With these latter then it is we must associate such a name as ‘John Wexmaker.’ While, however, we are dwelling upon such and similar wants in the domestic consumption, we are naturally led to make inquiry concerning the utensils in fashion at this period, and of those who provided them. Of drinking vessels we have many, for, as we have previously hinted, this was a decidedly drinking age. Chief of all was the ‘Mazerer.’ No word could be in more familiar use in the day we are speaking of than the ‘macer’ or ‘maslin,’ carved from the maple. It was the favourite bowl of all classes of society. By the rich it was valued according as it was made from the knotted grain, or chased and rimmed with gold and silver and precious gems. We are told of Sire Thopas how that— They fetched him first the swete win, And made eke in a maselin, And real spicerie. There is scarce a record of any magnitude or importance which has not its several surnames derived from the occupation of carving this cup, and as the term itself was variously pronounced and spelt, so did the name vary. For instances the Hundred Rolls give us ‘Adam le Mazerer;’ the Close Rolls, ‘William le Macerer;’ the Warranty Rolls, ‘William le Mazeliner;’ and the London Records give us again a ‘John le Mazerer.’ Besides these we have ‘Mazelyn,’ ‘Maselyn,’ and ‘Mazarin,’ probably sign-names, the latter familiarised to us in the celebrated Cardinal of that name. Strange to say, ‘Maslin’ and ‘Masser,’ or ‘Macer,’ all rare, are now the only relics we possess of this once well-known surname and occupation. No instance I can furnish more clearly demonstrates the uncertainty of descent in our personal nomenclature. Such a name as ‘Geoffrey le Hanaper’ or ‘William Hampermaker’ bequeaths us a strange story of changed circumstance. The shorter appellation, common enough at this time, still lives in our ‘Hampers.’ While the macer was invariably of maple, the ‘hanap,’ or two-handed goblet, might be of wood or metal. From the fact of a ‘hanaper,’ Latinized in our archives into ‘hanaperium,’ being the crate where these hanaps were kept, it acquired a secondary sense of a repository for things of a more general character. Thus has arisen the ‘Hanaper Office’[396] in Chancery, where writs were treasured up in a basket; and thus also it is that we now talk of a ‘hamper,’ a term so delightfully familiar to schoolboys about Christmas time. Our common ‘Bowlers’ represent such olden personages as ‘Robert le Bollere’ or ‘Adam le Boloure,’ they who made the cheap wooden ‘bowl’ or ‘boll.’ The old spelling still survives botanically in such a phrase as we find in the Authorized Version, where it speaks of the ‘flax being bolled,’ that is, the seed vessel was forming. It is always so spelt with our mediæval writers. Thus Glutton, in the ‘Plowman’s Vision,’ after sleeping away his last drunken bout, wakes, and—