Early Jewelry Of The British Isles

(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:

1. Celtic Ornaments

The recorded history of England may be said to begin with the invasions of the Romans, and very little jewelry made before the Roman conquest has come to light. Such specimens as have been found consist of pins, rings, neck ornaments, discs and bracelets, made of bronze or gold, never of silver.

There were also beads. First, last and always there are beads in all ages and among all peoples, civilized or savage. The prehistoric beads of the British Isles were made of bone, amber, jet or glass. The latter probably supplied by Phœnician trading ships, since glass-making was unknown to the early inhabitants of England.

The gold they used was often so pure that it was quite flexible, and a small gold bar would be bent until its two ends all but touched. The ring thus formed was easily opened and a number of them could be linked together to make an ornamental chain. It is supposed that the rings were used as a medium of barter, therefore they are usually called ‘ring money’.

Many of the ancient ornaments were torques. A torque is an inflexible, rather massive ring of twisted gold which was usually worn as a neck ring. Any number of them have been unearthed in Ireland and one of these torques is so huge that it could not have been worn about the throat, but must have been hung over one shoulder to rest diagonally across the chest. It measures more than five feet in length.

The Emerald Isle is famed for the fine collection of ancient relics of pure gold that have been discovered there during the last few centuries. Among them are many dress-fasteners in the form of brooches.

As for the dress-fastener, one of the problems met by the first man who appropriated the pelt of an animal and tried wearing it on his own back, was how to keep if from falling off. A history of the varied inventions of mankind for the fastening of clothes would in itself fill a volume, which might bear the title, From Thorns to Zippers, for the first fun ‘coat’ ever worn by man was very likely pinned together with a thorn. Buttons with buttonholes, hooks and eyes, snappers and zippers were rather a long time coming to our aid.

The pin has been through many stages of evolution. At a very early period it was made of gold wire bent into a form somewhat resembling our safety pin of today. A later development of the simple pin with a catch was the Roman fibula, a two piece brooch consisting of a pin on a hinge and a bow.

The characteristic Celtic brooch was composed of a long pin an an incomplete ring. Untold numbers of these ancient ornaments were, in former years, sold by the men who found them for whatever the yellow metal would fetch.

Archeology is not a science that appeals to the man with a hoe. If the hoe chances to turn up some priceless piece of ancient jewelry the important thing to him is the intrinsic worth of the metal; so into the melting pot it goes, and, losing all those incalculable values given it by the history of its period and the hand of the goldsmith, becomes once again a soulless lump of metal.

However, this sad fate does not always fall to the lot of ancient Celtic ornaments of gold found by accident, as the following instance goes to prove.

One day in the year 1896 (as near to the present as that) a peasant was plowing a field. As the plow cut its way through a furrow of brown earth it met with some slight obstruction which, on examination, turned out to be nothing less than the now-famous Limavaday Treasure. It would be interesting to know what the man thought when first he saw the yellow gleam of gold, but we have only the statement of bald facts. At any rate, from that plowed field in the county of Londonderry, Ireland, was taken a little golden hoard such as one reads of in a romance of buried treasure. There were chains of gold, a torque made of thick twisted strands of rich yellow gold, and there was a collar of remarkable workmanship ornamented with repousśe work, which marks the period of its making as sometime about the first century A.D.

The year following their discovery the ornaments were sold to the British Museum, whereupon Ireland set up a violent protest. She claimed that the relics, having been found in Irish soil were treasure-trove and therefore belonged to Ireland. The British Museum authorities pointed out that the National Museum at Dublin had had a chance to buy them and had failed to do so. And further, they said that nobody could prove that the jewelry was made in Ireland—it might originally have come from England. The Press fanned the flames is dispute, and the matter was taken into the Court of Law. It took some six years before the law got around to deciding which contestant was right. And then, with the wisdom of Solomon, it favored neither one side or the other. Judgment was given that the jewelry was indeed treasure trove and therefore by virtue of the Prerogative Royal belonged to the King. Whereupon His Majesty, after receiving the treasure, tactfully turned about and presented it to the Irish National Museum. Altogether, it seems to have been a merry puss-in-the-corner game played in recent times by ornaments of precious metal that for centuries had lain untouched where they had been hidden in the ground, perhaps by some rich and important owner when the alarm of invasion rang through the land.

Early Jewelry Of The British Isles (continued)