Jewelry Pearls

It has frequently been assumed that this tragedy had been foreshadowed in the fifteenth century by a general melting of baronial plate during the Wars of the Roses, and this assumption has generally been accepted as the explanation of the present rarity of early medieval silver. There does not appear to be any evidence to support this contention and it may be taken for certain that plate which was melted at this time must have been illegally sold abroad as bullion and not coined into money as it was in the Civil War. The Wars of the Roses saw the opening of no emergency mints and the surviving accounts of the London mint suggest no extraordinary activity. Of course some plate must have been destroyed and much must have changed hands, especially during the frenzied weeks between Wakefield and Towton, but the greater rarity of the plate of the earlier Middle Ages as compared with that of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries must be explained otherwise.

After all, the survival of nearly all the extant examples of plate of the latter period is due not to having been treasured as family heirlooms but to their presentation at an early date to some college or city company which managed to preserve them through the vicissitudes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The universities successfully avoided being involved in the Wars of the Roses and the citizens of London intervened as little as possible. Fate ordained that the two colleges which have preserved most of their plate (Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Christ’s College, Cambridge) should have been founded and richly endowed early in the sixteenth century. Had the choice fallen on two other colleges of earlier foundation the result might have been different.

On the other hand the immense realization of capital which occurred on the Dissolution of the Monasteries must have consigned to the melting-pot immense quantities of domestic plate from the monastic refectories and abbots’ dining-halls. Much of this must have belonged to the early Middle Ages. The abbeys were already wealthy in the thirteenth century when the city gilds were still in their infancy and most of the colleges as yet unfounded. Many of the abbeys, moreover, were at the time of the Dissolution not nearly as prosperous as they had once been, so that it is probable that what plate they retained was mostly old.

Much more deadly to the preservation of plate than the extravagances of reckless heirs and the exactions of needy governments have been the ravages occasioned by the changes of fashion. The idea that the masterpieces of the past were heirlooms to be handed down to succeeding generations is of comparatively recent growth and plate was particularly late in attracting the attention of the antiquarian collector. The illogicality of the situation in regard to plate was realized in the early eighteenth century by Matthew Prior who writes in his ‘Alma’:

My copper-lamps at any rate,
For being true antique, I bought:
Yet wisely melted down my plate,
On modern models to be wrought:
And trifles I alike pursue,
Because they’re old, because they’re new.

A careful examination of the lengthy accounts for the plate made by or through Robert Amadas for Cardinal Wolsey between 1517 and 1530 shows that nearly all was made from unwanted pieces of domestic and religious goldsmiths’ work. The callousness with which the destruction of old-fashioned plate was regarded is further illustrated in the account given by George Cavendish, Wolsey’s gentleman-usher, of the plate sacrificed by his master to regain the King’s favor after he had resigned the Great Seal on 18 November 1529. He says: ‘In the Gilt Chamber was set out upon tables nothing but all gilt plate; and a cupboard standing under a window, was garnished entirely with plate of clean gold, whereof some was set with pearl and rich stones. And in the Council Chamber was set all white plate and parcel-gilt, and under the tables, in both chambers, were set baskets with old plate, which was not esteemed but for broken plate and old.’

It is probable that the destruction of medieval plate was particularly severe about this time. A number of items which appear in a list of royal plate sent to be melted in 1533, can be recognized as having been in existence for a comparatively short time but because they had probably been made in the Gothic style they were already considered as out-of-date.

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