Introduction

Hanging in the galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is an oil painting by the nineteenth-century artist Charles Robert Leslie, who was known for the accurate renderings of dress in his works referencing historical literary subjects.¹ Titled merely Autolycus,² it presents a romanticised vision of the ‘rogue’ and pedlar of that name in William Shakespeare’s late romance The Winter’s Tale.³ As Autolycus makes his entrance on stage, he advertises the wares he has for sale in a song:

Leslie’s Autolycus occupies the centre of the canvas, his travelling case hanging at his neck and opened wide to prominently display his goods to the single male and four female inhabitants of the countryside who hover around him, intrigued by what he has to offer.

Literary depictions of this early modern wandering seller appear elsewhere as we see in John Heywood’s mid-sixteenth-century work, A Play Called the Four PP. Heywood introduces the figure of the Pedlar in an exchange with the character of the Apothecary, who asks what the former carries. The Pedlar replies that ‘euery pedler / In euery tryfull must be a medler’, alluding to his vital role in allowing rural men and women to purchase contemporary fashionable items.⁶ Among the gloves, purses, combs, ribbons and knives that Heywood’s Pedlar offers, he also hawks various items which we can classify as jewellery, as they added embellishment or decoration to dress or the body: ‘Pomanders, hooks, and lasses knotted / Broches, rynges, and all maner bedes’.⁷ That the itinerant Pedlar saw fit to stock jewels among his other wares suggests that he would have found willing buyers among lower-class consumers, particularly those unable to access larger, urban centres in England. This chapter explores the ownership and wearing of jewellery by men of the artisanal classes within early modern England.⁸ The male focus is a deliberate riposte to the way that traditional scholarship’s concentration on women’s jewellery has suggested that this was a female preoccupation. As I have discussed elsewhere, jewellery mattered to men from a range of social classes, all of whom ‘had the power, money, networks and status to commission, wear, give and bequeath jewels’.⁹

Accessing jewels: people and spaces

As Autolycus’s song and the speech of Heywood’s Pedlar suggest, featured among the wares of pedlars were often ones designed for the body, as well as ornamenting it. While it is unlikely that a pedlar would be selling very expensive goods, such as gem-set jewellery, that does not necessarily mean what he offered was of inferior quality. The account book of William Wray, a farmer, draper and haberdasher who kept a shop in Ripon, Yorkshire, contains a series of entries in April 1581 recording the sale of various goods – from pepper and saffron to linen cloth and Norwich points (i.e. the tags for laces) – to Thomas Marshall, whom Wray describes as a ‘petty chapman’.¹⁰ It is likely that Marshall then sold these goods as he travelled, thereby facilitating access among those who were removed from the wealthy towns and cities of England. While this account provides little evidence of jewellery being purchased by Marshall, what this record does tell us is that the goods offered by pedlars could originate from more established, fixed and legitimate sites of commerce.

In her work Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy (2020), Paula Hohti commented on the increased presence of pedlars in urban centres and rural areas across Europe in the later sixteenth century, noting that ‘all kinds of inexpensive smaller items … could also be purchased from itinerant pedlars’. Hohti observes that, through a combination of low prices and the availability of a wide range of goods, pedlars were able to provide ‘lower-class consumers in particular with easier access to affordable luxuries’.¹¹ We see some of what a pedlar might have hawked in one of Jost Amman’s woodcuts for Hartmann Schopper’s Book of Trades (1568) (Figure 5.1, see also 2.3). Although a German example, as we might expect, the pedlar appears in a rural setting, holding a tray that displays various goods, from playing cards and gloves to rosary beads, while in his right hand he holds a mirror, a case with utensils and another string of beads.

Figure 5.1 Woodcut book illustration of a pedlar from Jost Amman, Panoplia omnium illiberalium mechanicarum ... (Book of Trades), Frankfurt am Main, 1568. British Museum, London, 1904, 0206.103.33.

In choosing to embody the complexities of the character of Autolycus within the figure of the pedlar, Shakespeare reflected a real contemporary concern (among other) over these itinerant sellers: their mobile nature and the range of wares they sold meant they operated outside the traditional guild system, making them difficult to regulate.¹² Nevertheless, their ability to access customers beyond the reach of fixed-site retailers – ‘At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs’, as Shakespeare put it – fulfilled a valuable role in bringing the latest fashions to those who lived outside urban centres.¹³ That the pedlar was a controversial figure in the early modern period is undeniable. For fixed-site retailers, whose activities were governed by the various trade guilds operating within England, pedlars were a threat to their business and so they were strongly opposed to any attempts to license (and therefore legitimise) them. An Elizabethan statute from 1597 classified pedlars and petty chapmen alongside rogues, vagabonds and beggars, who should be whipped ‘until his or her body be bloudye’ and then forced to return to their place of origin.¹⁴ Yet in 1618, James I passed a royal proclamation allowing pedlars and petty chapmen to continue trading in recognition of the benefits such ‘industrious and well-disposed’ sellers brought to ‘our loving subjects dwelling remote from Cities and Market Townes’.¹⁵ However, this licence was revoked only three years later, in 1621, suggesting that pedlars were still considered a threat to guild-regulated trade.¹⁶

Concerns over pedlars continued to abound throughout the seventeenth century. In 1691, seven years before they were eventually fully licensed to trade by an Act of Parliament in 1698,¹⁷ a proclamation was printed and posted at the Three Pigeons on Cornhill, in the City of London, refuting any arguments in favour of allowing pedlars to operate.¹⁸ Among the anxieties evident within the pamphlet are the notions that pedlars subverted the guild system of training and regulation and undermined long-established retail networks, similar concerns to those that were prevalent in the preceding century. The activity of pedlars, the anonymous author argued:

The paper also accused pedlars of exploiting their mobility to deal in and distribute ‘Stolen, Smugled, and Prohibited Goods, such as Linnens, Silks and Spices of all sorts, Tobacco, Brandy, Tea, Coffee, Chocolate; and also French Goods’. Taking into consideration the range of wares offered by pedlars, it is clear that jewellery was not merely a concern of the elite and cheaper goods were available, allowing less wealthy citizens to participate in contemporary fashions and own highly personal jewels.

Another perspective on the extent to which men (and women) from the lower classes had access to jewellery is provided by exploring further other spaces from where they could purchase these goods. We have already seen how they might have been able to obtain them from itinerant sellers, but fairs and markets were also important retail settings in early modern England, especially for individuals who normally lived some distance from towns and cities. Each year in the second half of the sixteenth century, there were more than eight hundred individual fairs in England.¹⁹ Their scale and importance were remarked upon by the historian and topographer William Harrison (1535–93) in his panoramic Description of England (1577):

That jewellery was commonly bought and sold at fairs and markets is clear from the records of the Court of Wardens of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in London. The wardens were responsible for regulating the craft of goldsmithing, thereby maintaining its legitimacy throughout England. As early as the fourteenth century, provincial craftsmen were required to attend Goldsmiths’ Hall in London so that they could familiarise themselves with the guild’s hallmarks, while officials from the metropolis visited provincial shops and fairs in order to inspect and assay wares, ensuring that the silver and gold adhered to the prescribed standards of purity.²¹ The Court of Wardens imposed fines on those sellers whose goods failed the guild’s inspection, with the minutes of its proceedings recording the nature of the infraction and the resulting punishment, thereby enabling us to gain some sense of the extent to which customers might be tricked with substandard goods.²² Thus, for example, at Our Lady’s Fair in Southwark in 1568, an individual referred to as a pilgrim named Arnold was fined 2 s as a consequence of the impurity of the silver in eighteen gilt rings.²³ And the following year, at the fairs held in Bury in Lancashire, Harleston in Norfolk and Woodbridge in Suffolk, there were widespread attempts to foist inferior ‘claspes without hooke, claspes for cloke, earepykers, pynnes, whistells, paire of gyltehooke, and paire of eyes and claspes’ on unsuspecting shoppers.²⁴ The court’s records are full of references to small-scale and inexpensive dress accessories and jewellery, suggesting that fairs and markets were popular and legitimate places for citizens of the lower and middling classes to purchase such items of goldsmiths’ work, despite the occurrence of illegitimate practices.

Shifting perceptions of the ownership of jewels through material evidence

Our perceptions of who owned and wore items of jewellery have been skewed by the sources that conventionally have been considered, whether material, visual or archival. However, in recent years, there has been a shift in our understanding of the material culture of those living beyond what we might view as the more elite centres of the court and urban spaces. In his seminal work The Dress of the People (2007), John Styles explored the idea that participating in new fashions of dress was not limited to elite society in eighteenth-century England, allowing us to refocus our view on the consumption habits of those from the lower classes, whom we might deem ordinary people. Paula Hohti’s most recent work reflects on this idea of non-elite fashions, with its investigation of the material culture of those of lower social standing in Renaissance Italy. Hohti defines the artisanal class as those who had an economic and social position between that of professionals, such as merchants or notaries, and workmen. She notes that artisans are what we would consider craftspeople, shopkeepers and local tradespeople with small commercial outlets.²⁵ Similarly then, when examining the wearing and ownership of jewellery in the early modern period, it is now possible to shift our perspective away from the higher levels of society in order to gain a broader understanding of male artisans’ ownership of jewellery in early modern England.

It is true that the material evidence – the jewels themselves – seems to favour the survival of the sorts of high-status pieces we commonly see in museum displays. Though in spite of the high material worth of such jewels, these, and items of jewellery across all levels of society were often imbued with layered narratives that gave them intangible emotional value. Even those pieces of seemingly lesser worth, such as a simple silver-gilt clasp, were made from materials with an intrinsic fiscal worth, no matter how small. This is important to remember when we consider evidence for artisan ownership, with the ability to bequeath a jewel indicating relatively stable wealth, but conversely the paucity of surviving examples suggests that such items may have needed to be pawned or sold.

Nowhere is this monetary value of jewellery more obvious than in the use of gold chains as payment for mariners, revealing that, at the most fundamental level, jewellery often remained nothing more than a wearable and portable store of wealth. An evocative narrative letter sent to the Spanish king by Francisco de Cuéllar, a captain shipwrecked off the Irish coast during the failed 1588 Spanish Armada campaign, explains how he was stripped of his clothes to reveal a gold chain hanging at his neck. The chain, he writes, was ‘worth more than a thousand reals’, adding that ‘I was only a poor soldier and this money was what I had earned on board ship’.²⁶ Gold chains recovered from the 1622 wreck of the Spanish guard ship, the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, personal possessions of the forty-eight male passengers or the 220 crew members, provide another case in point.²⁷ The weight of the links corresponded with the contemporary Spanish escudo coin, and the malleability of the gold made removing them from the chain simple, suggesting that these items of jewellery were considered a form of currency. This is perhaps not altogether surprising given that ships journeying between the New World and Europe were subject to looting by Dutch and English privateers, and a gold chain could be concealed about the body more easily than a purse full of coins.

As styles changed, jewels were broken up in order to be refashioned and updated. Sixteenth-century jewels were particularly susceptible to this fate, as the seventeenth century brought with it a shift in aesthetics away from favouring the figurative art of the goldsmith and enameller and towards a preference for an abundance of gemstones.²⁸ So those jewels that have been preserved are remarkable survivals and probably remained intact precisely because of their significance to their multiple owners. The four ‘Hunsdon jewels’, given by Elizabeth I to her cousin Henry Carey, first Baron Hunsdon (1526–96), illustrate this. Comprising an enamelled gold ship pendant, a rock-crystal bracelet, an onyx cameo and a tiny enamel and gold girdle prayer-book, they have survived because of their association with the queen.²⁹ That is not to say that jewels owned by the less wealthy meant less to them, but the financial value of a single silver clasp would have represented a greater proportion of their wealth, so a jewel such as this was more susceptible to destruction, thereby allowing an owner to benefit from the intrinsic value of the raw material.

Equally, the survival of jewels can equally be the result of chance, as is certainly the case with the cache of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century jewels and loose gemstones that form part of the ‘Cheapside Hoard’. These items are believed to have been part of the stock-in-trade of an as yet unidentified Jacobean goldsmith. Deliberately hidden sometime after 1640 or 1641 likely as a result of the outbreak of Civil War, the hoard was discovered only in 1912 by workmen excavating a site on Cheapside in London.³⁰

However, it is chance survivals of another nature that have improved our understanding of the ownership and use of jewellery by men and women from across the entire social spectrum. Since the implementation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland of the Treasure Act in September 1997, all finds of objects with at least 10 per cent gold or silver content that are more than three hundred years old must be legally reported to the district Coroner via a local Finds Liaison Officer. The discovery of objects whose value is solely archaeological is subject to voluntary registration with the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) administered under the aegis of the British Museum.³¹ The publicly accessible PAS database of finds has transformed the scholarly narrative so that we no longer perceive jewels as the preserve of the social elite. Because the majority of the early modern pieces of jewellery recorded in it are not Treasure, it is likely that they were once owned by members of the middling and lower levels of society. The range of items – all presumably lost by their owners, on the basis of how they were discovered in the ground – has broadened our understanding of the prevalence of jewels, and their different types, among non-elite English men and women.³²

As well as demonstrating that early modern individuals from all walks of life owned and wore jewellery, the PAS database also reveals the affinities these objects share with those valuable enough to be classified as Treasure. Take, for example, a ring found in Oxfordshire in December 2018 (Figure 5.2).³³ Thought to date from some time in the early modern period (between 1450 and 1700), it is made of copper-alloy and clear traces of gilding remain to its surface. Its oval-shaped bezel, the shoulders of which taper to a narrow hoop, was designed as the setting for some now-lost decoration, such as a stone. It is not hard to imagine that, when gilded and with a cheap coloured stone or paste in place, the ring would have appeared very similar to a gold ring set with a precious or semi-precious stone. A bezel and remnants of the hoop of another copper-alloy ring, probably dating from the sixteenth century, were found in Pembrokeshire in 2003.³⁴ The bezel takes the form of a heart, from the top of which sprout two flowers, which are surmounted by a crown. The heart is held between two hands, each with cuffs, which form the shoulders of the missing hoop. There is significant gilding or silvering of the surface, again inviting comparisons with higher-value gold or silver pieces of similar design. It seems likely that a ring with this iconography would have been a token of love or affection, possibly in the context of a betrothal or marriage. Such base-metal rings would have enabled those of particularly limited means to adorn themselves fashionably at least in some small way.

Figure 5.2 Cast copper-alloy finger ring with gilding, England, c. 1450–1700, found in Merton, Oxfordshire, England. Portable Antiquities Scheme NMS-88E563.

The definition of jewellery in the early modern period encompasses items that we might now regard as dress embellishments, such as buttons. Although buttons are ostensibly functional objects used to fasten the fabric of clothing together, the manner in which they were often decorated and the materials from which they were made in the early modern period suggest that they should be regarded as forms of jewellery. There is clear evidence for this in the PAS database of finds. Although the gold buttons recorded there are not numerous, they all bear decorative features of varying types.³⁵ Silver buttons are far more common, and the majority of these are engraved or stamped with decorative features.³⁶ One popular style features a heart and crown motif commonly associated with the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza in 1662. There are variations in the design, including one with two hearts beneath a crown, and one with a flaming heart pierced by two crossed arrows.³⁷ While silver versions of these buttons – some of which were gilded – were probably worn by men of the middling sort among whom we might count male artisans, there are also examples made from copper-alloy and other base metals such as a seventeenth-century disk (presumed to be a sleeve button) found at Cundall with Leckby in North Yorkshire. This has stamped decoration of two hearts conjoined beneath a crown.³⁸ These base-metal objects were almost certainly worn by men of more limited means, providing evidence both for their participation in fashion and for the sharing of fashionable jewellery designs across the social spectrum.³⁹

Much the same can be seen with a particular type of jewellery, which was worn exclusively by men in the sixteenth century – the hat ornament. The fashion spread north from the Italian peninsula from military origins to a more secular context across Europe to England. Portraits of elite European men with these large, brooch-like, often iconographic jewels abound, with Tudor men more accustomed to being depicted with jewels that are not emblematic in nature.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, the fashion for substantial jewels on the cap remained popular in sixteenth-century England, with a preparatory drawing by Hans Holbein of William Parr suggesting that emblematic hat ornaments were adopted by Tudor men.⁴¹ Earlier scholarship has proposed that these were often worn as a mark of distinction by the elite, noting specifically that ‘a man of standing might wear a badge on his hat or cap as a status symbol’.⁴² However, there is strong material evidence that these adornments were popular among men across the social spectrum, with even those of lesser means participating in the fashion, though documentary evidence for such use in England is limited.

A discrete group of copper-alloy roundels, termed ‘plaquettes’,⁴³ was donated to the British Museum in 1915.⁴⁴ Those that we can safely identify as hat ornaments are circular in form and have holes pierced at their edges to enable them to be sewn on to a cap. They resemble in style and form the gold and enamelled versions that were evidently in fashion among the wealthy. Indeed, the remnants of gilding on most of them, and the presence of enamelling on one in particular, indicate that they may well have been intended to echo costlier examples (Figure 5.3). The same can also be assumed from the way that the decorative schemes on the plaquettes are derived from classical iconography, the particular choice of subject matter no doubt fulfilling some emblematic function.

Figure 5.3 Embossed bronze hat ornament with traces of gilding and remains of green, red and blue enamel depicting a scene from the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, which is enclosed within a garlanded border, sixteenth century. Diameter 5 cm, weight 23 g. British Museum, London, 1915,1216.133.

These ornaments were not only produced from cheaper materials but were also manufactured using a more economical process. Instead of being unique commissions, often embossed and chased, they were cast in one piece, allowing multiple copies to be produced at relatively low cost once the mould had been made. This method enabled men of lower economic standing to participate also in the trend for emblematic hat ornaments as a mark of distinction. Indeed, the speed with which the fashion took off, along with its geographical spread and its century-long duration, suggest that artisanal engagement with it was to a significant degree independent of elite involvement.⁴⁵

Using documentary sources to understand artisanal engagement with jewels

One disadvantage that finds of Treasure and the objects recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme share with much early modern material evidence is that they are often impossible to connect with their original owners.⁴⁶ Instead, to gain a real insight into the ownership of jewellery by men from the lower and middling classes, it is necessary to resort to documentary evidence, and especially to that provided by wills and inventories. For the following discussion, I have relied on two published sets of probate inventories from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for men we might deem artisans (from Ipswich and Bristol), and a published series of wills of men from London, with artisans numbering among them. A singular will from Lincolnshire is also examined, for the richness of evidence it provides.

The inventorial records of the inhabitants of Ipswich allow us to consider ownership within the context of a busy early modern trading and commercial town in the provinces, where, because of its location, considerable wealth was generated.⁴⁷ In all, the published set comprises seventy-two inventories dating between 1583 and 1681, of which fifty-nine belong to men. Of these, eighteen do not list the occupation of their subject; the remaining forty-one represent a total of twenty-five different occupations, many of which are artisanal, such as blacksmiths, butchers, tailors or linen weavers.

Jewellery is present in only five of the male inventories. The contents of the earliest, however – that of John Seely, dated 8 September 1584 – suggest he may have been a tailor and so the items listed do not appear to be of personal use.⁴⁸ The sailor Edward Barnes, whose inventory is dated 14 March 1590, owned two dozen silver buttons, which are listed in such a way as to suggest that they were two separate sets that could be moved between items of clothing.⁴⁹ The possessions of another mariner, Matthew Nicholas, inventoried on 25 April 1599, appear relatively modest: some simple furniture, two candlesticks, pewter dishes to dine off, and limited clothing.⁵⁰ Nevertheless, he also had ‘a silver whistell and silver chaine’ together valued at £1 1 s, which seem to be the most valuable goods he owned. It is likely that these items were related to his profession; as such, they would not have been deemed frivolous jewels, but rather a symbol of office. The inventory of a second tailor, Simon Isam, taken on 22 March 1618, records ‘a whistle and pick’ (probably an ear and toothpick), both made of silver, along with a silver spoon. The combined value of the three items is relatively low, at only 6 s.⁵¹ The final man whose inventory includes jewellery is the clerk Richard Rainsford and this dates to 14 June 1631. His occupation would seem to preclude him from being considered a member of the artisan class, and the goods listed in his inventory reflect both his relative wealth and learned status, so we read of his ‘Lybrarye of Bookes’ valued at £10, as well as noting that his pewter dishes and clothing are of a greater value than the men we have just seen.⁵² The jewels he owns are only two rings and together they are valued at £1 10 s.

The second group of published inventories comes from Bristol, another large urban centre in early modern England, and covers the period from 1542 to 1650.⁵³ In all, the inventories number 108 but in the period up to 1635, in total only eight men whom we might consider to be artisans appear from their inventories to have owned jewels.⁵⁴ The inventories of two of them include jewelled goods that appear indicative of stock-in-trade rather than personal possessions – for example, the ‘ij gould bands’ and ‘vij copper bands’ recorded in the inventory of the haberdasher Robert Clement, dated to 19 March 1589 or the ‘thrid, buttens, pins, Laces, needles’ that are listed in John Noble’s 1625 inventory.⁵⁵ Of the six men who owned jewellery in a personal capacity, five possessed only rings. According to his inventory of 16 October 1634, the shoemaker John Shipway had ‘two gold rings with a gilt gimmall Ringe’.⁵⁶ Three of the others – the clothworker Francis Baylie (4 July 1620), the hosier Michael Threkelle (14 July 1623) and the haulier John Davies (1635) – owned a single gold ring each; while another haulier, Nathaniel Wright (inventory dated 1620/1), owned a single ring of unspecified material.⁵⁷ The surgeon Richard Woodson, whose inventory is dated 11 February 1623, possessed instruments for his trade of silver and trimmed with silver. These plus his silver toothpicker were valued at £3 18 s 4 p.⁵⁸

It is highly likely that, apart from Shipway’s gimmel ring (a form of love token), the rings owned by these men were signet rings engraved with their marks to legitimise their business transactions. Whether used to stamp the wax seals on documents or to prominently display as a mark of identity, these were important personal possessions crucial also in establishing trust.⁵⁹ An example of a ring bearing a mark likely to represent an individual involved in the trade of wheat is the fragment of a copper-alloy ring discovered in 2018 in Somerset. The flat, oval-shaped bezel is engraved with a wheatsheaf with seven pellets flanking the decoration. The design is encircled with a corded border (Figure 5.4).

The one minor exception to the general paucity of jewellery in the Bristol artisans’ inventories is provided by the plumer Richard Saunders. Saunders’s original inventory is dated 6 July 1629, with two further addenda recorded noting his gold ring and the following items: ‘one dozen of old silke, silver and gould poynts’, worth 18 d; ‘one silver bodkin’, worth 12 d; ‘one old silke and silver hat band and one old small twist silke and silver hatt band’, together worth 2 s 6 d; and ‘one seale of silver with a boaning handle’, worth 12 d.⁶⁰ This last item would have been used to authenticate documents, and so would have been essential for the effective conduct of Saunders’s trade, just like his signet ring. By way of contrast to artisan ownership, the inventory of the merchant Nathaniel Butcher dated to 25 November 1628 reveals he owned four rings – two signet rings, a ring set with a blue sapphire and one described only as ‘a little hooped ringe’. The fifth jewel recorded within the inventory is recorded only as ‘an old Jewell’.⁶¹

Figure 5.4 Fragment of a copper-alloy signet ring engraved with a wheat sheaf encircled by a corded border, sixteenth-seventeenth century. Found in Whitelackington, Somerset. Portable Antiquities Scheme DEV-416E32.

Inventories are able to provide only a snapshot of what goods an individual had in their possession at one particular moment in time. Nevertheless, they do serve to highlight what might have been owned by men from a range of social backgrounds. They have shown how, among the artisan class, rings were the most common single item of male jewellery and were probably used for proving one’s identity. However, given that jewels were highly personal objects, their owners might choose to pass them on to family or friends after their death, and, in such instances, it is wills that often enable us to get a sense of what particular jewels might have meant to a man, as he made the deliberate choice to bestow them as marks of remembrance.

A published collection of 245 wills from the diocese of London, dating to the period 1507–47, provides an insight into the nature of the goods owned by the middling and wealthier artisan classes.⁶² Of these, ninety-five relate to religious figures and so these can be discounted since they are out of the scope of this chapter. Of the remaining 150 wills, only twenty-two contain any evidence of jewellery within them, of which only twelve were made by male testators. This might suggest that ownership of jewels was not especially common – or, more accurately, that the bequeathing of jewels was not commonly practised even among the citizens of by far the largest and wealthiest city in England. In ten of the twelve wills, there is language such as ‘I have putto [sic] my seale’, which is indicative of the testator using – and therefore owning – a personal sealing device, whether a signet ring or a handheld seal such as the one described in the plumer Richard Saunders’s inventory. But only two of these self-sealed wills specify actual bequests of jewels. The haberdasher William Turke, in his will of 14 August 1541, left a ‘ryng of golde of the value of 20s.’, along with a black gown, to his executor.⁶³ The inclusion of the monetary value of the ring may indicate that Turke wished to emphasise the extent of his gratitude for the role undertaken, though in another context it may also be necessary to indicate the value that was to be spent on a mourning ring. The skinner Wylliam Chambarlayn, in his will of 20 May 1542, bequeathed two rings – one ‘a byge houpe off gollde’ and the other ‘a golde rynge with a dyamond’ – in a manner that suggests they were treasured possessions.⁶⁴ The remaining two wills do not refer to any form of sealing device but do include bequests of jewels. Wyllam Symons is described as a merchant tailor and on 28 December 1538 he left ‘bedes of corall’ and ‘black bedes of get’, both of which were ‘gawded with sylver’, to his two nieces.⁶⁵ The surgeon Antony Copage, on 14 December 1537, left two rings. The one he describes as ‘mye rynge’ is for the brother of Doctor Laye. Is it possible that this was a form of a signet ring he was bestowing on a fellow medical practitioner? The second he describes as ‘the ryng that is a ponne my fynger’ and this he leaves to the wife of a one Thomas Austyn, which suggests a level of intimacy between testator and recipient; but, as a member of one of the professions, he cannot be classed as an artisan.⁶⁶

Moving away from London, the will of the mercer John Leek, from Boston in Lincolnshire, and dated 19 August 1527 includes a number of bequests which reveal the items of jewellery that he owned.⁶⁷ As one might expect, rings predominate, with six being bequeathed. Three of these rings are described as a ‘gymmowe’ or ‘gymmow’, meaning ‘gimmel’. Most often associated with love and marriage, gimmel rings take their name from the diminutive of the Latin word for ‘twin’, gemellus, since they are often formed of two interlinked hoops. Each hoop bears its own inscription or stone, essentially forming half a ring; so that when the two hoops are joined, the ring is complete.⁶⁸ An example of this is a ring believed to be the wedding ring of the London merchant Thomas Gresham, with the two hoops each inscribed with one half of a fuller inscription and the bezels set with a ruby and diamond, united as the hoops come together. Leek bequeathed William Pakker a gold gimmel ring, and a silver one to Pakker’s wife. John Neyll’s wife also received ‘a lyttyll gymmowe off sylver’, while her husband was left a ring of ‘basse golde’, which might be a reference to an alloy. John Neyll also received a ‘sylver hernest gyrdyll’ which he had once given to Leek. The fact that Leek bequeathed his wife’s wedding ring to one Alice Arley suggests that she was probably a close kinswoman. Such an item of jewellery would have been particularly symbolic, representing at once Leek, his wife and their union. Arley was left a significant number of other items, mostly furniture, but she also received a silver buckle for a girdle and a pendant, the form and material of which is not specified. Isabel Arley received ‘a lyttyll golde ryng’ and a ‘tryangle off sylver’ (likely a small triangular-shaped ornament, possibly a dress accessory), while John Arley was left an Agnus Dei pendant, a talismanic jewel of some form depicting the Lamb of God. The final gift of jewellery was the ‘crystall stone closyd in sylver’ bestowed on John Smyth, though the lack of any further description leaves the precise form of this object unclear. Although it is evident from his will that Leek was considerably wealthy for a mercer, it is not possible to determine which, if any, of the few pieces of jewellery mentioned in it he might have worn himself.

The documentary evidence from inventories and wills allows us to connect male artisans with the types of jewelled items that they owned. What is clear is that we cannot consider these artisans as a homogeneous group, with varying degrees of wealth manifest, and so what these men owned differs. There is limited jewellery within the written sources, contrasting with what material survivals indicate,⁶⁹ but we do see that of all items the singularly most important piece was the signet ring. And this is not surprising given that these men demanded trust, authenticity and identification daily within their respective trades.

Conclusion

Men from the artisan class were among those from almost every social and occupational background who wore and owned jewellery in early modern England. The material evidence that we now have access to illustrates the extent to which the consumption of jewels was not restricted to those from wealthy urban or courtly circles. However, the documentary evidence from both wills and inventories – which allows us a glimpse of behaviours at an individual level – is perhaps more nuanced and nor does it reflect what we now understand from objects uncovered as Treasure or through the Portable Antiquities Scheme. However, here in these written sources it seems that a single signet ring may have been the item of jewellery most commonly owned by a male artisan, as it was the one most necessary to his occupation. That is not to say that these men did not own or wear other jewellery; it is just that we cannot see the evidence for this as clearly in the archival records. No doubt this is in part because they owned fewer jewels than their wealthier counterparts, but it may well also be the case that these objects succumbed to the whims of fashion or times of financial hardship without leaving a trace or being found among records of pawnbrokers. Jewellery, therefore, was not merely an elite concern, and nor was it a female preoccupation. Men bought, wore and exchanged jewelled goods, participating in the latest fashions as they did.