The Luck of Edenhall
A Mamluk Syrian glass beaker and “Masterpiece” of the V&A
This polychrome enameled and gilded drinking glass, among the earliest and most fragile objects of the Arab decorative arts to arrive in Northern Europe from the Middle East, got its name from a legend descended from its first known owner, the baronial Musgrave family of Cumberland in far northwest England, which received its Coat of Arms from King Edward III roughly at the same time that the glass was made sometime in the middle of the 14th Century.
Glyn Davies, curator of glass at the Victoria & Albert Museum, has called it “one of the most famous medieval objects in England” and “a testament to the fascination that can be exerted by skillful craftsmanship and technical mastery…its perfect state of preservation is almost miraculous”.
The Musgrave legend described the beaker’s story of origin, that during a banquet the family butler was sent to draw water from the well of St. Cuthberts Church near their castle in the village of Edenhall, and there he came upon a group of fairies who in their haste to run away left the glass behind. When the butler refused to return it to the fairies, they set upon it a hex later recorded in the poem “Luck of Edenhall”, written in German in 1834 by Johan Ludwig Uhland but known better in a translation by the popular American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow- “…If this glass doth fall/Then farewell, O Luck of Edenhall.”
A darker interpretation of the legend might be that the family had in fact stolen the glass from the church where it was in use as a chalice, and then they covered up the theft with a back-dated, whimsical tale of how it had fallen into their hands through providence, but with the added twist of a punishment foretold- the fall of the family fortune- as a veiled admission of their guilt.
The fact that fine Mamluk glassware of similar age, often set on rounded feet of chased gold, was used in Christian ritual is known from similar pieces in France, one called the Goblet of Charlemagne that was transferred during the French Revolution from a church in the town of Châteaudun to the Chartres museum, and another bequeathed by its original owner Margaret Mallet in 1329 to the cathedral in the town of Douai.
The Luck of Edenhall probably was made either in the Mamluk cities of Cairo, Damascus or most likely Aleppo. As the 13th C. geographer Al Qazwini reported about Aleppo’s glass industry, “Among the most notable things of this city is the glass bazaar. He who enters will be reluctant to leave, on account of the astonishing multitude of notable and exquisite objects which he sees there and which are exported to every other country.” Although it is possible that the glass may have been carried to Europe by a returning Crusader, the Egyptian historian Al Maqrizi (1364-1442) wrote of many Italian merchants in Mamluk lands engaged in the luxury trade connecting Egypt and Syria to Europe.
We know that the glass arrived in Europe no more than one hundred years after its creation because it still has a custom-fitted leather case of French manufacture dated to the 15th Century. When precisely it entered the Musgrave household is unknown, but it was first mentioned in the 1677 will of Sir Philip Musgrave and later in a 1729 ballad attributed to a family relative which begins, “God prosper long from being broke/The Luck of Edenhall”.
An article in a 1791 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine first recorded its origin legend from the fairies, and an 1844 diary entry of a guest at a Musgrave family party described a shattered glass-defying game once played with the cup, of throwing it into the air and making the butler catch it before it fell to the floor. The glass was lent to the V&A in 1926 and donated outright in 1959, when it was named a museum “Masterpiece”, a rare designation only given to the collection’s most valuable objects like the Ardabil carpet from Iran and statues by Renaissance sculptors Bernini and Donatello.
So-called fairy cups were common in the inventories of English country homes to elaborate on the old aristocratic families’ mythologies, but none has a story as well established as the Edenhall’s. As for the family’s fate after the loss of their cup- as Longfellow put it, “Then farewell, O Luck…”- their mansion was demolished not long after due to “insufficient wealth”, according to an historical accounting of lost baronial mansions, which stated further that several deaths in the family in short succession meant that heavy estate taxes had financially crippled them. The Hall was sold and the family moved to London. Nothing more is known for certain about the house until its demolition in 1934.
Another variation on the theme of the cup’s curse can be read in an 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual”, when Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of the disappearance of the Musgrave family butler by answering a riddle written in the form of a poem, which leads him to both a dead body and a bag of broken bits of colored glass…which, sorry to disappoint anyone looking for a neat plot ending, are not the shards of the Luck of Edenhall at all, but rather something else entirely.
