Medieval jewelry

 Without easy access to African diamond mines, Asian pearl fisheries, and the like (if these even existed then, which they didn't), medieval people had far fewer jewels accessible than do modern westerners, who can walk into a jewelry store and pick something out.  If you like, you can even pay heed to the Diamond Sellers of America (or whatever they're called) and spend six months' salary on an engagement ring.

But medieval people valued jewelry and precious metals just as much as we do, for a combination of their beauty and their rarity.  They had gold and silver but in small amounts, the silver mostly from German mines, and a lot of it old, constantly reused material that went back to the Romans.  Coins were officially silver, though there was always a certain amount of "baser" metal mixed in.  Gold, valued more than silver then as now because it doesn't tarnish, was used for jewelry but rarely for coins.

We tend to think of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, but there are a lot of other jewels out there, a lot of which medieval people valued.  You don't hear as much these days about tourmaline, beryls, chalcedony, peridot, and carbuncles, but these are perfectly good kinds of jewels.  For that matter, carefully cut colored class made a nice jewel equivalent (and still does).

Jewels were worn decoratively by the very rich (as they still are), by both men and women.  Rings were highly valued, both as signs of display and as gifts.  We treat rings today as symbols exchanged between engaged or married couples, but they were also given in the Middle Ages to friends, to faithful followers, and to people who performed a special service.  Jewels could also be made into necklaces, but jeweled rings and brooches were more common, because you needed far fewer stones.

Jewels as signs of prestige of course decorated crowns and diadems.  In the stories, jewels were set into the swords of the elite, but this seems very unlikely.  Every piece of jewelry was of course unique, being hand-crafted from whatever stone or stones the jeweler had to work with.

Both precious metals and precious gems were used to honor God and the saints.  An exceptionally fine Gospel book would be decorated with images using thin layers of gold leaf.  Reliquaries would be decorated with jewels.  As I have discussed before, poverty in emulation of the humility of Christ was considered (potentially) holy, but when it came to glorifying the King of Kings, medieval people didn't hold back.

Reliquaries were embossed with gold and silver, as in this arm reliquary, and precious stones adorned them.  In the post-medieval period, a lot of reliquaries were robbed of their jewels or were melted down for their gold and silver, but we still have some of them in more or less pristine form.

These days churches have gone in a much simpler look, but in the Middle Ages they were meant to take your breath away with their beauty and decoration, including statues, paintings, and jeweled reliquaries.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on the medieval decoration and sense of the holy, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Beads

Nobody these days thinks much about beads.  Beading (or making simple jewelry from them) can be fun, but it is not something we think of in terms of trade routes and great expense.  In the early Middle Ages, things were different.

Beads were considered a fine form of decoration for women and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to men.  In the late Roman Empire those in the West who could afford it wore necklaces of beads made from semi-precious stones.  Beads could also be made from amber, from non-precious stones, even from horn.  (Plastic was centuries in the future.)  But the most important kind of material was glass.

This changed in the seventh century.  With the rise of Islam and the resultant breakdown of Mediterranean trade routes, it became hard for the West to get glass.  Beads found in graves from that period tended to be made instead from bone, horn, even fired clay.

This changed with the Vikings.  As I have noted before, they established long-distance overland trade routes that reached all the way from Scandinavia to Byzantium.  One of the most important things that they brought to the west was glass.

A lot of the glass was already in the shape of beads.  Other glass could be melted down and shaped into beads (most commonly short tiny cylinders in shape, rather than the round form we take for granted).  The glass came in all sorts of different colors.

The Vikings, who set up trade colonies in the West by the ninth century, once the fun of constant raiding wore off (and they realized that one could make consistent money year after year through trade, whereas a raid usually couldn't be repeated), traded beads.  Beads made excellent trade goods, because everyone wanted some, they were (relatively) inexpensive per unit, so everyone could afford at least some, and they were fairly lightweight, making them easier to transport than say metal or stone.

Big heaps of early medieval glass beads have been found in Scandinavian harbors, presumably from a box being loaded that broke loose and dumped.  It would not have been worth it at the time to send divers down into the murky, icy waters to try to pick up beads one by one.

Do you find it hard to picture a Viking warrior wearing a necklace of glass beads?  Readjust your thinking.

Some of the ideas in this post were inspired by the work of Matthew Delvaux of Boston College.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on Vikings, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.