Chats on Old Copper and Brass

by Fred. W. Burgess

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.

Arms and Armour.

A volume might well be taken up with describing mediæval arms and armour. It is true iron and steel are the chief metals in the making of weapons, but brass and bronze are closely allied with some of the armaments of war. Many of the small mediæval cannon were of brass, and not a few of the guns, or "hand cannon," were of that metal.

In the days of Elizabeth the musketeer carried, in addition to an unwieldy weapon, his flask of powder, touch-box, and burning match. The match-box was a tube of copper pierced with small holes, and in it the lighted match could be conveyed safely. The powder-horn was at first of real horn, but in time it became a copper flask. Many of the old flasks were exceedingly ornate, and were often ornamented with hunting scenes worked up in repoussé on the copper sides. The spur-makers were important craftsmen in early days, and under the name of the Guild of Loriners ranked with the City companies. It is true that the spur rowels of six, eight, or even twelve points were generally of iron, but the collector of metal finds many interesting specimens made entirely of brass. One pair of spurs in the reign of Henry VIII consist of fourteen brass points, the neck of the rowel being shaped like a peacock and embossed with brass rosettes. Our finest collection of armour and of ceremonial metal-work—that splendid collection which dates from quite early times, finding its greatest strength and massive grandeur in late mediæval days and its artistic ornament in the richly damascened armour of lesser weight of the Stuarts—is rightly housed in that greatest of English strongholds, the Tower of London. It is there that the antiquary and the archæologist love to wander, and in the vast recesses of those dungeons and prison-like towers read history. There is an abundance of metal everywhere. Guns and cannon and mortars of historic fame lie about in the open. The Bloody Tower, nearly opposite the Traitors' Gate, the Middle Tower, the Byward Tower, and many others of equal interest may be seen. To some the Regalia with its crowns, swords, and sceptres of state, ampulla, spoon, salt-cellars, maces, and orders of merit, are the greatest attraction. The curio collector, however, finds his way to the museum and admires and perhaps envies the quaint and curious guns, powder-horns, and trophies of war. He is in the midst of the England of the Middle Ages, with its jousts and tournaments, shut out by the thick walls of the White Tower from the hurry and bustle of the traffic and commerce of the twentieth century.