Original subject line: “Something new on 12th century jewelry (long)”
I have just got in on inter-library loan a wonderful book called Mediaeval European Jewellery, by Ronald W. Lightbown, which has been the subject of discussion on one of my other lists. It is published by the Victoria and Albert Museum and covers jewelry (except rings) from the 9th to the 15th century. The main topics cover the 13th to the 15th century in great detail, with many color photos. The author also includes information from inventories and wills that greatly enhances the information given to something beyond a book of pretty jewels.
The material provided on the 12th century is most interesting, and after the author explains to us that there is not as much information available on this century as for earlier or later centuries, I became even more intrigued. I thought a would post a long quote for further discussion (page 108-110):
“We get some hints of the jewellery thought proper to French and English ladies in the twelfth century from Anglo-Norman compilers of Latin dictionaries or vocabularies and from the French and Latin glosses that were added to their works. The earliest, Adam du Petit-Pont (d.1150), couches his little book in the form of a description of a manor house, round which he is shown by his hosts. In the chamber they open a coffer containing jewels – a strictly realistic detail, for references in the English Curia Regis Rolls of the early thirteenth century show that it was long the custom to keep jewels for safety in a coffer in the camera of bedchamber of the master and the mistress of the house, where it would be directly under their eye. In the coffer Adam saw garlands, coronals, bandeaux, circlets, the diadems worn by women, hairpins, earrings, hair-gands, together with various sorts of hats and other ‘ornaments of the head’. Adam does not mention nets for hair, but these were current in late twelfth-century Naples, where a document of 1184 mentions a ‘gold net for the head of a noblewoman’. For the neck, shoulders and breasts there are collars (torques), buttons, brooches, both of gold and humbler metals, slender flexible necklaces (murenule) ad slender chains, bracelets, cloak clasps (fibule, glossed tachet). For the waist there were girdles – semitacia or semitinctia (explained by a Latin glossator as a girdle made of two different colours of leather, white and black), cingula (explained by the French glossator as girdles for men), succintoria (explained by the French glossator as a baldric), strophea (explained by the French glossator as liseres or borders: braidings), catulae (unhelpfully glossed in Latin as a kind of girdle). For the arms there are brachilia, glossed in Latin as ‘girdles which go about the arm’.(17)”
“We deduce that the principal jewels of a twelfth-century French or English lady were a coronal or chaplet, earrings, a brooch and a collar – what we should call a necklace – and a slender chain. This picture is more or less that painted by our second dictionary-maker, Alexander Neckham (1157-1227). For Alexander a matron ought to check the liberty of her straying hair by a band or net. She should fasten the collar of her tunic or chemise with a brooch or a pin, and wear in addition a collar and earrings. These, however, were the full panoply of the great and very wealthy; all the evidence suggest that at the level of the lady of the manor brooches and rings were usually the main jewels owned.…”
“The only surviving gold head ornaments of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries have been found in Scotland. Three (now in the National Museums of Scotland) were discovered in 1863 at Plan in the Isle of Bute, in a hoard containing Scottish coins of David I and English coins of Henry I and Stephen. The hoard seems to have been concealed at some date between 1140 and 1160, which must therefore be more or less the date of the head ornaments. All are of the same form: The longest measures 17 inches, and its greatest height 3/16 of an inch: it tapers away from this height to circular ends which are pierced with holes, presumably so that a thread could be drawn through to fasten the band, almost certainly on the forehead, over a veil or other head-covering. It is decorated with a zig-zag pattern, familiar from other twelfth-century goldsmith’s work, and this also appears on the ends of the next longest head-band, measuring 13 inches. The third, which is broken, is decorated with a pattern of diaper. The gold is extremely thin, so that the bands are light and flexible. Two rather later bands were found in 1923 on the site of the nunnery at Iona. The nunnery was founded in 1203, but the silver spoons found with completest head-ornament seem to date from the later decades of the twelfth century. This head-band (fig. 24) is of the same form as the Plan head-bands, except that it tapers away to rounded ends, which are pierces with the same holes for drawing a thread. It is now in two pieces, but when completed was 35.2 centimeters long and 1.1 cm high at the centre. It is chased with an elegant design of stylised foliated scrollwork between pearled borders – its delicate formal elegance admitting us to one of our few glimpses of Romanesque glamour. The other Iona headdress is only a fragment, and was decorated in the same fashion as one of the Plan head-bands, with a motif that runs inwards from the ends for only a little way. In this case the ornament is a line of bosses, terminating in two arranged as a cross. It is worth considering if these are not the ligadurae of which Queen Matilda speaks in the Latin of her will, but as so often with early jewellery we have here on the one hand objects without a name and on the other names without objects. Nevertheless, the sophistication of the scrollwork ornament on the complete Iona fillet suggests that here is some representation of the gold head-bands worn by great ladies in the Scotland and England of the twelfth century and possibly elsewhere as well.”
I definitely recommend taking a look at this book for its
interesting tidbits that are spread through its 588 pages.
~ Katrine / Katherine Barich
Message #733, January 19, 2003
Here is a scan of the
headband as seen in the book. It’s on the
files page under Katrine’s picks or at the URL
below.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/12thcenturygarb/files/Katrine%27s%20picks/Iona%20headband%2040.jpg
~ Katrine / Katherine
Barich
Message #748, January 22, 2003