The Alfred Jewel. Earle John

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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