Pins Can Be Fun: Brooches

The Cheddar Brooch, From The Museum of Somerset, Recently Recovered

Capes, we can all agree, are cool. So are shawls or scarfs. But how do you get them to stay in place?

Brooches: The Jewelry

Brooches are a classic example of jewelry being made from necessity and lasting as long they are needed. Metal pins to hold clothes in place first showed up in the bronze age, and these became the brooches that are a staple of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Viking-era graves. The Cheddar Brooch that is depicted above is from Alfred the Great’s reign, and three brooches were found in a grave in Germany that dates back to 300 to 400 BC. A pretty neat square brooch that was discovered recently dates back to 1250 to 1400. (AD- so about 600 to 800 years ago.)

Their ubiquity is kind of inevitable. If you are living in the ancient and medieval times, you don’t want to put a permanent hole in the cloak that you paid nearly a third of your yearly income to get your hands on. You need the folds to hang just right, and you need the darn thing to stay on your shoulders in order to do its job. However, buttons wouldn’t be invented for a thousand years. (In the 1500’s, in fact,) and you already have tied everything that can be tied, including your underwear, which is being held up by a string called a brail. (I think that’s how it’s spelled. I know I spelled it right when Magda confronts Brynhild with Karl’s braies in ‘The Crimes Along the Arunder.’ But maybe I’ve forgotten the spelling since.)

Design

The standard design for the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, into the early Middle Ages, was the penannular. A pin tucked behind a metal ring with a small gap in it. You moved the pin behind the gap, stuck the pin through the cloth in the way you wanted it to hang, and then twisted the pin from the gap. Think safety pin with a front. To unpin it, you twisted the pin back to the gap and slipped it off the cloth.

A similar idea from Celtic times used a pin with no ring. All sorts of shapes could be closed over the pins: two-headed shapes called dragon-esque, heads, goddesses, horses, you name it. These designs are called ‘long’ designs because they form horizontal lines, as opposed to the more common ‘circular’ designs that came with the penannular brooches.

These rings could come in a variety of materials and looks. Alfred the Great would have gold and silver brooches. Poorer folks would have iron, copper alloy, bronze, and tin.

Uses

And everyone had a couple of these brooches. Women wore matching pairs of them, one on each shoulder, and men wore one on their left shoulder.

They quickly got more uses. Celtic folks would give brooches depicting goddesses as amulets to the pregnant to protect them. Children got similar protective brooches. Wealthy folks had fancy versions made with beads and gems on them.

They became jewelry for marriage. While wedding rings started appearing in the 1100’s, they weren’t the be-all in wedding jewelry for a long time, and wedding brooches were given from the groom to the bride. One groom in the 1400’s described it as symbolizing how the bride’s heart was ‘trapped’ and proving how chaste she was. (I wanted to have one of my characters get one for his wife after years of marriage because they had married hurriedly, but it probably doesn’t matter. Bigitte would have plenty of bronze or iron brooches as a minor noblewoman and butler. Probably silver too, since Augston produces a bunch of silver.)

Starting in the 1600’s, brooches were handed out for deaths, to memorialize people who have passed. They hit their peak of popularity in the 1800’s.

Why Not Many Brooches Now?

We don’t wear a lot of cloaks these days, which we can all agree is a darn shame.

More importantly, we have buttons, Velcro, metal hooks built into clothes, and zippers. Brooches are not as important.

That does not mean you can’t find them. They have made a small come back as fun decorations or a way to keep a shawl in place. You can find them in antique stores and on Etsy. In fact, when I went looking for information on brooches today, the very first return on Google was a sale for ‘medieval brooches’ on Amazon and Etsy. We live in quite the world.

Anyway, enjoy the Cheddar Brooch.

Source:

A history of brooches: the style evolution of a classic jewel | The Jewellery Editor

Cheddar Brooch — The Museum of Somerset (swheritage.org.uk)

Rosalie’s Medieval Woman — Weddings (rosaliegilbert.com)

Celtic Brooches — World History Encyclopedia

Beautiful medieval brooches discovered in England and Wales — Medievalists.net