Ornamental Trinkets.
The household ornaments, trinkets, and little articles of personal adornment which have been preserved tell not only of female vanity but of masculine love of ornament. It would appear that the use of bronze lingered on for centuries after it had nominally been displaced by brass; especially was that the case in decorative objects and metal ornament. The metals known as bronze, copper, and brass are, however, much intermixed in their use.
The objects which can be collected include brooches, rings, pins, needles, bodkins, and thimbles of brass. Buckles are very numerous, and varied in form; some are heart-shaped, others have ends cut out to form a trefoil and are decorated with a pierced fleur-de-lis. The story of the pin, the smallest and yet the most used metal object preserved, is very interesting. At one time it was made by hand from brass wire, the head being twisted round and round until it had the appearance of a solid knob. The Pinners were in years gone by an important guild, and in 1376 returned two men to the Common Council of London. In the reign of Henry VII an Act of Parliament was passed compelling the Pinners to solder fast to the shank the head of the pin, and directing that the pin itself should be "smooth, rounded, filed, and sharpened." Very laborious indeed must have been the making of pins in those days. There were pins, however, of an earlier date, for it is recorded that on one occasion when the men of Athens had gone out to battle only one returned. He was met by an infuriated mob of women, who were so enraged at the loss of their husbands that Herodotus tells us they pulled the pins out from their garments and stabbed him to death. There were bronze pins in Rome, too, and we are told that even the safety-pin of to-day is by no means new, for among the collectable objects in brass are prehistoric safety-pins.
Half a century ago, when little girls went to school they carried with them the inevitable pin poppet, some of which receptacles for pins and other similar sundries were of wood, but many were brass; some met with among old metal curios are quite handsomely decorated. Another indispensable object is the button, so many of which are of metal, many decorative, some inscribed, and others ornamented with portraits. There are little brass sleeve-links, worn in Tudor days, to be met with, and some curious brass studs which were worn by men in the shirt fronts of the early Georgian period. There are clasps of purses and books and casket mounts of brass, some of which date back to the fifteenth century. The older mounts of purses, so-called, would be more correctly described as the mounts of gipcieres; the gipciere was a kind of pouch formerly worn at the girdle; the name is also spelled gipser:
"A gipser all of silk
Hung at his girdle white as morné silk."
Chaucer.
Sometimes the mounts were inscribed with mottoes; one found in Brooks' Wharf, London, believed to be of fourteenth-century workmanship, is inscribed "CREATOREM CELI ET TERRE ET IN IESVM." Other objects in brass are girdle ends, some of which are shaped like acorns and others are of ivy-leaf design. Among ornamental bronzes which can be worn, and in larger sizes hung upon the wall, there are plaques, many of the earliest being copied from antique gems. Plaquettes in bronze were common in the sixteenth century.