When the Jewel was found, in 1693, it fell into the hands of persons who belonged both socially and intellectually to the foremost ranks. The first recorded owner was Colonel Nathaniel Palmer, of Fairfield House, in the region of the Quantocks. Of this house and this family some particulars will be related in the ninth chapter.
The first notice of the Jewel was published by Dr. Hans Sloane, a Fellow of the Royal Society, eminent as physician, natural philosopher, and antiquarian. He was elected Secretary of that Society in 1693, the year in which the Jewel was found. Whether by reason of the new cloud of political and religious trouble which brooded over the land in the latter years of James II, or from whatever cause, so it was that the Philosophical Transactions had been suspended for the past six years, and they were resuscitated by the new Secretary, who was himself an active contributor. This remarkable man lived to a great age, and when he died, in 1752, in his ninety-second year, his museum was bought by the Government, and this purchase was the origin of the British Museum; for until the middle of the eighteenth century the idea of a national library and museum had never been entertained in England.
The same Act of Parliament (26 Geo. II) which directed the purchase of the Sloane museum also directed the purchase of the Harleian collection of manuscripts which had been made by Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford, whose name is also memorable in the study of the Alfred Jewel; for it was from an engraving furnished by Robert Harley, and made from a drawing of his own, that the first of the three figures in Hickes’s Dissertatio Epistolaris was printed.
The first published notice of the Jewel appeared in the Philosophical Transactions (No. 247 in 1698), and it was contributed by Dr. William Musgrave, Fellow of New College, physician in London, and an active member of the Royal Society, and author (1709) of Antiquitates Britanno-Belgicæ. He also contributed to Hickes’s Thesaurus the second and third figures of the Jewel which are there engraved[8].
These were the eminent persons who prepared the material for the elaborate account which Hickes (1705) gave of the Alfred Jewel in the first volume of his Thesaurus. For the minutiæ of the description he was particularly indebted to Harley and Musgrave, who appear to have been occasional visitors at Fairfield House.
The first impression which prevailed as to its design and use was that it might be an amulet. This was Dr. Musgrave’s first opinion. But afterwards he followed Hickes in supposing it was a pendant to a chain or collar of state, and Hickes even says (but here he must be simply repeating the expressions of his informants) that the cross-pin in the socket seems adapted to such a use.
The boar’s snout is developed into a tubular ending which furnishes a socket with a cross-pin, manifestly asking a peg or (as artisans speak) a stert; and when this observation was maturely appreciated, it generated two inferences: (1) that there was no provision for attachment answering to the above theory; and (2) that in the position imagined, the picture would hang upside down.
These criticisms opened the way for new observations and new conjectures. The antiquary Hearne interpreted the Jewel as if it were designed to be fixed at the extremity of a roller on which a manuscript was rolled, as a suitable ornament for some ceremonious presentation. But this hypothesis neglected the fact that the Jewel is made with an obverse and a reverse, a front and a back, which renders it quite unfit for such a position as Hearne had assigned to it.
By Francis Wise and Samuel Pegge, chief antiquarians of the eighteenth century, it was imagined that our Jewel might have adorned the top of a stilus or ancient pen for writing upon a waxen tablet. In refutation of this theory it sufficed to observe how awkward and unwieldy an ornament it would prove to the penman.
Nevertheless, this idea had a career, winning a momentary plausibility from the assumption that Alfred’s ‘æstel’ was a stylus. In Archæologia ii there is a letter signed ‘S. Pegge,’ from which I extract the following:—