Norwich silver coconut cup

Coconuts were among the new fashionable foods available for the rich in Britain in the seventeenth century as a result of rapidly expanding international trade. Their shells were also prized, as exotic works of art, and were sometimes believed to neutralise poison if used as drinking vessels. Coconut shells could be polished, mounted and carved. This vessel may have been one of a pair. It was made to celebrate the marriage of James Calthorpe, High Sheriff of Norfolk, to Katherine Lewknor in Norwich Cathedral in 1642, and the silver mount bears both their coats of arms. This coconut shell cup is the only known Norwich silver mounted example. It forms part of a more general European fashion in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries to mount exotic natural materials like shells, mother of pearl or ostrich eggs in elaborate precious metal mounts. This represented a union of the wonders of nature and the skills of man.