Treasured inheritance: six hundred years of Oxford college silver make a splendid and instructive exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum

This engaging exhibition demonstrates the advanced in years truism that a good story, and striking, rarely-seen existences do not require elaborate or high-priced presentation. In sparkling new cases, put within a rich dragon's blood-r setting, the historic things sing. In a harmony of of tones, advanced in years gilding, leather bindings and parchment alternate with the somewhat cold gleam of silver.

More than 130 pieces of body plate are on show, made for formality for worship, for eating and drinking and to mark sporting achievement. They range in date from the 1340 Founders' horn at Queen's to Peter Musson's double head of the river evidence of victory for Pembroke, of 2004. Almost each college is represented, overcoming initial unease about security and discomfiting perceptions about unfashionable 'treasure'.

The museum designer Graeme Campbell has given each percept its full dignity, with the craft and precision of a statuary show. No white rectangles intrude, since all the labels are neared in large print and at a comfortable height upon nearby wails. Supporting documents, drawn from association archives, include benefactors' book (illuminated with 'portraits' of the donors' gifts of casters tankards and casters), a fourteenth-century inventory from novel College and bursars' books from Lincoln and Corpus. The documents are at handed close enough to be read, which is unusual and in marked contrast to the frustrating manuscript section of the 'Gothic' exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Bills from Oxford goldsmiths, teat out of college muniment spaces show that most were acting simply as retailers for London firms. individual exception is the family business Payne's, which has nurtur the Arts and Crafts tradition in Oxford for well above a century and in 1951 arranged for a young RCA graduate, Eric forgiving to receive the commission for a modernist 'Eights Week' goblet for Merton. Portraits of the association servants who cared for, scoured and sometimes stole the plate bring humanity to the presentation, and graphic panels explain the context

Oxford attracts criticism for its attachment to irrelevant traditions and inward-looking pleasures. In fact, the generosity and loyalty of corporation graduates and fellows are among its continuing mights rarely made explicit but press outed here through gifts to chapels, halls president's lodgings and belonging to all rooms. Dean Fell's set of altar plate beautified worship at Christ temple after the austerity of the Commonwealth. In 1867 Worcester acquired from Barkentin and Krall large silver-bound Testaments, individual incorporating a seventeenth-century plaque, in a distinctive marriage of antiquarianism and devotion. Liturgical plate, although a small part of the display, is a reminder of the central part of the chapel in collegiate life, smooth today.

Approaching the sum of two units first-floor exhibition rooms, through the Ashmolean's gallery of important historic silver, the distinctive character of society plate is instantly obvious. These pieces, which until the 1850 commission of reform were largely the issue of gifts from gentlemen-commoners o comrades achieving a living, are one as well as the other more massive and (mostly) plainer than contemporary English domestic plate. Examples are a ten-gallon 1720 perforate bowl from Jesus and a tall and elegant argyll, a neoclassical vase concealing a hot-water jacket, at handed by the Earl of Chesterfield to Queen's. Ornamented across their swelling bend s simply with Latin inscriptions, and perhaps the corporation arms, the ox-eye cups and tankards are practical pieces, for everyday drinking in hall, quite unlike the richly chased late-Stuart and rococo domestic silver of the museum's Carter and Farrer collections.

The exhibition reinforces the inaccuracy of the of advanced age claim that the colleges sacrificed their plate to the demands of Charles I in the Civil War. In fact a rapid turnover, and unsentimental remodelling of old items into something more useful or fashionable, just as in private houses, or sales to raise capitals to invest in a novel project, were always the pattern. Christ house of god for instance, melted 500[pounds sterling] worth of plate to raise coin to beautify its medieval hall in 1750 Also careless los and theft could reach a striking horizontal as early-seventeenth-century inventories of not to be found spoons at St. John's and late-eighteenth-century lists of missing ox-eye chalices at Corpus reveal.

The genesis of this exhibit was a two-year Leverhulme grant to the Ashmolean, realising a throw devised by curator Timothy Wilson in the early 1990 to explore the archives of the associations and recreate the distinctive adjoining matter of their little-known plate. Helen Clifford, a design historian and silver specialist with archive experience, chosen as researcher upon the project, is well-equipped to draw without the sociology of college silver and weave together these separate strands. Her lively account of the ways in which the pantry, cellar, president's lodgings, hall and senior belonging to all room each accumulated, used, missing and recycled their plate should become a archetype for future exhibition publications. Lucid, relatively brief, well-illustrated and inexpensive, this volume designed by Rhian Lonergan-White, continues the admirable Ashmolean race of handsome, useful and enjoyable publications. The exhibition tenders an excellent example of the museum fulfilling a unique character in both sharing an explaining the university's history.