse in peace, shall cause all oracles to cease’. However, writing the divine sibylline prophesy by hand is an odd choice as the text is also found on the printmaker Martin Droeshout’s original engraved print, wrapped tightly around the circular Latin motto, enabling the image of the sibyl, motto and English inscription to be easily cut out for the purposes of decoration. Writing the inscription by hand would have cost the trencher craftsman considerably more work and time, especially because the plate is only one of a full set of 12, each representing a different sibyl. This suggests that the processes of time-consuming labour and the exposed material traces of painstaking construction – cutting, pasting and the manual insertion of text – were important visual dynamics of these objects.
At 13.5 cm in diameter and only a few millimeters in thickness, this trencher is – like all trenchers – a dainty and fragile object, easily snapped if not handled gently. Yet they required a series of physical manipulations in order to operate, thus demanding a degree of familiarity from their user. Once the delicacies were consumed, guests would turn their trenchers over to reveal their imagery and verses and read them aloud to the table, probably challenging their fellow guests to identify and respond to the subject. Their deployment in the social context of a banquet, then, required a considerable degree of corporeal refinement from their users – a fingertip touch to grasp and lift the wafer-thin plate off of the table, flip it over and rotate it in the hands while simultaneously recounting and verbally contemplating its newly uncovered scene. This was a ‘performance’ shaped by the materiality of trenchers, and one which was designed to prompt and support social exchanges. This trencher would have been central to the rich material landscape of the banqueting table, and thus it offers a valuable insight into the important role played by objects in the rituals of sociability.
Globe, A. (1985) Peter Stent: London Printseller circa 1642–1665, Being a Catalogue Raisonné of his Engraved Prints and Books with an Historical Bibliographical Introduction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.