Jewelry Pearls

The use of domestic silver in the first half of the seventh century is attested by Bede, who records that St. Oswald, King of Northumbria, was served with food in a silver dish. A charter of Bertulf, King of Mercia, records the gift in the year 80 I of a large and finely worked silver dish to the Cathedral of Worcester, whilst amongst the extensive presents of plate made by Athelstan in 934 to the shrine of St. Cuthbert were two silver covered cups.

Though it is probable that plate never descended very far in the social scale in Anglo-Saxon England, it is likely that its use was as widespread in this country as anywhere else in Western Europe. There can be little doubt that the upper classes were well acquainted with the use of plate in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Ethelgiva (d. 985), wife of Earl Aylwin who founded Ramsey Abbey, is recorded to have presented its refectory with ‘two silver cups of twelve marks according to the weight of the husting of London’. William of Poitiers, when speaking of the spoils taken home by the Normans after the conquest of England, says ‘the vessels of silver or gold were marveled at, of which the number and decoration would be impossible to relate’. He adds that the English were great drinkers and favored especially ox-horns tipped at each end with metal. These drinking-horns are clearly depicted in the scene of Harold feasting in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Sutton Hoo ship-burial, discovered in 1939, yielded the British Museum the silver mounts of six to nine horns dating before the middle of the seventh century but no complete silver-mounted horn is yet known.

It is impossible to give with any certainty a list of the few surviving pieces of Anglo-Saxon domestic silver (excluding for the moment spoons), since a Continental origin has been claimed for all of them. A bowl in the Yorkshire Museum, York, which was found at Great Ormside, Cumberland, is certainly amongst the most interesting survivors. It is probably North English work of the beginning of the eighth century and is of silver and copper-gilt, embossed with birds and beasts and studded with enameled bosses. Still more attractive is the nielloed silver bowl from Fejø (Frontispiece, I) in the National Museum, Copenhagen. Its decoration of birds and beasts with fantastic interlacing seems to indicate that it was made in the south of England towards the end of the eighth century. An embossed silver bowl from Ribe in the National Museum, Copenhagen, a second from Halton Moor, Yorkshire, and a third with a cover, both in the British Museum, are perhaps more probably of Continental origin and are dated variously from the ninth to the beginning of the eleventh century.

A number of silver spoons of different dates and very various designs have been discovered. A little two-pronged fork in the British Museum, found at Sevington, Wiltshire, suggests a greater refinement than might be expected at the end of the ninth century when it appears to have been made.

However uncertain may be the extent of the use of domestic plate before the Norman Conquest, there can be no doubt that there was a steady increase in its popularity during the succeeding centuries. Plate was acquired not only to serve the everyday needs of the purchaser but also from other motives.

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