From beginning of jewellery to modern ‘plague’ of fakes

A JEWELLERY historian from Henley has written a book to share his extensive knowledge.

Dr Jack Ogden has been fascinated with jewellery-making all his life.

He is an elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and founder of the Society of Jewellery Historians. His partner is former town councillor Sara Abey, who is a gem historian.

Now he has published Jewelry Technology in the Ancient and Medieval World, an illustrated guide to jewellery technology from the Bronze Age to the late Middle Ages.

Jack says: “This book is a summary of the mental detritus of
60-odd years put into some sort of narrative.

“It is something I’ve been messing around with all my life, I suppose. I started quite young as I was interested in archaeology from about the age of seven and my family was involved in the jewellery world and so it sort of mutated across.

“My great grandfather actually founded a jewellery business in Yorkshire which is still going.

“He was a keen amateur archaeologist and had odd bits and bobs he’d collected. Because I showed an interest at a young age, some of these were pushed in my direction and they just sort of fuelled the fire, I suppose.”

The book reflects on the evolution of jewellery-making into the designs we might recognise today. Jack says: “If some ancient Egyptian goldsmith had travelled forward a few centuries to a Greek one, they would have recognised most things and a Greek one travelling forward into an early medieval time would have recognised most techniques and so on.

“The really huge change came with the Industrial Revolution, so it’s a sort of continuum.

“Then, of course, there’s the fakes. Most of my working life has been working as a consultant, advising auction houses and museums around the world, and the number of fakes in the gold world is staggering.”

Jack says modern technology is being used to replicate valuable ancient artefacts and create a “plague of fakes”.

One way of checking authenticity is through hallmarking, which began about 600 years ago so is “relatively recent”.

“There was some sort of quality control in Greek and Roman times but it’s very difficult to get any kind of literary evidence for it,” says Jack. “You couldn’t control gold in an official sense until you could control what the purity was to start with.

“I mean, you couldn’t sort of hang somebody for selling substandard gold if there was no means of producing pure gold or telling if it was pure or not.

“Again, there’s a continuum between using gold as it came out of the ground and discovering how you could refine it, taking out all the other stuff that’s with it, leaving pure gold.

“Then they found out pure gold was too soft so they alloyed something else with it to make it a bit harder for use and so on.

“The book talks a bit about how gems were set but I’ve written quite a lot over the years on gem history.

“One that ruffled a lot of feathers was the so-called Black Prince’s Ruby in the Crown Jewels, the bloody great red stone.

“It’s not a ruby, it’s actually a spinel, and they’ve known that for years. It was given to the Black Prince and it was worn by Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt and all this stuff you read in the books, that’s all bull. There’s nothing substantiated at all.

“It was actually a tentative suggestion in the 18th century and it has been taken as gospel ever since.”

• Jewelry Technology in the Ancient and Medieval World by Dr Jack Ogden is available from all good bookshops priced at £60.