The word tankard and mug tend to be interchangeable today but in earlier times the word tankard tended to be reserved for a drinking vessel which had a handle and a lid, and the mug was a vessel without a lid.
The silver tankard first appears in Tudor inventories but are rare today. They tended to be silver gilt with flat chased decoration and domed lids. Tankards became more popular and plentiful by the middle seventeenth century and are generally very plain and of quart capacity with flat lids.
It was about this time that the mug makes its appearance. The earliest mugs of the 1670s are normally of small capacity (less than half a pint) and of a bulbous shape with the odd straight sided example. It was not really until the early 1700s that the mug becomes as popular as the tankard.
Both the tankard and the mug are generally very plain in style with the odd fluted example from either side of the 1700s (tankards by now normally have domed lids)and by the 1770s some are in the form of a coopered barrel.( There are a lot of mugs and tankards which are encountered with embossed decorative motifs ,these should be avoided as the decoration was usually added in the nineteenth century) By the early 1800s the tankard loses popularity to the mug and the range of styles and sizes and decoration expands rapidly.
Whether it’s a silver tankard from the Charles II period or a small christening mug from the Victorian period or later William Walter Antiques has a wonderful selection spanning five centuries.
