Jewelry Pearls

The custom of giving presents of plate, often indistinguishable from bribes, to important persons appeared early. Already at the end of the thirteenth century the accounts of the wealthy and aristocratic cleric Bogo de Clare, who was notorious in a lax age for the number of livings which he had accumulated, show that in six months of the year 1285 he spent £21 : 4 : 8 on seven silver cups for presentation. In 1371 the City of London presented the Black Prince with a handsome gift of plate costing £ 173 : 8 : 11 on his return from Aquitaine. The position of a royal duke naturally entailed huge goldsmiths’ bills as may be judged from an order signed on 13 April 1373 by John of Gaunt at his palace of the Savoy. The delivery of the following handsome presents is commanded-to his brother the Black Prince and to his wife a gold cup each, to four other notables a silver-gilt cup apiece and to one a ewer as well, to another a silver box with the arms of England and Castille, all the work of the celebrated goldsmith Sir Nicholas Twyford. Two other persons received a silver-gilt cup and a ewer made by John Chichester, two more got a silver-gilt cup each by Thomas Rainham, whilst another two each received a silver-gilt cup by an unnamed goldsmith.

The extent to which the love of collecting plate was carried at the close of the Middle Ages can be traced in the inventory of the plate of Sir John Fastolf, taken after his death in 1459. He was a Norfolk man who had succeeded in accumulating a considerable fortune partly as a result of his distinguished services in the French Wars thirty years earlier, and partly through a fortunate marriage with a rich widow. His domestic silver weighed no less than 1175 lb. troy, whilst his chapel plate contributed. another 110 lb. Hardly less impressive is the detailed list of plate in the will prepared in 1509 by John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, from which it appears that he possessed 1116 lb. troy of domestic silver as well as 108 lb. in the form of plate for his chapel. The inventory of royal plate composed in 1520 gives us a still more vivid impression of the wealth of goldsmiths’ work which then abounded in this country. Henry VIII was, indeed, a hardened and unscrupulous collector, as is shown by the number of items which are catalogued as having been forfeited on the execution of the Duke of Buckingham (’Ducke of buck’) and by those formerly belonging to his Boleyn ‘in-laws’ and to Wolsey which appear in the inventories of 1532 and 1550 in the Renaissance period.

The accumulation of plate was not entirely due to love of ostentation. Until about a hundred years ago the family plate was regarded merely as a reserve of capital which could be easily realized in an emergency. Such a realization almost inevitably consigned the plate to the melting-pot unless circumstances allowed it to be pledged. The forced loans which the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns repeatedly levied on the City formed a constant drain on the resources of the city companies which was very detrimental to their collections of plate. The Great Fire not only was the direct cause of the destruction of the plate of several companies but brought about the sacrifice of that of others in the cause of rebuilding the halls which had been destroyed. More spectacular was the general melting of plate which took place during the Civil War and under the Commonwealth, when vast hoards of plate belonging to owners whose economic stability in ordinary times would have been assured, were sacrificed voluntarily or involuntarily in the form of loans to support the cause of King or Parliament. On this occasion the collecting of plate was systematic and ruthless, the contributions varying according to the wealth of the owners from the I 06! oz. ‘lent’ to the Parliament by the gentry of the lathe of Aylesford, Kent, to the 1610 lb. provided for the King’s use by twelve of the Oxford colleges.

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