Communion Cup

From St Thomas's church in East Orchard, Dorset. This cup is part of a remarkable group of silver communion cups made in Salisbury in the second half of the 16th century – of which over 40 survive. The cups have a very distinctive style. About one third of them bear a maker’s mark, a pelleted circle. To which Salisbury maker it belongs remains a tantalising mystery. The cup is not dated, but it resulted from a church campaign to replace elaborate pre-Reformation chalices with much plainer communion cups, which in Dorset happened in the first half of the 1570s, and in Wiltshire in 1576-7.