Less common today, but used throughout Europe for centuries, is the reliquary ring. This band bears a small cabinet, case, compartment, or box, usually elaborately carved and bejeweled, within which was a splinter of the True Cross or the holy relic of a martyred saint.
We shall speak later of the wedding ring, which while a social is also a religious symbol. Annually on Ascension Day the Doge of Venice sets a wedding ring onto a finger of the sea, to denote that the Adriatic is servant to the city just as a wife is to her mate.
Practical Rings
From earliest times, too, rings have been enlisted for more prosaic duties. Signet rings have served romantic ends in history and legend, as well as supplying the king’s or the merchant’s identifying seal. Noblemen slain in battle have oftentimes been identified by their rings, which bore the crests of their noble houses. Until recently every Chinese scholar and mandarin wore a ring, or carried a little ornamented bar of ivory or jade, topped with intaglio symbols that stamped his name. Such stamps are to be seen on many paintings, and at the end of passages of calligraphy.
The practice of sealing envelopes with stamped wax is no longer a widespread western custom, and even red tape has lost its redder seal; hence the signet ring, once most common among men, has been largely replaced by rings bearing the insignia of a high school or college class or a fraternal order.
Among other practical uses of finger rings may be mentioned their use as money by the Gauls and other tribes of northern Europe. Women have had mirrors set in their rings, to give them constant glimpses of beauty—or a chance for quick repair. In eighteenth-century England and later—my grandfather wore one—were rings capped with a little hammer to press the tobacco down in pipes.
And there were rings for fighting. Roman gladiators added iron rings to the power of their fists, sometimes even enlarging these with a bar across the entire back of the hand, held by a leather thong across the palm—predecessors of the infamous “brass knuckles.”
Poison Rings
Even more sinister, though mainly obsolete except in spy stories, is the murderous poison ring. In some such rings, the poison could be ejected through a tiny aperture in a point of the design, as in the lion’s claw of a ring of Cesare Borgia’s. This point would normally be on the side of the ring at the back of the hand, but it would be slipped around to the palm outstretched to shake the hand of the unsuspecting victim. A firm pressure of greeting became at once goodbye.