Silver in England

Philippa Glanville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136611704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First Published in 2005. Silver is unique among the decorative arts in that its raw material is both inherently valuable and infinitely reusable. Its ownership has been a social bench-mark and its form has exercised the skills of sculptors, designers, chasers and engravers, but ultimately it could be, and normally was, melted down and refashioned quite without sentiment. Because of this constant recycling, the survival of any individual object is quite random and unrelated to its uniqueness or otherwise in its period. Hitherto plate historians have focused on individual objects almost to the exclusion of the context - social or economic - from which they came but now that context is seen as crucial in understanding historic plate. So in the first section of this book each chapter considers contemporary attitudes and usage.

 

 

 

PART I

HISTORY

ONE

MEDIEVAL

EARLY English silver is extraordinarily rare; fewer than 300 pieces made before the 1520s survive, a figure which is put into perspective when we consider that one London goldsmith, Robert Amadas who died in 1532, left more than 300 items in stock. For a more positive picture of the importance of silver from the early Middle Ages we must turn to contemporary documents, fleshing out their dry descriptions with examples drawn from the handful of surviving pieces.

Silver in the Early Middle Ages

First the Danes, and then their successors the Normans, virtually swept clear the monastic treasuries of Eastern and Southern England, with the result that curiously we are better informed about the goldsmithing of the pagan Saxons than their Christian successors, particularly through discoveries of burials at Sutton Hoo, Kingston and Taplow.

The custom of equipping dead kings and noblemen with rich grave-goods has, despite later grave-robbing, preserved goldmounted drinking horns and armour, jewellery, buckles and basins which together make up an overwhelming contribution to our picture of early Anglo-Saxon art. But this source died abruptly once the conversion to Christianity had taken hold, and there is pathetically little visual evidence to bring to life the glowing references to treasure of gold, silver and jewels, in Anglo-Saxon literature from the eighth century onwards, apart from chance survivals. A hoard found by tin workers at Trewhiddle near S. Austell, Cornwall in 1774 was deposited about AD 875. It contained a parcel-gilt chalice and paten; a silver hanging bowl found in the last century in the River Witham near Lincoln (and now slipped from sight again) enables us to say that niello, engraving, cloisons of enamel, filigree, parcel-gilding and cast figures were all techniques used by Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths in the eighth century, although it should be pointed out that a rather larger number of jewels, which are smaller and so more easily lost and found again, have been recovered to illustrate this aspect of the goldsmith’s craft. The Alfred Jewel at the Ashmolean Museum, dated to between 871 and 899, is one; another (seventh century) found in Kingston-on-Thames is now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.¹

From the earliest times horns were used as drinking vessels. They were particularly popular with the Anglo-Saxons since they lent themselves to competitive drinking; once filled, they could not be put down until emptied. A group of seventh-century graves found at Taplow in Berkshire in 1883 yielded six horns, one with silvergilt mounts and settings for gems, and seven were buried with the Sutton Hoo ship.²

Drinking vessels were inevitably the most personal and most adorned of a man’s possessions and in later periods form the bulk of surviving objects. But more is known about Anglo-Saxon church art; chalices, statues, reliquaries and crosses of gold, studded with gems, and silver fronts to altars are all described in English wills and in lists of gifts to cathedrals. One masterpiece produced by a goldsmith working in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, if not actually an Englishman, belongs to Kremsmunster Abbey in Austria. This coppergilt chalice, made for Tassilo, Duke of Bavaria, between about 777 and 788, is engraved with Christ and the Evangelists in ovals, with chipcarved palmettes and interlace between. This scheme of decoration, carried out in silver and gilding, covers the entire surface area; its intricacy and the combination of techniques demonstrates why Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths’ work was so highly regarded that the popes of the eleventh century delighted in its possession. This is clear from the lists of their holdings in the Liber Pontificalis, although none of their goldsmiths’ work, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon needlework, can now be traced.³

Open-handedness was a prime Anglo-Saxon virtue and much of our information about their goldsmiths’ work, as Professor Dodwell demonstrates, comes incidentally in accounts of gifts to religious houses. When King Cnut presented a group of relics to the New Minster in Winchester, they were encased in a gold cross; he is depicted with his wife in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript making the presentation. His other gifts included six-branched silver candlesticks and two large-scale effigies ‘Finely adorned with gold and silver’, as the chronicler William of Malmesbury described, so that ‘the amount of precious metal fills visitors with awe and the splendour of the gems dazzle the eyes of the beholders’. The description is typically imprecise; nothing remotely like this has survived and the illustrations in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are not much help, since they lack a sense of scale. However, one of Christ’s Temptation by the Devil shows a drinking horn, a cup, a bowl, a silver-mounted sword and torcs for neck and arms, all examples of typical Anglo-Saxon work. The Norman William of Poitiers, writing shortly after the Norman invasion of 1066, described the native goldsmiths’ work of England in hyperbolic terms, claiming that it would impress even the metal workers of Byzantium. More practically, he commented on their liking for drinking horns ornamented with silvergilt; Cnut is said to have used one of gold. The Atheling Athelstan left a silver-mounted trumpet to S. Swithin’s shrine and gold-sheathed, or at least gilded, furniture is shown in several Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.⁴

In his stimulating study of Anglo-Saxon art, Dodwell has stressed both the enormous significance this society attached to precious metals and jewels, to the extent that they became a touchstone of beauty and were constantly used metaphorically by English writers, and the many factors which militated against Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths’ work surviving. In 1066 the religious houses suffered a new rule and one that was disastrous for all works of art composed of precious metals, whether gold or silver vessels, embroidered textiles, chalices, reliquaries, or book bindings. Apart from the official depredations of William the Conqueror and William Rufus (to benefit their favourite home abbey of Caen) which stripped those abbeys which had stood out against the Normans, the incoming Norman abbots also removed treasures, sometimes to alleviate local disasters such as famine and fire, but more frequently to spend on their ambitious building programmes. Ely, for example, was despoiled in 1071 and again in 1076, losing among other treasures a life-sized statue of the Madonna and Christ child. Relics of England’s Anglo-Saxon saints and kings were not spared; in a generation all the royal gifts of Cnut and Edgar to Winchester were destroyed.

Given the scale of this destruction or removal of Anglo-Saxon metalwork, it is hardly surprising that we have virtually nothing to show. The situation is little better after 1100, although we can at least consult the monk Theophilus (Roger of Helmarshausen) who wrote a handbook of techniques for goldsmiths, to see what goldsmiths working in England might be capable of. The exhibition on English Romanesque Art (1984) brought together from across the world an astonishing assemblage of items in both precious metals and base metal made between 1066 and 1200, bearing out the descriptions he gives of niello, lost wax-casting, inlay, gemsetting and enamel. A silver flask of about 1130–40, a unique secular survival, now in the treasury of the Abbey of S. Maurice d’Agaune, Switzerland, incorporates several of these; it is engraved with dragons with foliate tails found in English manuscripts of the twelfth century.⁵

Base metal objects (almost all made for liturgical purposes) can demonstrate the techniques and ornament found in the precious metals too. The inhabited scrolls and cast openwork of the coppergilt Gloucester candlestick (VAM), about 1104–13 and given to the abbey of Gloucester by Prior Peter, may be presumed to have had silvergilt precursors. A small group of coppergilt ciboria (standing bowls for the Host) of the late twelfth century, the Balfour and the Warwick in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Malmesbury Abbey in the Pierpont Morgan Library, depict scenes from the Old and New Testaments while a unique silver ciborium (c. 1200–10) also in the treasury of S. Maurice d’Agaune, Switzerland, has an unexpected mixture of classical and biblical imagery, with three Virtues in ovals on the foot and ten medallions with scenes from the Infancy of Christ on the bowl and cover; the finial is a three-dimensional group of Chiron and Achilles. The closest, indeed the only parallel for all these scenes are English manuscript paintings of about 1200 and it is clear that a model book was used common to several workshops.⁶

But the recent exhibition of Romanesque art emphasised the difficulty of ascribing nationality to metalwork, since both craftsmen and styles crossed the channel both ways. Two twelfth-century drinking cups found in a hoard on the island of Gotland, Sweden, are thought to be English work, one most unusually signed by a goldsmith called Simon working for a Slav patron called Zhalognev. Itinerant Limoges craftsmen visited England to make enamelled objects, like the Thomas à Becket chasse (box) on loan to the British Museum.⁷

Church Plate after the Norman Conquest

Virtually no secular silver and only a few liturgical pieces survive from before 1300. There is a gradual build-up of information from other sources – marginal drawings in manuscripts, for example – but only chalices and spoons provide more than a dozen examples before 1500. However, a fairly clear impression emerges of later medieval silver, that is after about 1400, even though it is impossible to be sure whether a given shape was new for its time, or already well established. Ironically, because of the depredations of Henry VIII and his son Edward, which required full inventories, more is known about ecclesiastical than about domestic silver; but even these descriptions can only push back the history of English plate half a century or so.

None of the early (pre-1400) chalices and cups now known survived the Reformation in church use; either they have been rediscovered in episcopal graves, or turned up as chance archaeological discoveries, or they were given later, perhaps preserved in a private family chapel. This position was reversed with domestic silver of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which has been preserved from refashioning only because it was given for church use.⁸

Several extraordinarily elaborate and beautiful chalices survive in Ireland, such as the Ardagh (eighth century) and the recently discovered Derrynaflan (early ninth century, found with a metal detector in 1980), but the finest medieval example made by an English goldsmith is the Dolgellau chalice and paten of about 1250, found by a country road in 1890 and now exhibited at the National Museum of Wales. This superb piece is unusual not only in its ornament (it is both engraved and embossed) but because it is signed ‘Nicol’us Me Fecit de Herfordie’; this is probably not the name of the goldsmith but of the dignitary, perhaps a bishop, who had the piece made. The largest group of medieval chalices to have been preserved are those found in bishops’ and archbishops’ graves, notably at York Minster, at S. David’s, at Salisbury, Canterbury and Chichester.⁹

However, these are usually simple in form and either made specifically for the burial rite or chosen as the plainest in the cathedral treasury or the bishop’s private chapel. They do not enable us to visualise the more elaborate chalices, monstrances, ewers and basins commonly used on the altars of the great cathedrals. The dry inventories of Henry VIII’s commissioners can be supplemented, for Canterbury at least, by an account of a visit there by the humanist Erasmus.¹⁰ He was particularly struck by the contents of the cathedral treasury, which were regularly shown both to pilgrims and to visitors with more secular interests; many of the items – relics and elaborate plate – he describes can be identified in inventories preceding his visit and at the time of dispersals a few years later. But most of the pre-Reformation church plate preserved is of no great artistic merit, standard items produced by goldsmiths to customary designs, as similarity between chalices from Coombe Keynes, Nettlecombe and the private chapel of the Bedingfield family, all of which date between the mid-fifteenth century and the 1530s, makes clear. Of rather higher quality is the late fifteenth-century cup from Lacock Abbey (on loan to the British Museum; Fig. 1), but this is secular in origin.

Common to these late medieval chalices are the bands of gilding to contrast with the burnished silver surface. It is clear from the Edward VI inventories that those who could afford it preferred gilt to white silver; a chalice gilt overall cost substantially more than one silver parcel (partly) gilt. Often additional ornament was added, such as an engraved panel on one cusp of the foot, normally showing a crucifixion. This cusped foot, on which there were six in-cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Photographic Credits
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part I History
• One Medieval
• Two Tudor
• Three Stuart
• Four Early Georgian
• Five Mid-Georgian to Regency
• Six From Victoria to the Present Day
• Part II Craft, Company and Customers
• Seven ‘Touch’, Assay and Hallmarking
• Eight Techniques of the Silversmith
• Nine London, the Country and the Colonies
• Part III Design and Ornament
• Ten Heraldry as Ornament
• Eleven Engraving and Engravers
• Twelve Alien Craftsmen and Imported Designs
• Part IV Silver and Society
• Thirteen Antiquaries, Collectors, Fakers
• Fourteen The Sociology of Silver: Gifts and Obligations
• Bibliography
• Index