Domestic Treen
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Glasgow Museums has a small but significant collection of treen objects dating from the late-sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Treen objects are often defined as small household, domestic objects made from wood. Glasgow Museums holds exceptional examples of Elizabethan and Jacobean treen objects used for drinking and dining, including standing cups and mazers. A star object includes a set of 12 sycamore trenchers, used during an Elizabethan dessert banquet, and painted with small poems – known as a ‘poesies – which were read aloud or sung by banquet guests as a form of after dinner entertainment. There are also seventeenth century examples of lignum vitae wassail bowls, including an exceptionally rare wine fountain with silver mounts. Some of the treen objects in the collection were used for ecclesiastical purposes. A key object is the ‘Hickman’ chalice, dated from 1608, and decorated with scrolling foliage designs and Protestant religious text incised onto the wood surface, denoting this was probably used in the Christian act of taking communion. Most of these objects were acquired by Sir William Burrell (1861-1958) and his wife, Constance, Lady Burrell (1875-1961), and donated to the city of Glasgow in 1944. Many of the purchased objects featured previously in the collections of notable British treen collectors and scholars of the early twentieth century, including Edward H. Pinto and Owen Evan-Thomas.
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