Today we're going to be looking at this Tudortastic piece of bling.
It was found completely unexpectedly at the end of 2019 in a field.
One of the parts of my job here at the Museum is to answer questions about how an object
like this was made, when and for whom.
I'm going to look at the clues that I've been using to get answers to those questions.
My name is Rachel King I'm curator of Renaissance Europe and the Waddesdon Bequest here at the
British Museum and welcome to my corner.
Today we've got the exceptional opportunity to look at this sensational object.
You might have heard about it through the press.
It's a really recent find which has come to us through the Portable Antiquities Scheme.
It weighs just under 350 grams, it's a pendant in the shape of a heart with a chain of 75
links.
It was found in December 2019 by a gentleman named Charlie Clarke a metal detectorist working
in Warwickshire.
He was working over the field when he heard the sound on his machine that indicated there
will be something special in the ground below him.
And as he began to dig he saw the shine of gold.
He says he had to reach in up to his elbow and then he pulled this out.
Can you imagine the feeling that that must have given him?
In the Museum as well, we were pretty surprised to see something of this type.
Charlie did the right thing according to the treasure process and he took it to his local
Finds Liaison Officer.
The Finds Liaison Officer investigated the object initially for him and then it came
to London to the British Museum.
The British museum was absolutely the right place for something like this to come because
we have a range of expertise here in-house that allowed us to investigate the piece and
to think more carefully about when this could have been made for whom and why.
A quick aside.
Before we carry on we need to introduce you all to a concept that archaeologists use to
work out the date of an object.
It involves identifying something we call Terminus dates.
Or if you know your Latin a Terminus post quem - the earliest possible date an object
could have been made and a Terminus ante quem.
The latest possible date an object could have been made.
Rachel's job is to use each element of the pendant to reduce the gap between the two
Terminus dates until she's left with the smallest plausible period of time that the pendant
could have been made in.
For now our Terminus ante quem is pretty easy to work out the pendant was found in December
2019 and so must have been made before this date.
Everything else is still unknown.
Back to you Rachel!
It's a bit of a detective story and we take a number of different approaches we look at
it scientifically, we look at its manufacture and its construction we'll look at materials
and we'll look at what we can glean about the history of the object from reading the
object.
We also read lots of books.
So let's take a look at some of the clues that this object gives us about itself.
Let's begin with the heart pendant at the base.
You can see a domed heart around that a border of twisted ribbon.
In the centre we have a motif which is a red and white rose superimposed entwined with
a pomegranate.
And then we have a banner stretching across the bottom with a text ‘tous jour’.
Some of these motifs mean something in particular you might already know the red and white rose
that's the symbol of the Tudor Dynasty and is used by them after 1485.
The pomegranate here is a symbol used by Katherine of Aragon and they're entwined.
Things like this tend to be a reference to a union in this case the union between the
Tudor Dynasty and the Dynasty of Aragon.
More specifically the marriage of Henry the 8th and Katherine of Aragon.
If I turn the object over on the back, there's a very specific clue you might have already
asked why am I saying Henry because Katherine was married to Henry's older brother first
but of course here we have the h Henry and the K of Katherine and they're knitted together
by a white ribbon which ends in these natty little tassels that have the effect of being
like thistle heads.
And again down at the bottom here the banner which says
That's the first slew of clues that we want to investigate I've implied that those related
to Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon but essentially I could make a heart today if
I were skilled enough like this and I could decorate it with all of these motifs.
Motifs are one thing but they don't get you down to that very specific moment in time
and in the Museum here we have scientific Laboratories and our colleagues working there
are able to apply a number of different techniques to an object like this.
It's they who can test the surface purity of the metal they can identify the metal in
this case as I've already said it's gold and we know it's between 23 and 24 carats.
So very high purity there were certain expectations of goldsmiths working under the reign of Henry
VIII they had to produce objects of a certain gold quality so although we can't tell where
the gold came from to make this object or when it was mined we can look at the purity
of the object and see whether that's consistent with what we would expect a Goldsmith to be
making from that period.
By and large it's generally accepted that an object from this period should be of high
quality gold.
Conveniently this object is of high quality gold, however when the object came into the
museum we realized there wasn't very much data out there so we did a wholesale survey
of English-made objects from around this period that are already in the British Museum's collection
and we happened to find out that almost no object conforms to what the real standards
were.
So this object's somewhat of an outlier in that circumstance.
We can also test the colourful decoration on the object we call this enamelling.
It's a glass-based decoration and you can see white and red and amber colour and on
the back there's a little bit of black.
We look at the recipes that were used to make them both in books and manuscripts that survive
from the period but also through analysis for an object that would be from the time
of Henry VIII.
We have certain expectations of what those recipes should contain and in this case the
scientists here were able to demonstrate that the contents of the enamels here are consistent
with what we would think about for this period but more specifically particularly when it
came to the black enamels a specialist in the Museum here was able to demonstrate that
those black enamels would very likely have been made before 1530.
Now that's very good for this object because Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon were married
between 1509 and their marriage was annulled in 1533.
What's particularly interesting about this object though some of it's made in a very
high quality way and other parts of it are made in the rather slap dash cobbled together
manner.
In fact one of the questions we had was, is this a whole object or is this two pieces
which have been brought together?
And there seems to be a significant difference in quality of workmanship between the pendant
and the chain.
Now which one do you think is better than the other?
In fact it's the chain which is significantly better than the heart this chain is made of
75 individual links each link is fed through four other links it allows the chain to lie
flat at all times it stops it becoming tangled.
Each link is individually soldered into place.
You might know this form of chain already it's what we call in modern English, a curb
chain.
The type of chain that you often have for a handbag or you might also see it on the
bare skins if you see The Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace.
This type of chain means that there's a lot of gold used in a very, very small space,
and in fact of the 350 grams that this object makes up about 300 grams are in the chain
and only 50 grams in the heart.
How do we know that the chain and the heart are made at the same time?
Well again that comes back down to consistency, the enamels which are used on the heart and
the enamels which are used on the hand are not only consistent with the period we expect,
but they're also consistent with one another.
So it's either the case that whoever enamelled the heart enamelled the hand or that the people
who enamelled heart and hand were working from the same recipe or they might even have
been working in the same workshop.
Whatever is the case they shared some type of knowledge.
We wanted to look at other ways of dating the object and as I've already said for the
heart motifs are one important way to do that so let's say something about the hand as a
motif.
It took us a long time to identify a source for this hand but we're happy to say that
we found an image that we believe might have inspired the crafts person.
In the middle of the 1510s a book printer and publisher working in Basel his name is
Johan Froben develops the symbol for his printing press.
Froben's symbol was a hand with cuff, emerging from a cloud and the hand is in a fist shape.
When Froben is publishing his books this symbol is being spread all across Europe.
Books were very important and expensive things at this time of course but if you were a scholar
you would have been acquainted with the works of Erasmus of Rotterdam or someone like Thomas
Moore and Froben was their publisher.
How did the Goldsmith come to know the motif?
Well we don't know the answer for that it could be because whoever asked the Goldsmith
to make this piece supplied the types of motifs they wanted to have it could be because the
Goldsmith themselves perhaps came from Europe and many goldsmiths also worked with Publishers
and printers to engrave for them so that their books could be Illustrated it could be that
the Goldsmith was fairly learned and had access to books of this type anyway there are a number
of avenues still to explore but whatever is the case we can certainly date this hand as
a motif to somewhere around 15 15 16 17 and available in England around that time as well.
We started to look at manuscript sources archival sources accounts of Henry's Court.
There's a lot about how Henry spent his money.
His father had been very frugal and Henry inherited huge sums.
He liked to splash the cash.
He liked to have a party and there were many celebrations throughout the year.
We found in 1521 an account tilt yard which is like a jousting place at Greenwich one
of the king's palaces and the account says that they're tidying up after a joust which
had happened at Shrove tide that year.
And one of the things that they're starting to wonder about whether to keep or to get
rid of are a series of horses bards and these horses bards are decorated with a hand emerging
from a cloud and the Hand emerging from a cloud is holding entwined bows of roses and
pomegranates and letters H and K interlaced together.
So with that in hand we think we've narrowed it down further and we'd like to suggest that
this object might have been made in the context of one of these entertainments.
Because the motifs on this object are so similar to the motifs which are recorded as being
on the horse decoration.
We've been through all of the inventories and other surviving documentation for Henry
VIII and his wife Katherine of Aragon and it's fair to say in comparison with the type
of objects that Henry had Katherine for that matter too this object much as it weighs nearly
350 grams is pretty puny in comparison.
It's likely that somebody who belonged to the upper nobility or who was a high-ranking
courtier could have afforded an object such as this they were in the pay of Henry so in
this effect Henry is the paymaster for everything but we haven't been able to demonstrate that
Henry himself directly had this made or that Henry and Katherine were the wearers of something
like this.
It was an expensive object in its time and if you were for example Master of the mint
which would be something of the equivalent of the Chancellor of the Exchequer today an
object like this may have cost you half your annual salary.
These are all ideas and we're feeling our way towards understanding this object still
it was found three years ago in 2019 and it came into the museum in 2020 we're in 2023
now
it's very likely it'll take us just as long again if not longer to really understand this
and hopefully with time we'll also begin to understand how and why this came to be in
Warwickshire in a field.
If you think this is over the top then wait until you see some of the other things I've
got the privilege of looking after here at the Museum you can see some of my other videos
here.