Drink as well as food had to be assayed twice, once in the buttery and again in the hall. The butler drank of the wine in the buttery, and then handed it to the cup-bearer in a covered vessel. When he arrived at the hall, he removed the lid of the cup, and poured into the inverted cover a little of the wine, and drank it under the eye of his master. We give an illustration, reproduced from an ancient manuscript, of an assayer tasting wine. The middle of the twelfth century is most probably the period represented.
In the ancient assay cup, it is related on reliable authority, a charm was attached to a chain of gold, or embedded in the bottom of the vessel. This was generally a valuable carbuncle or a piece of tusk of a narwhal, usually regarded as the horn of the unicorn, and which was believed to have the power of neutralising or even detecting the presence of poison.
Edward IV. presented to the ambassadors of Charles of Burgundy a costly assay cup of gold, ornamented with pearls and a great sapphire, and, to use the words of an old writer, "in the myddes of the cuppe ys a grete pece of a Vnicornes horne."
The water used for washing the hands of the great had to be tasted by the yeoman who placed it on the table, to prove that no poison was contained in the fluid. This ceremony had to be performed in the presence of an assayer.
The stick takes many forms. It is the sceptre of kings, the club of a police constable, the baton of a field marshal. The mace is but a stick of office, being ornamental and merely symbolical.
In history we may go back to the pilgrim's staff, which was four feet long, and hollow at the top to carry away relics from the Holy Land. It was also used to carry contraband goods, such as seeds, or silk-worms' eggs, which the Chinese, Turks, or Greeks forbade to be exported. It is occasionally used for eluding the customs now. Some people smuggle diamonds into the United States in that way.
Prometheus' reed, or marthex, in which he conveyed fire to "wretched mortals," as Aeschylus tells us, is a well-known fable.
An enormous amount of interest centres around the walking stick, and there are few families in which we do not find an old stick handed down generation after generation. Such an inheritance was at one time a common possession of those who belonged to the medical profession.