EARLY SPECULATIONS ABOUT ITS DESIGN AND MANNER OF USE
The finding of the Alfred Jewel chanced upon a remarkable time in the
intellectual life of the English nation. It was the time of Dryden,
Defoe, Swift, Christopher Wren, Bentley, Lord Somers, Sir Isaac
Newton, Addison. In literature the coming man was Alexander Pope.
The cardinal event of that period was the institution of the Royal
Society in 1660, the year of the Restoration. The most conspicuous
bent of the intellectual world was in the direction of physical
science, and ‘the great work of interpreting nature was performed
by the English of that age as it had never before been performed in
any age by any nation[7].’ This was the period in which a national
Observatory was established at Greenwich (1676). To this period belong
the chemical discoveries of Boyle, the botanical researches of Sloane,
and the classifications of Ray. In every department of knowledge
enquiry was roused, and with it the genius of theory, whose movements
were sometimes hasty and erratic. But this tendency was gradually
counteracted by the deepening conviction that sound knowledge must
be based on careful observation, and the need of museums began to
be recognized. The Ashmolean Museum was built by the University of
Oxford, in 1683, to receive Elias Ashmole’s collection of curiosities,
the formation of which had originated with the Tradescants. The
architect was Sir Christopher Wren. Altogether it was a time of new
ideas and new institutions.
When the Jewel was found, in 1693, it fell into the hands of persons
who belonged both socially and intellectually to the foremost ranks.
The first recorded owner was Colonel Nathaniel Palmer, of Fairfield
House, in the region of the Quantocks. Of this house and this family
some particulars will be related in the ninth chapter.
The first notice of the Jewel was published by Dr. Hans Sloane,
a Fellow of the Royal Society, eminent as physician, natural
philosopher, and antiquarian. He was elected Secretary of that Society
in 1693, the year in which the Jewel was found. Whether by reason of
the new cloud of political and religious trouble which brooded over
the land in the latter years of James II, or from whatever cause, so
it was that the _Philosophical Transactions_ had been suspended for
the past six years, and they were resuscitated by the new Secretary,
who was himself an active contributor. This remarkable man lived to a
great age, and when he died, in 1752, in his ninety-second year, his
museum was bought by the Government, and this purchase was the origin
of the British Museum; for until the middle of the eighteenth century
the idea of a national library and museum had never been entertained
in England.
The same Act of Parliament (26 Geo. II) which directed the purchase
of the Sloane museum also directed the purchase of the Harleian
collection of manuscripts which had been made by Robert Harley, first
Earl of Oxford, whose name is also memorable in the study of the
Alfred Jewel; for it was from an engraving furnished by Robert Harley,
and made from a drawing of his own, that the first of the three
figures in Hickes’s _Dissertatio Epistolaris_ was printed.
The first published notice of the Jewel appeared in the _Philosophical
Transactions_ (No. 247 in 1698), and it was contributed by Dr. William
Musgrave, Fellow of New College, physician in London, and an active
member of the Royal Society, and author (1709) of _Antiquitates
Britanno-Belgicæ_. He also contributed to Hickes’s _Thesaurus_ the
second and third figures of the Jewel which are there engraved[8].
These were the eminent persons who prepared the material for the
elaborate account which Hickes (1705) gave of the Alfred Jewel in the
first volume of his _Thesaurus_. For the minutiæ of the description he
was particularly indebted to Harley and Musgrave, who appear to have
been occasional visitors at Fairfield House.
The first impression which prevailed as to its design and use was
that it might be an amulet. This was Dr. Musgrave’s first opinion.
But afterwards he followed Hickes in supposing it was a pendant to a
chain or collar of state, and Hickes even says (but here he must be
simply repeating the expressions of his informants) that the cross-pin
in the socket seems adapted to such a use.
The boar’s snout is developed into a tubular ending which furnishes
a socket with a cross-pin, manifestly asking a peg or (as artisans
speak) a stert; and when this observation was maturely appreciated,
it generated two inferences: (1) that there was no provision for
attachment answering to the above theory; and (2) that in the position
imagined, the picture would hang upside down.
These criticisms opened the way for new observations and new
conjectures. The antiquary Hearne interpreted the Jewel as if it
were designed to be fixed at the extremity of a roller on which a
manuscript was rolled, as a suitable ornament for some ceremonious
presentation. But this hypothesis neglected the fact that the Jewel is
made with an obverse and a reverse, a front and a back, which renders
it quite unfit for such a position as Hearne had assigned to it.
By Francis Wise and Samuel Pegge, chief antiquarians of the eighteenth
century, it was imagined that our Jewel might have adorned the top of
a stilus or ancient pen for writing upon a waxen tablet. In refutation
of this theory it sufficed to observe how awkward and unwieldy an
ornament it would prove to the penman.
Nevertheless, this idea had a career, winning a momentary plausibility
from the assumption that Alfred’s ‘æstel’ was a stylus. In
_Archæologia_ ii there is a letter signed ‘S. Pegge,’ from which I
extract the following:—
‘It is not certainly known to what use this valuable curiosity ...
might be put: but among other conjectures Mr. Wise imagines, and
very probably, it might have been the handle of a stylus. And if
one should say it was one of those styli which the king sent along
with his translation of Gregory’s _Pastoral_, it would be no great
absurdity.... It may here be alleged that the king sent his present
to the cathedral churches: but, with submission, this does not imply
that he might not also send the like to the two monasteries of his
own foundation, this of Athelney and the other at Shaftesbury; it is
most probable he would send a book and a stylus to both those places,
and if he did, this jewel in my opinion bids fair to be the handle or
upper part of the stylus which was presented by him to the House of
Athelney where it was found.’
Collinson, the historian of Somersetshire (1791), in a passage to
be quoted below (chapter ix), designates it an amulet, and this was
probably the way in which it was usually regarded in the eighteenth
century. To this Pegge (in the article cited above) objected as
follows: ‘Dr. Musgrave once thought it might be an Amulet, but Alfred
never ran (that we know of) into such vanities.’
Passing now to the nineteenth century, Mr. Philip Duncan, in his
Catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum, advanced the theory that it might
have been mounted on the top of a staff (after the manner of a Roman
eagle), and that it was carried into battle as a standard to animate
the courage of warriors. This exquisite bijou, of materials so brittle
as enamel and crystal, cased in a delicate web of golden filigree,
looks strangely inappropriate for the fury of battle and the
interchange of hard knocks.
And indeed this theory was never suggested to its author by the reason
or probability of the thing, but by certain texts which at that time
were in better esteem than they are now, especially the hagiography of
St. Neot, wherein it was said of this saint that he went before the
king in war, carrying a palm and guiding him to victory, to all which
the palm-bearing figure in the Enamel seemed to correspond. And this
also explains why that figure was supposed to represent St. Neot.
In like manner, Hickes was carried away by a passage in pseudo-Ingulph
to abandon his first and best interpretation of the enamelled Figure,
and to adopt the idea that it may have been intended to represent St.
Cuthbert[9].
All these speculations on the design and use of the Jewel are
unsatisfactory and, considering the eminence and ability of the
propounders, strangely poor in the craft of interpretation. If this
surprizes us in an age when the minds of men were so much awakened, we
should remember that the new movement was chiefly in the direction of
physical science, and that little progress had as yet been made in the
analysis of human history and the science of historical criticism.
From these abortive attempts at interpretation, we gather that this
singularly elaborate phenomenon of a Jewel had the effect of setting
curiosity and imagination awork in the minds of those who contemplated
it, and that some theory, however precipitate, became a sort of
necessity. To this category must be added a more recent conjecture,
which, as it proceeded from a highly honoured source, as it was
persistently and circumstantially argued out, and as it has been
widely accepted, demands a chapter by itself.
[7] Macaulay, _History_, c. iii.
[8] Appendix A.
[9] Appendix B.