Perfume for a lady's chamber."
In Italy, we learn from an ancient chronicle, that ladies wore them made of bent gold coins, and that whistles, in the shape of a dragon, set with gold and pearls (probably to call servants), sometimes depended from them.
A picture of Joan of Navarre, wife of Henry IV., in whose reign necklaces were much worn by ladies, represents her wearing a collar of Esses.
A necklace on the ancient effigy of Lady Peyton, at Isleham Church, Cambridgeshire, is formed of pear-shaped stones or pearls, attached to a string or narrow band of gold, while another, represented in the Harleian MS., looks like a wreath of small stars, and was, in all probability, of the same precious metal.
In the Middle Ages, we read that the necklaces of women were set with jewels and stones; and that some, called serpents, from the fashion of them, were also in vogue; and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the necklaces of English ladies were arranged in the same manner as the rayed ones of the Romans.
Queen Elizabeth is always represented wearing strings of pearls, or jewelled carcanets, and the royal example appears to have been very generally followed by the dames of her realm, whose taste for a profusion of such ornaments has been handed down to us by the dramatists and other writers of the period; though in her reign, as in her father's, sumptuary laws were made to prevent persons below a certain rank from appearing in them.
Barclay, in his "Ship of Fools," printed A. D. 1508, speaks of some who had their necks
"Charged with collars and chains,
In golden withes."
And in a curious work called "The Four Pees," of John Heywood, written 1560, he makes the Peddler vaunt, amongst other vanities of women, "of all manner of beads." The penalty for wearing anything of gold or gilt about the neck, in Henry VIII.'s time, unless the wearer was a gentleman, or could prove that he possessed, over all charges, 200l. yearly value, was the forfeiture of the same; a regulation well calculated to maintain the restriction in fact.