ABSTRACT
STUART silver is rather more commonly found than Elizabethan. Historians often refer to the Civil War as a disaster for English silver but it brought only the best documented melt, a threat to which silver has always been subject. More significant for the study of seventeenth-century silver are the Restoration innovations in eating and drinking, particularly equipment for the new beverages of tea, coffee, chocolate and punch – and refinements in tableware. Therefore, 1660 rather than 1600 divides Elizabethan from early modern silver.
