The mazer bowl — a broad, shallow drinking bowl made from burr maple, often with silver mounts — appears in medieval and early modern poetry as the communal drinking vessel of hall and household; In Scots makar poetry, the mazer is passed at feasts — its silver mounts bearing inscriptions, its maple wood polished by generations of hands; A poem about a medieval feast might describe the mazer's passage "from hand to hand around the hall, the lord drinking first and the bowl completing its circuit before the meat was touched"; The maple burr of the mazer — chosen for its beauty and its impermeability — gives poets a material detail: "the knotted wood, not chosen despite its strangeness but because of it"; Henryson or Dunbar might plausibly have drunk from a mazer, and a poem about the Scottish court could invoke it as part of the physical culture of makership; A contemporary poem about community and shared ritual might return to the mazer bowl as an image of collective drinking that individual glasses have replaced: "one bowl, one table, one passage of it between us — the shared cup as the original hospitality."