Episode five of "A History of Britain" deals with the highpoint of the English Gothic culture, a world that was to be threatened and undermined by Black Death.

A silver boat with a prow decorated with a ram's head, and a miniature Gothic building form a fanciful partnership in the Museum's Medieval Treasury. They belong together as two liturgical vessels, the one a censer swung by the thurifer (thuribulum is the latin word for censer) to waft the uplifting perfume of incense at particular points in church ceremonies, and the other an incense boat in which grains of incense were stored and from which the censer could be replenished.

The use of incense in religious worship was introduced into Christian ceremonial around the fourth century, probably imitating pagan practices in the Mediterranean area. The Museum has a late fourth-century ivory panel depicting a priestess about to scatter corns of incense on to the fire of an altar, which illustrates the survival of this activity in pagan circles into the period when it was first appearing in Christian ritual. Pagans and early Christians alike conventionally put the incense on to hot coals in small metal pots which were suspended from short chains. Gradually over the centuries the chains became much longer and a perforated lid was introduced for the pot to stop the coals and incense falling out. Clearly, from this design development, we can deduce that during the first Christian millennium the thurifer moved from simply carrying the incense to dramatically swinging it. By the time the Ramsey Abbey Censer was made many great churches, such as old St Paul's in London, had massive censers suspended from the church vault which could swing almost the entire length of the nave and required the strength of five or six men to move them. Such a censer still survives, and is used, in the northern Spanish cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

By contrast this censer is a relatively small affair. It is nearly thirty centimetres high and the boat is twelve centimetres long. What it loses in size however it certainly gains in the individuality of its design and the precious materials from which it is made. The censer and the boat are fashioned from silver, the former fully gilded whilst the latter is partly gilded, a device known as 'parcel-gilt'. The container for incense was originally hemispherical in form but by the twelfth century had become oblong in shape and had begun to be known in Latin as the navis or navicula, in English 'boat'. The designer of the Ramsey Incense Boat has taken the name seriously and the rams' head finials which appear at both ends are shown emerging from waves. The gilded roses which feature on top of the lid are probably simply decorative, since similar roses appear on contemporary items, such as the fourteenth-century bishop of Exeter, John Grandisson's ivory panels, two of which are in the British Museum collections. From one rose a knop emerges which was used to raise the hinged lid to retrieve the incense.

The censer is designed as a polygonal building with a steeply raked roof. The architectonic motif was fairly common in medieval censer design and a number of earlier, more primitive, base metal examples are displayed in the Museum's study collections. The reason for the building connection was that the censer, exuding its heavenly fragrance, was seen to symbolise heaven, described as a city, the 'heavenly Jerusalem', in the last book of the New Testament. Alternatively the censer might represent Solomon's temple, described in the Old Testament and seen by medieval Christians as a prefiguration of heaven. There is a twelfth-century treatise written by a German monk who called himself Theophilus which describes in detail how to make a censer to the design of Solomon's temple. The Ramsey Abbey Censer, although following the architectonic theme, is more earthbound in its reference because it appears to imitate a peculiarly English kind of building, very fashionable in the second half of the thirteenth century and the opening decades of the fourteenth, the polygonal chapter house. A number of these were constructed attached to abbey and cathedral churches during the period, such as those at Westminster Abbey and at Salisbury Cathedral, although the fashion does not seem to have been taken up on the continent. Some of the details also seem to imitate English architectural trends of the same period, such as the tracery design and the miniature crenellations.

Not all censers of the period were architectonic and there is plenty of evidence in manuscript illumination to suggest that a simpler and perhaps more common design for censers was a straightforward bowl with a pierced hemispherical lid. A common motif found in painting and going back at least to the early thirteenth century was that of angels swinging censers as a way of venerating figures such as the Virgin and Child or Christ on the cross. The De Lisle psalter, probably dating from the 1330s and now in the British Library, shows angels wafting the Virgin and Child with incense from circular censers apparently crested with traceried forms, whilst in their other hands they carry incense boats.

The importance of the boat and censer lie not only in their design and materials but also in that they are the only such objects to survive from the English Gothic period, with the exception of one other recently discovered censer also in the Museum, but which is not of such high quality. The survival of English ecclesiastical plate from the Middle Ages is a rare phenomenon. Even in the medieval period plate might be melted down, often to refashion it into something more appropriate for the times. With the English Reformation there was a mass recycling of plate to suit the liturgical demands of the new regime. The survival of the Ramsey Abbey Censer and Incense Boat may seem therefore to be something of a miracle. That it was hidden away at the bottom of a small lake in the sixteenth century so that it would not be found by zealous reformers may have been the fate of many such pieces. That it was found again in the nineteenth century by a man fishing for eels does border on the miraculous. The find was made at Whittlesey Mere in Cambridgeshire when it was being drained in 1850. Whittlesey is not far from the once great Benedictine abbey of Ramsey in Huntingdonshire to which it is thought the hoard belonged. The abbots of Ramsey, particularly through the middle years of the fourteenth century, were frequently called upon to entertain royalty and once played host to the ill-fated daughter of Edward III, the Princess Joan, one of the early victims of the plague. The reference to the sea in the design of the incense boat already referred to may also be read as a medieval visual pun on the name of the abbey, the rams' heads emerging from the sea being a rebus for Ramsey. Such visual wit was not unusual in the art and architecture of the late Middle Ages.

Although they were found together, along with some pottery and pewter plates, the two almost certainly were not made by the same workshop as a pair. It is thought that the censer may be about twenty or thirty years older than the boat, the former dating perhaps from c.1325 and the latter from the middle of the century. We can imagine the censer being used around the time of the Black Death, perhaps employed in the elaborate funeral rituals associated with the death of powerful figures, although such was the virulence of this particular wave of plague that such ceremonial niceties would soon have had to be put aside, even for the most affluent. The slightly later date assigned to the boat is connected with its design. One of the changes in fashion in liturgical plate which took place around 1350 was a change in the shape of the base, moving from a circular to a polygonal foot with concave sides. The development was probably instigated by an introduction into the ceremonial associated with the celebration of the Mass. From about this time the chalice was laid on its side to drain into the paten after the ablutions - what might be described as the ritual washing-up. To stop the chalice rolling around, a mullet foot was often adopted as the design for the base. On loan to the Museum is a chalice from Hamstall Ridware in Staffordshire which has this feature and which is thought to be contemporary with the Ramsey Incense Boat. It may be that the boat was made as part of a set of liturgical vessels, all of which sported this design innovation. The censer, on the other hand, retains the circular design.

In the Middle Ages every-day life brought plenty of challenges to the olefactory senses, not all of them pleasant. The rich, resinous smell of incense wafting from the church censer must indeed have lifted the spirits above the physical world. In a period when sanctity and sweet perfume were often seen to go hand in hand, the Ramsey Abbey Censer and Incense Boat would have played their part in conjuring up literally the presence of the Divine for those who witnessed their use.

Dr Catherine Oakes, Lecturer, V&A.