To leave standing cups and retrace our steps, we may examine another class of vessel, the flagon. This is tall and usually rotund in shape, having a narrow neck. It belongs to the sixteenth century. Many of the specimens remaining are among communion plate, but its use was not confined to ecclesiastical purposes. The name is of ancient origin, and was possibly at first applied to any vessel holding drink--the Danish word _flacon_ goes back many centuries. We find various references to it in the older writers. Bacon writes: “More had sent him by a suitor in Chancery two silver flagons,” and Shakespeare, in _Hamlet_, has “A mad rogue! he pour’d a flagon of Rhenish on my head once.” The relationship of the flagon to the tankard is a close one. The form as it continued to the end of the eighteenth century was practically unchanged from that of the earliest known types. It differs from the Italianate ewer with its slender neck and graceful proportions. Ale obviously required a broad, swelling vessel. There is nothing finnicking about that old English beverage. But wine necessitated something more delicate. Although nothing in silver has emulated the modern long, thin-necked, glass claret jugs with silver mounts, yet there has always been a distinction between ale, the popular drink of the people, and wine of foreign origin more pleasing to the palate of the connoisseur. In the two Elizabethan examples illustrated (page 105), it will be seen that although taller and more grandiose, these are the prototypes of the later tankard, of which the definite form was established in the seventeenth century. The evolution of design, whether it be a continuity of the same technique and medium, or an adaption by the silver worker of the forms of the glass worker, the potter, or the woodworker, is always interesting to the student. There is little doubt that these silver tankards were in a measure derivative from Scandinavian types belonging to the earlier era. Man did not on a sudden invent new shapes for everyday use which no other man, in no other country or in no other age, had ever conceived. The salt-glazed stoneware of Germany and Flanders without doubt introduced new fashions to the silversmith. The canettes of Jacqueline Countess of Hainault in the fifteenth century, _Vrouw Jacoba’s Kannetjes_, the Cologne cannette of stoneware of middle sixteenth century days, and the Flemish cruche, a decorated jug with a pewter lid and mounts, all had an influence on the silversmith. But the law of supply and demand, even in early days, was something which could not be gainsaid. Man himself determined what was best fitted to his needs.