This ring of the Ten Maidens suggests the decade or rosary rings, of which so many specimens exist. Usually there were ten bosses or knobs, as the name indicates, but occasionally there were eleven, for counting ten Aves and a Pater. The earliest date Mr. Waterton is inclined to assign to rings of this type is the fourteenth century.[58] A so-called decade ring with twelve bosses is described in the catalogue of the Londesborough Collection.[59] Here the central knob is a tooth, opposite this is a piece of labradorite, while on either side are set two amethysts, a chrysoprase and an emerald, two jacinths, two turquoises, and two pearls. The twelfth knob stood for the creed. Sometimes, where there are eleven projections, ten paternosters and the creed were to be recited. A good example of a decade ring is one of silver in the British Museum. The ten projections for the paternosters are very marked and the eleventh, for the creed, which forms the bezel, has the form of a crucifix, the cross resting on three steps. This rises to a considerable relative height above the hoop. Such a ring could scarcely be worn with comfort, its liturgical use evidently being the paramount idea of the maker.[60]
The gold and silver chaplet rings, with a cross and ten beads or bosses in relief upon the hoop, were frequently used by the Knights of Malta, in the eighteenth century; indeed this type of ring is said to have been invented by them. Their use as substitutes for the less convenient chaplet was spreading, until in 1836 the matter was referred by Pope Gregory XVI to the tribunal of penitentiaries. Its decision, transmitted by the Cardinal Penitentiary Castracane, as to the question “whether the gold or silver rings, surrounded by ten bosses, which are used by some pious persons for the recitation of the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin, can be blessed with the appropriate indulgences,” was in the negative.[61]
The ring-money used by the ancient Gauls and Britons illustrates the employment of what might be ornamental objects as currency. An exceptionally fine specimen made of nearly pure gold was recently found by a farmer while he was ploughing a field near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England. Of course many or most of these rings were not worn but merely used as money.
A legal use of a sapphire ring to bind a bargain is recorded in a deed of gift, from about 1200 A.D., by a certain John Long to William Prohume, clerk, of land and houses in St. Martin’s Street, Exeter, at a rent of 6s 8d, which sum was to be donated to St. John’s Hospital in Exeter. The grantor acknowledges the receipt of 45 marks and of a gold ring set with a sapphire as the price of this lease on very favorable terms.[62]
Precious stones set in rings sometimes served to hide a “talisman” of a peculiar kind, namely, a dose of death-dealing poison, kept as a last resort to free the wearer of the ring from disgrace or from a worse death. So we are told that when Marcus Crassus stripped the Capitoline Temple of its treasures of gold, the faithful guardian broke between his teeth the stone set in his ring, swallowed the poison hidden beneath it, and immediately expired.[63] The great Hannibal, also, had recourse to the poison contained in his ring, when he was on the point of being given up to his bitter enemies, the Romans. Of this ring the satirist Juvenal wrote as follows: “Cannarum vindex et tanti sanguinis ultor Anulus,” or “That ring, the avenger of those who fell at Cannæ, and of so much blood that had been shed.” Another great man, the peerless orator Demosthenes, is said to have carried with him a similar ring. In a Rabbinical commentary on Deuteronomy occurs the following curious passage:
Hast thou then no ring? Suck it out and thou wilt die.
This has been explained as referring to a hollow ring filled with liquid poison.[64]
Some ancient gold rings were made hollow, so that they could be filled with mastic or brimstone, or an aromatic material. In the old “Oneirocriticon,” or “Dream Book” of Artemidorus, to see a ring of this kind in a dream portended treachery or deceit, as they enclosed something hidden from view, while a ring solidly wrought by the hammer was exactly what it purported to be.[65]
The poison-rings of the Borgias are not fabulous, for some of them still exist, one bearing the date 1503 and the motto of Cæsar Borgia in Old French, “Fays ce que doys avien que pourra” (Do your duty, happen what may). Beneath the bezel of this ring there is a sliding panel and when this is displaced there appears a small space where the poison was kept. Such rings simply afforded a ready supply of poison at need, but another type constituted a death-dealing weapon. It is curious to note how in a ring of this latter type the Renaissance goldsmith has combined an artistic idea with the nefarious quality of the jewel. The bezel is wrought into the shape of a lion, and the hollow claws of the animal admit the passage of a subtle poison concealed in a small reservoir back of the bezel. By a mechanical device the poison was pressed out of the cavity through the lion’s claws, and it is conjectured that the death-wound could have been inflicted by turning the bezel of the ring inward, so that a hearty grasp would produce a few slight punctures in the enemy’s hand.[66]
While these Borgia rings represent an extreme of diabolical ingenuity, the perfumed rings, the use of which has been revived to a certain extent of late, constitute a refinement of civilization. This ring is generally made of plain gold with a small elastic ball and valve at the back. This is squeezed flat and the ring is immersed in a perfumed liquid; when the pressure is removed the scent is drawn into the ring by suction. An ingenious adjustment renders it possible for the wearer to discharge a jet or spray of perfume by the exercise of a very trifling pressure. Not only perfumes but disinfectants also are sometimes used, and rings charged in this way may be said to represent antidotes of the dreaded poison rings, not perhaps in a literal sense, but at least in the sense of being curative rings.