INTERESTING ANTIQUES

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 143, 21 June 1929, Page 13

INTERESTING ANTIQUES

The interest displayed at the recent sale in a famous London auction room" of a dozen little wooden fruit platters of about the size, shape, and thickness of modern slices of bread and butter, serves to call attention to a remarkable new object of the collector's quest (says the correspondent in the city of the Science Monitor"). This is treen, otherwise any ancient vessel;made of wood of which, incidentally, a wonderful collection was shown at Olympia. last season. The little thin rectangular wooden platters —each six inches long and four and a half inches wide, the upper surfaces enriched with Bible mottoes in quaint coloured oia English characters—were stated to have belongea to Queen Elizabeth, ana they bore the Eoyal. Arms of Good Queen Bess on, the top board. Although the entire dozen of these flat rimless sections of wood and the thin wooden bos, decorated with the historic Tudor Bbse ana Eoyal Fleur-de-Lis, which contained them, wouldscarcely have furnished sufficient kirialing wooa to light a fire, the bidding for them rapidly rose to more than £200, or 1000 dollars, before the hammer fell. The unpretentious little platters were the successors of the original medieval English edible plates or trenchers, which were nothing more than thick slices of bread on which food was served to each guest in the Middle Ages. Those formed the only plates our far-off ancestors kr.ew.