The Middle Ages was a period that spanned approximately 1000 years and is normally restricted to Europe and the Byzantine Empire. The surviving material remains from that time, including jewelry, can vary greatly depending on the place and time of their creation, especially as Christianity discouraged the burial of jewelry as grave goods, except for royalty and important clerics, who were often buried in their best clothes and wearing jewels. The main material used for jewelry design in antiquity and leading into the Middle Ages was gold. Many different techniques were used to create working surfaces and add decoration to those surfaces to produce the jewelry, including soldering, plating and gilding, repoussé, chasing, inlay, enameling, filigree and granulation, stamping, striking and casting. Major stylistic phases include barbarian, Byzantine, Carolingian and Ottonian, Viking, and the Late Middle Ages, when Western European styles became relatively similar.
Most styles and techniques used in jewelry for personal adornment, the main subject of this article, were also used in pieces of decorated metalwork, which was the most prestigious form of art through most of this period; these were often much larger. Most surviving examples are religious objects such as reliquaries, church plate such as chalices and other pieces, crosses like the Cross of Lothair, and treasure bindings for books. However this is largely an accident of survival, as the church has proved much better at preserving its treasures than secular or civic elites, and at the time there may well have been as many secular objects made in the same styles. For example, the Royal Gold Cup, a secular cup though decorated with religious imagery, is one of a handful of survivals of the huge collections of metalwork ("jewels") owned by the Valois dynasty who ruled France in the late Middle Ages.
In addition to basic forms of personal jewelry such as rings, necklaces, bracelets, and brooches that remain in use today, medieval jewelry often includes a range of other forms less often found in modern jewelry, such as fittings and fasteners for clothes including, buckles, "points" for the end of laces, and buttons by the end of the period, as well as hat badges, decorations for belts, weapons, purses and other accessories, and decorated pins, mostly for holding hairstyles and head-dresses in place. Neck chains carried a variety of pendants, from crosses (the most common) to lockets and elaborate pieces with gems. Thin "fillets" or strips of flexible gold sheet, often decorated, were probably mostly sewn into hair or head-dresses. Arm-rings ("armillae") and sometimes ankle-rings were also sometimes worn, and sometimes (for the very rich) many small pieces of jewelry were sewn into the cloth of garments forming patterns.
Social implications Jewelry was used in different ways as a very important marker of identity such as social status. Additionally, it served as an indicator of wealth, literacy, and faith. For example, aristocratic families used jewelry to re-enforce their rank by wearing an emblem of the lineage that they belonged to.
Reliquary jewelry Additionally, wearing jewelry sold near pilgrimage sites or containing relics was a way to for those who have voyaged to display piety. Many times this looked like a pendant cross that contained a souvenir from their journey. Pilgrims also took such souvenirs from these sites, usually oils or pieces of earth, in hopes that they would protect them on their journey back home and improve the quality of their prayers. Typically, these pendants were hinged at the top and were worn around the neck as amulets. One example of this type of necklace being a reliquary cross from the Medieval Byzantine period from around 1100–1200 AD.
Medicinal amulets and gems Similarly, some precious stones in the Middle Ages were thought to have medicinal benefits. For example, certain jewels were worn by pregnant women to ensure a safe pregnancy and delivery as death through childbirth was common. Sapphires were attributed with certain magical properties that were used to detect fraud, cure snakebites, and expel witchcraft. Other materials such as coral, fossils, and teeth were worn to fight disease. In Italy, there was a practice of coral worn around the neck of infants to imitate pictures of Christ wearing coral as a child. Gems were chosen by wearers based on the healing powers they were thought to have had as well as the associated meanings behind their color and size. Lapidaries were an extremely popular type of work in the Middle Ages, and listed the many medical and quasi-magical powers attributed to gems, as well as their religious symbolism and sometimes their astrological significance.
Viking jewelry For the Vikings, a group of peoples that were constantly exposed to conflict and social tensions, women used clothing and jewelry to express a sense of belonging to a particular social, political, tribal, or other form of group. Because of this, the investigation of the distribution of decorative items used by Norse woman such as brooches and clasps can be used to interpret tensions between regions. For example, the disappearance of a pattern of jewelry distribution that suggests a united identity across a territory can suggest uneasy social or political conditions in that area.
Social status A way to distinguish rank through the use of jewelry was by observing the difference in materials that people wore. For example, jewelry obtained by the lower class typically was made of base metals such as copper, while higher class individuals such as royalty often wore gold and precious gems. In the 13th century, jewelry became the province of aristocratic and noble houses, as merchants gained the wealth to purchase luxury goods, resulting in sumptuary laws prohibiting commoners from wearing jewelry with precious stones, pearls and excess amounts of gold or silver. This was in an effort to keep a distinction between the socially elite and those who displayed jewelry that suggested a deceivingly higher rank than they occupied. An example of this regulation being a fifteenth century law from Germany that prohibited women from displaying more than one gold chain at a time.
By the end of the period, the types of personal jewelry worn by wealthy women were not very different from those found today, with rings, necklaces, brooches, lockets and (less often) earrings all popular. But accessories such as belts and purses, as well as other personal possessions such as combs and book-covers might also be jeweled in a way rarely found today. Poorer women wore smaller quantities of similar styles of personal jewelry in cheaper materials, as today. Wealthy men wore far more jewelry than today, often including large chain collars, and a cap badge, which might be very extravagant.
Raw materials
Precious metals Gold has held the fascination of humans for thousands of years. By the end of the fourth millennium BCE it was already being worked and refined with great technical skill. Many ancient goldsmiths used alloyed gold found in nature, as it does not often occur naturally. Alloyed gold can be purified through a process called refining, and due to the Hittite derivation of the Greek word, it is believed that the ancient peoples of Asia Minor were the first to refine gold. Ignoring its beauty and the possible association with the sun's perceived mystical powers, the main advantage of using gold to create jewelry was its malleability.
The Romans were voracious producers and consumers of gold, and all but exhausted European deposits. Some gold mined in West Africa, more at the end of the period, probably reached Europe through the Islamic world, but the main source was undoubtedly ancient Roman gold that remained above ground in coin or object form, or was recovered from buried hoards. Gold ran short at several periods, and European gold coinage was unusual throughout the period, in contrast to the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. In contrast silver was mined in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, with very large deposits discovered at Kutná Hora in Bohemia in 1298 that lasted until the end of the period.
Gemstones Nearly all gemstones had to be imported from outside Europe, though Insular jewelry used native stones. Amber, jet, freshwater pearls and coral could be found within Europe. The modern facet-cut style of gemcutting was only developed at the end of the period, and before that stones were all cut and polished in variations of what is now called a cabouchon cut, with rounded contours. Diamonds are relatively unexciting, and very difficult to create, in cabouchon style, and other stones such as ruby and emerald were the most highly prized, but a wide range of stones were used, with modern distinctions between precious and semi-precious stones largely ignored, and clear rock crystal, sometimes engraved, popular. Large stones were greatly valued, and many rulers and great nobles amassed collections, which were often frequently reset.
Ancient engraved gems were often reused among stones, which in early medieval jeweled objects were often set profusely, spaced out across surfaces, mixed with ornaments in gold. Medieval gem engraving only recaptured the full skills of classical gem engravers at the end of the period, but simpler inscriptions and motifs were sometimes added earlier. Pearls gathered in the wild from the Holarctic freshwater pearl mussel were much used, with Scotland a major source; this species is now endangered in most areas.
Adhesives Various adhesives were used to stick precious metal foils to wood or any other support that functioned as a basis for the work of art. In his treatise, at book III, chapter LIX, entitled De confectione quæ dicitur tenax, Theophylus speaks about a preparation called confectio tenax. The material cited by Theophylus has a double role: it should act as an adhesive and as a filling. Current analytical evidence has shown that it has also a double composite chemical nature: the inorganic part forms the inert mass on which to work metals and can be made of sand, clay, powdered bricks and tiles, or the so-called cocciopesto (powdered bricks mixed with mortar), while the organic part works as an adhesive between metal and wood and is made of wax and/or pitch.
Styles
Northern Europe in the Migration Period
Barbarian jewelry of the Migration Period is one of the most common forms of surviving art from their cultures, and the personal adornment of the elite was clearly considered of great importance, for men as well of women. Large jeweled fibula brooches, worn singly (with a cloak) or in pairs (for many types of women's dress) on the chest were made in a number of forms based on Roman styles, as the barbarian peoples including the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Anglo-Saxons and Lombards took over the territories of the Western Roman Empire. These and other jewels very often used gold and garnet cloisonné, where patterns were made by thin chips of garnet (and other stones) laid into small gold cells. Enamel was sometimes used in the same style, often as a cheaper substitute for the stones. In the Insular art of the British Isles the preferred shape was the penannular brooch, and exceptionally large and elaborate examples like the Tara Brooch and Hunterston Brooch were worn by both secular elites and the clergy (at least on liturgical vestments). Relatively few other types of jewelry have survived from this place and period. The wearing of cheaper forms of jewelry appears to have reached quite far down the social scale; gold was relatively cheap at the period.
Though mostly based on Roman models, styles varied with the different tribes or people, and the jewelry buried in graves can be used to trace the movement of ethnic groups, having presumably served with other aspects of costume as a cultural identifier for the living.