The Balfour Ciborium

This very important religious vessel was probably made in the south of what is now the Netherlands, or across the border in Aachen, in the twelfth century.  Aachen is an important city that used to be the preferred imperial residence of Charlemagne’s court and was originally founded by the Romans. According to the V & A description this Ciborium was gifted to Sir James Balfour of Pittendreigh after the defeat of the Earl of Huntly in 1562. 

The vessel is also known as a pyx and was likely made in around 1150, when our ancestor, Sir James and a direct ancestor equally, called Octred, witnessed a charter by King David I of Scotland (1141), his cousin twice removed. This is the same David who built St Margaret’s Chapel at Edinburgh Castle, for his beloved mother Queen Margaret the Saint.

Octred’s name is an old English adaption of the name Uhtred, who was Octred’s great great grandfather, and Ealdorman of Northumbria seated at Bamburgh Castle. Family legend has it that Sir James Balfour and his brother Gilbert led the plot to assassinate Lord Darnley, Queen Mary’s husband, in 1567, at Provost’s House in Edinburgh, owned by another brother, Robert Balfour. 

Sir James was a prominent councillor to Queen Mary, and his brother Gilbert was Master of the Royal Household.  The Ciborium passed into the collections of the Lords of Balfour of Burleigh over the next centuries.  Sir James’ youngest son, Captain John Balfour, moved to Holland in 1602 where he joined his brother Colonel Henry Balfour in fighting the Spanish.  We traced Gilbert’s last resting place to Stockholm in a very circuitous journey of discovery through the Baltic States and then into the Nordics.  

Captain John had a grand son called Gilbert Balfour named after his great grand-uncle. We are descended with the same collecting habits and interests as our forebears it appears based on this example of an early collectable that would have already held 400 years of age by the time it came into family collections, and now public collections.

As this brief tour d’horizon evidences, all is circular in life and within families, and we reconnect to each other through the ages by virtue of names, objets d’art and natural habits formed over thousands of years. Even our physiognomy reverberates over centuries as other V & A exhibits show, in very familiar settings e.g. Sir James Arthur Balfour.