Lot Essay
The mark, recorded by Ian Pickford, Jackson’s Goldsmiths and Their Marks, Woodbridge, 1989 on page 103, line 8, has been given a possible attribution to Mark Bingham by Dr David Mitchell in his new work Silversmiths in Elizabethan and Stuart London Their Marks and Their Lives, Woodbridge, 2017, p. 414 where he suggests his as ‘…. the most likely owner of the mark’. Bingham, originally from Derbyshire, was apprenticed to Thomas Alsopp, becoming free in 1592. He seems to have had an active career as a plateworker, with a number of apprentices, before dying in 1641.