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ppfufThe curator at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery has uploaded a picture of their Squirrel trencher (object number TA2529) to their website. It's a fascinating lone survivor that in spite of its less-skilled presentation, links together several otherwise disparate groups of these little wooden plates.
The central motif of an animal (red squirrel) is similar to a pictureless trencher at the British Museum and another surviving singleton of an elephant & castle at the National Museums of Liverpool. Interestingly, neither the British Museum set nor the Liverpool example have floral bands, but they do have gold belts around the exterior and the center, just as TA2529 does.
TA2529 's floral band of Peas and Pea Flowers is very close to the floral bands on the V&A’s 333F-1898 and the Ashmolean's rectangular trenchers (barely visible as second out of the box on http://www.bridgemanart.com if you search for "A set of trenchers and their box"). The Ashmolean example also has a very small central roundel, just as TA2529 does. Normally the similarity of the floral band and use of pale pink in the flowers would make me place this set with the "fundamentalist" groups except instead of the usual densely packed scripture the Bristol trencher has a quote from William Baldwin’s A treatise of morall philosophie (it reads: Be merry and glad, honest and virtuous: For that suffices to anger the envious, page 123 quote attributed to Hermes). The only other known group of trenchers that use that literary source is the “Set of tablemats and their container” in the Colchester Museum (no useful info on their website, sadly). In design the Colchester set is unlike TA2529, they are much more like the round Ashmolean trenchers ermine-rat posted about some time ago.
The central motif of an animal (red squirrel) is similar to a pictureless trencher at the British Museum and another surviving singleton of an elephant & castle at the National Museums of Liverpool. Interestingly, neither the British Museum set nor the Liverpool example have floral bands, but they do have gold belts around the exterior and the center, just as TA2529 does.
TA2529 's floral band of Peas and Pea Flowers is very close to the floral bands on the V&A’s 333F-1898 and the Ashmolean's rectangular trenchers (barely visible as second out of the box on http://www.bridgemanart.com if you search for "A set of trenchers and their box"). The Ashmolean example also has a very small central roundel, just as TA2529 does. Normally the similarity of the floral band and use of pale pink in the flowers would make me place this set with the "fundamentalist" groups except instead of the usual densely packed scripture the Bristol trencher has a quote from William Baldwin’s A treatise of morall philosophie (it reads: Be merry and glad, honest and virtuous: For that suffices to anger the envious, page 123 quote attributed to Hermes). The only other known group of trenchers that use that literary source is the “Set of tablemats and their container” in the Colchester Museum (no useful info on their website, sadly). In design the Colchester set is unlike TA2529, they are much more like the round Ashmolean trenchers ermine-rat posted about some time ago.