Jewelry Pearls

In the early 15th century, solid silver was owned and used mainly by the nobility and people of great wealth, and did not come within the reach of the middle class family. All this was changed in 1742 when Thomas Boulsover, a cutler working in Sheffield, England, accidentally fused silver onto copper while repairing a broken knifeblade, Boulsover had unknowingly revolutionized the silver trade when he discovered that these two metals, silver and copper, became inseparable when heated. Recognizing the commercial value of his discovery, Boulsover began making articles that had the appearance of solid silver, yet were stronger and cheaper to produce. Now people of modest means could have replicas of solid silver at a fraction of the cost.

By the end of the 18th century, Sheffield silver was being made in quantity and became a leading industry in Britain and the town of Sheffield a manufacturing center of great importance.

In 1838, the Russians succeeded in creating a very fine method of electroplating silver; consequently, the older and slower process of Sheffield plating, discovered by Boulsover, died out.

Really old Sheffield articles are beautiful and extremely valuable.

If you own any real Sheffield and the pink of the copper begins to show through the silverplate, do not have the piece resilvered. Resilvering would be immediately apparent to a connoisseur and ruin the value of the piece.

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.

When we consider the powerful incentives which have contributed to the destruction of old plate, we cannot but be grateful to those who, from diverse and often obscure motives, have helped to preserve what remains. If we owe much to the indolence and lack of economic sense which urged some of our ancestors to cling to their old plate or that of the community to which they belonged, we must also allow that certain of them laid a certain value on the historic associations connected with some of their treasures. The fact that an object was a gift from some celebrated person of the past was unfortunately not always enough to secure its preservation. Those who felt some compunction at the destruction of a piece with historic associations were often content to compromise with their consciences and whilst consigning it to the melting-pot, to register a vow to replace it with a piece of similar value (which meant weight) when the opportunity occurred. It not at all infrequently happens that a piece which is inscribed as having been presented on some particular occasion is demonstrably of later date and may even be found to bear a hall-mark perhaps even of the nineteenth century. The earliest surviving instance of this practice is the Pusey horn, of which we shall have to speak, but the instances of this species of falsification in more recent centuries are innumerable.

After an examination of a quantity of medieval wills and inventories, it will be found that on the whole the range of utensils made in the precious metals was comparatively small. In nearly every inventory of the plate of persons of exceptional wealth unfamiliar items will be found but ordinarily the plate of baron and merchant differ from each other only in quantity.

Drinking-vessels form the largest item (beakers, bowls, cups, goblets, godets, hanaps, mazers, peces, etc., - names about which it is not always safe to dogmatize). The rest usually consists of rosewater ewers and basins, salts, spoons, candlesticks, dishes, pots and spice-plates. As there are no surviving examples of the last four items we shall not be troubled with them.

The form of most of the drinking-vessels in use during the Middle Ages may be classified roughly into two classes-those deriving from the beaker and those deriving from the bowl.

It has been suggested that the beaker originated from the use of a straight section of an ox-horn with one end stopped up. The use of beakers can be traced in this country to the eleventh century by means of manuscript illustrations. By the fourteenth century they appear to have become very popular and several are depicted in the Louttrell and ‘Queen Mary’ psalters. Beakers are mentioned in a York will of 1346 and in the accounts of the treasurer of Edward Prince of Wales in 1348.

Since this book first appeared the writer has helped to show that the mark on the beaker given by Bishop William Bateman (d. 1354) to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, proves that it was made at Avignon. The number of medieval beakers is therefore three, since a recent attempt to claim an English origin for the ‘Founder’s Cup’ of Oriel College must be resisted.

All three English beakers belong to the close of the Middle Ages and differ in pattern. The earliest is in the possession of Lady Louis Mountbatten and bears the hall-mark for 1496. It is a delightful little vessel of silver-gilt, standing only 3¼ inches high and having the lower part of the side decorated with curious projecting vertical ribs.

Of still less ambitious proportions but equally attractive is the small beaker 2! inches high, which formed part of the Pierpont Morgan Collection. Its exterior is decorated with the scale pattern popular about the time when it was made in 1525.

The only medieval beaker of ambitious proportions is the one of 1507; which was one of the rich pieces of plate with which Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, endowed Christ’s College, Cambridge, which she had founded. It stands 9t inches high, and consists of a shaped base formerly set with precious stones, a spreading drum engraved with a trellis studded with marguerites and enclosing Tudor roses and portcullises, and a cover similarly decorated and surmounted by a knop framed by six portcullises from which sprout four marguerites.

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.

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.