Pair of Silver Armada Dishes, London Assay, Mappin and Webb, 1963

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Pair of silver armada dishes, made by Mappin and Webb of London, dated 1963.
Made as a direct copy of the original Elizabethan dishes with the same hallmark formation.
Many histories of the Armada Dish claim that they are so named due to the fact that the originals were made from silver captured from Spanish treasure ships returning from the New World. While this is a romantic story, there is no proof for the theory and it is based on speculation around the relationship of Sir Walter Raleigh and his friend and colleague, Sir Christopher Harris.

Sir Christopher worked as an Admiralty official during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) and it was around this time that the dishes came into his possession, perhaps as a gift from Raleigh. Given the timing, it could be that the dishes were taken from the Portuguese ship Madre de Deus (Mother of God), captured by the English in 1590 when returning from the East Indies with a fabulous cargo of gold, silver, jewels and spices.

Other stories have it that the Harris family were rewarded with silver for being part of the fleet that defeated the Spanish armada and that already owning a few silver dishes, had more made to match them.

The Armada service is made up of twenty-six partly gilt dishes, each engraved on the rim with the arms of Sir Christopher Harris and hallmarked in London for the years 1581, 1599, 1600 and 1601.

Dishes like these would have been used in Elizabethan England as serving dishes on formal occasions. They could also be used to keep food warm; the smaller dishes being upturned and used to cover the larger dishes.

While attractive, very few functional items of silver like these have survived to the present day as they were often sold and melted down for cash or made into new pieces of more fashionable design.


 

Made byMappin & Webb

Maker
Mappin & Webb
Year
1963
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