Ivories Ancient and Mediæval

by William Maskell

The examples in the South Kensington collection were all made for private use, and the woodcut represents an Italian specimen, no. 2144. English family inventories from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, occasionally include combs of that kind. To name one only: the list of the effects of Roger de Mortimer at Wigmore castle, in the reign of Edward the second, specifies “j pecten de ebore.”

One half only of the mirror cases, speaking generally, has been preserved. It is very rare to find both covers. Originally, the mirror was fastened to one side, and the other slid over it or was unscrewed. No example of both parts is in the South Kensington collection, and only one (it is believed) in the British museum. People, as time went on, probably thought that an unornamented side was not worth taking care of.

We find the subjects sculptured on mirror cases to be almost always scenes from domestic life, or from some poem or romance. Naturally it would be so. The only exceptions among all the examples at South Kensington are two, on one of which is a representation of the Almighty Father and the dead Christ, on the other the message of David to Bathsheba. The rest, ten or twelve in number, have hunting and garden scenes, or players at chess, or assaults on the castle of Love. So it is also with the large collection of ivory mirror cases in the British museum.

The use of small mirrors is to be traced to the earliest historic period, and to be found among almost every people of the world. In the most ancient times they were commonly of metal; and it is believed that none, except of that material, has yet been found in any tomb of Egypt, or Greece, or Italy. These, unlike the mediæval mirror, had generally flat and broad handles, and the backs were often incised with various designs, mythological subjects, gods and goddesses, or from stories of the poets.

Many metallic mirrors have been found in Roman burial-places in England. Several are described in modern archæological publications; one especially curious, found in 1823 at Coddenham in Suffolk. This is important as an early example in respect of the smallness of its size and because it is enclosed in a case. It “is a portable trinket, consisting of a thin circular bronze case, divided horizontally into two nearly equal portions, which fit one into the other; and, being opened, it presents a convex mirror in each face of the interior.” The diameter is scarcely more than two inches, and on one side is the head of the emperor Nero.

Anglo-saxon mirrors have seldom been found. Two, both discovered in a barrow near Sandwich, are engraved in the Nenia Britannica. Mirrors were nevertheless commonly used by ladies at that time; and there is a letter preserved in Bede from pope Boniface IV. to Ethelberga, queen of Edwin of Northumbria in 625, wherein he requests her acceptance of an ivory comb and a silver mirror. Combs and mirrors are frequent on the sculptured stones of Scotland; they occur on more than fifty, according to a table given in the preface to the admirable work published by the Spalding club; and seven stones have representations of mirror cases.

Dr. Stuart in a short paper upon these sculptures, read before the International congress of prehistoric archæology in 1868, assigns to them a date not later than the seventh, eighth, or ninth century, and believes that the figures on the rude pillars may be of even an earlier date, before Christian times.

It is not known when glass covered at the back with lead was introduced in place of the earlier metallic mirror. Probably some of the cases which are in various collections were the covers of the new material. John Peckham, an Englishman, wrote in the middle of the thirteenth century a treatise on optics in which he speaks not only of steel mirrors but often of glass mirrors, and adds that when the lead was scraped off the back no image was reflected.

There is, or perhaps was 150 years ago, a curious coat of arms in a painted window of the fourteenth century, in the chancel of the church of Thame in Oxfordshire, on which was blazoned a mirror in a case with a handle attached to it. “He beareth argent,” says Guillim in his Display of heraldry, “a tyger passant, regardant, gazing in a mirror or looking-glass, all proper.... Some report, that those who rob the tiger of her young, use a policy to detain their dam from following them, by casting sundry looking-glasses in the way, whereat she useth long to gaze, etc.”