Month: April 2021

Civil War mourning ring found on Isle of Man

Modern(ish)

A 350-year-old ring discovered on the Isle of Man may be a mourning ring dedicated to James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby and Lord of Man. The ring is gold with cut crystal stone on top. Embedded in the center underneath the stone are the initials “JD” spelled out in gold thread. Its style marks it as a Stuart-era mourning ring and it dates to the mid-1600s.

Allison Fox, Curator for Archaeology at Manx National Heritage said:

“The ring is small and quite delicate in form, but of a high quality and intact. The quality suggests that it was made for, or on behalf of, an individual of high status. It is unlikely that we will be able to establish for certain who owned the ring or whom it commemorated, but there is a possibility that it may have been associated with the Stanley family, previously Lords of Man.

The initials JD may refer to James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby and Lord of Man, a supporter of the Royalist cause in the Civil War. Letters and documents from the time show that he signed his named as J Derby, so the initials JD would be appropriate for him.”

James Stanley wasn’t very involved in the political conflicts between Parliamentarians and Royalists, but when war broke out in 1642, he dedicated himself to the Royalist cause, commanding troops in many battles, most of which he lost. He was with Charles Stuart, son of the decapitated king, in September 1651 at the Battle of Worcester, the final battle of the English Civil War. He was captured as he made his way north after the defeat at Worcester and a month later was tried for treason on the grounds that he had corresponded Charles Stuart, an act that had just been classified as treason in legislation passed a month earlier. He was easily convicted and executed.

Charlotte de La Trémoille was a formidable Royalist in her own right. She held Lathom House, the last Royalist castle still standing in Lancashire, when it was besieged by Parliamentary troops in 1644. On the grounds that it would dishonor her husband, she refused the order to surrender. Instead she fortified the castle to withstand repeated bombardments and placed sharpshooters in strategic locations to pick off enemy soldiers. Lady Derby kept the wolves at bay for more than three months until Royalist forces arrived and broke the siege of Lathom House.

Charlotte was evacuated to Isle of Man for her own safety. She lived there, occasionally joined by Stanley when he wasn’t fighting in England, for the next seven years. After James Stanley’s capture in 1651, he wrote in a letter to his wife that the king was dead, the cause lost and might as well barter the Isle of Man to the Parliamentarians in return for the best possible outcome for him and his family, hopefully including his freedom. She tried but it didn’t work. The Parliamentarians negotiated with Manx rebels instead and Stanley was beheaded. The mourning ring, if it is Derby-related, would have been made at this time and given to a loved one of the deceased to remember him by.

Lady Derby was forced to surrender her two castles on the island to the rebels and was imprisoned. Her heavy losses and her and her husband’s efforts in the Royalist cause did not win her much gratitude from Charles II even after the restoration. She retired to Knowsley Hall, seat of the Earls of Derby, and died in 1668.

Lake pile dwellings prove Lucerne was settled in prehistory

Ancient

Wooden stakes from prehistoric pile dwellings built on what was then the shore of Lake Lucerne were discovered last year during construction of water pipeline. They date to 1000 B.C., proving that the human settlement of Lucerne is 2,000 years older than previously believed.

The city of Lucerne as we know it today was founded 800 years ago and while there have been a few Neolithic and Roman archaeological materials found here and there, no evidence of a previous settlement has ever been discovered until now. This is largely due to the rise in the level of the lake since the 15th century. The outflow of water began to be choked by storm debris at that time, and the lake rose even higher when weirs were installed to power mills in the 19th century. The much deeper lake effectively put the remains of its prehistoric settlement out of reach as well as making it seem an unsuitable candidate for a pile dwelling settlements.

Because the water levels in the lake were 16 feet lower before the 15th century, archaeologists have looked for evidence of early pile dwellings on the lake bed as a long shallow shore would have been an ideal settlement area. Nothing was found before now because the thick layer of mud covering the lake bed obscured everything.

Only heavy construction work can penetrate it, so when the lake pipeline was laid, underwater archaeologists took the opportunity to follow in its wake looking for evidence of human occupation in the lakebed exposed by the pipeline trench. They hit paydirt (paymud?), discovering about 30 wood piles and five pottery fragments. Radiocarbon testing dated them to the Late Bronze Age.

The timing of the find coincides with the tenth anniversary of “Prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps” being granted UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Since 2011, 111 pile dwelling sites in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Slovenia and Switzerland have been added to the list, and almost half of the total — 56 sites — are in Switzerland.

Gloriously gory St George Altarpiece restored

Renaissance

The Saint George Altarpiece, a masterpiece of wood carving by Flemish Renaissance sculptor Jan Borman, has gone back on display at the Art & History Museum in Brussels after three years of meticulous restoration that returned it to its original gory glory.

The retable is monumental in size at 5 meters (16’5″) wide and 1.6 meters (5’3″) high and features more than 80 figures carved in exquisite detail in a high Gothic architectural setting. It depicts seven scenes from the martyrdom of Saint George, who according to a 6th century hagiography suffered more than 20 different forms of torture over seven years in an unusually dedicated but nonetheless fruitless attempt to get him to renounce his beliefs. The scenes are dynamically composed, capturing the figures mid-motion: George quartered on a wheeled mechanism, George decapitated, George sawed through the head, George cooked on a brazier, George tied to a pole and flagellated, George roasted in a brazen bull, George hanging upside down over a fire.

The altarpiece was commissioned for the Chapel of Our Lady Outside the Walls at Leuven, founded in 1364 by the Guild of Crossbowmen. In those pre-Reformation times, members of the volunteer municipal militia (think Rembrandt’s Night Watch) had religious requirements as part of the job and often endowed chapels and churches which they then used for solemn ceremonies and to intercede with their patron saints. Saint George was one of them. In Leuven, members swore their oath of allegiance to the guild in the chapel, and they were required to bequeath their coats of arms and crossbows to the chapel after their death.

Politics appears to have played an important part in the commissioning of this altarpiece as well. Saint George also happened to the patron saint of Archduke Maximilian of Austria who had recently defeated Flemish rebels and retained control of the Netherlands. The Guild had sided against Maximilian, nearly emptying their coffers over the course of the rebellion. They spent the last of their ready cash commissioning the altarpiece from Jan Borman who was a favored court artist of Maximilian’s. It seems to have done the trick as Maximilian chose not to inflict punitive measures on the Guild.

The Crossbowmen recovered from the setback. They poured money into their chapel, commissioning exceptionally fine artworks like The Descent from the Cross by Rogier Van der Weyden, now in the Prado Museum http://www.museodelprado.es/en/visit-the-museum/15-masterpieces/work-card/obra/descent-from-the-cross/ because Philip II of Spain demanded it for his palace and bullied the city council of Leuven to sell it to him over the vociferous protests of the Guild of Crossbowmen.

Alas, that would not be the last the chapel was looted. In 1798 the government of the Batavian Republic, a client state of revolutionary France, abolished all the guilds and Our Lady Outside the Walls was sold. All of the art, all of the silver decorations, the gold leaf, even the copper from the chandeliers was sold off, leaving only an empty husk of a building. It was demolished later that year and private homes built at the site.

As the only extant signed piece by Borman and the only work of his whose original commission document has survived, the retable would be a unique treasure even if it weren’t widely acknowledged to be his greatest masterpiece. Experts from the museum and the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) took the opportunity to study the work in detail, dismantling the 48 separate wooden elements. They found hidden surprises. Small parts like fingers and an earring that had fallen off and been trapped under the foreground scenes and one rough hand-carved figure of a praying man. Radiocarbon analysis found that the prayerful man dates to the late 15th century, so researchers believe it may have been a votive that Borman secretly hid in the altarpiece as a prayer for grave.

Another surprise was found when the central scene was dismantled: a parchment left behind by one Sohest declaring he had done some restoration work on it in 1835. As the surreptitious addition of a parchment into the altarpiece might suggest, Sohest didn’t prioritize non-invasive conservation in as close to original condition as possible. The restoration team discovered that the wooden pegs and nails keeping the figures attached did not match the holes. Sohest had dismantled the scenes and put them back together in the wrong order. That inexplicable mistake has now been corrected and the scenes are now in the original order.

Emmanuelle Mercier, wood sculpture expert (KIK-IRPA): “Careful observation and laboratory analyses revealed that, contrary to tradition, the altarpiece had never been covered with polychromy. That also explains the remarkably fine carving of the wood, which would be lost even under the thinnest layer of paint. Jan II Borman also amazed us with his ability to carve complex scenes, with different figures, from a single block of wood. Tree ring analysis showed that he worked with the hard type of oak found in our regions. All these elements indicate exceptional talent.”

The restorers removed dust and dirt from the countless fine reliefs, glued the pieces of wood that over the years had fallen into the case, and consolidated areas weakened by woodworm. The layers of non-original nineteenth century patina in various shades and the black layer of wax that marred several faces were also thinned down and harmonised. Thus, the plasticity of the contours comes into its own again, and all the fine details are visible.

Tiny altars found in Gallo-Roman home

Ancient

An excavation on the summit of Mt. Cavalier, the highest point of the city of Nîmes and the site where the first fortified settlement was built by the Volcae Arecomici people, has revealed the remains of an ancient neighborhood dating back to the early years of the Gallic city of Nemausus. Pottery found at the site dates to the 4th century B.C. and the area was in continuous use to the end of the 2nd century.

The city of Nemausus long preceded the Roman colony that was founded by veterans of Julius Caesar’s Egyptian campaigns in the 1st century B.C. There is evidence of human occupation going back to the Bronze Age, and the Volcae fortified the hilltop, encircling it with defensive walls in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. and building a dry-stone tower that was later incorporated into the Tour Magne, the only surviving remnant of the defensive walls erected by Augustus in the 1st century A.D.

Most of the construction in the newly-discovered neighborhood dates to between the early 1st century BC and the reign of Augustus (d. 14 A.D.). Houses were built in Roman style, with central courtyards and walls painted with frescoes in the Second Pompeiian style. The road between two grids of houses was meticulously paved in the 1st century and is in excellent condition. The occupants were Romanized, but they still upheld Gallic cultural traditions. Archaeologists found two small votive altars in one of the homes. One of the altars bears the name of the Celtic goddess Proxumis.

The construction techniques used to build the houses were also typically Gallic. The lower parts of the walls were made masonry, but most everything else was built with raw earth, either molded into bricks or built up without using any forms, or a combination of both.

The scale of the work required a significant contribution of material, provided by craftsmen working in nearby quarries. All of these constructions called on professional trades specialists in earthen buildings, an ancient technique well mastered by the Celtic populations of the south of Gaul. This technology is still present during the Roman era, betraying for a long time the Volcian heritage in the architecture of the city.

Somewhere between the 1st and 2nd century, the neighborhood shifted from residential to commercial uses, including the production of ceramics. The neighborhood was abandoned at the end of the 2nd century and the land converted to agricultural use.

Iron Age weapons hoard found on Holy Mountaintop

Ancient

Archaeologists working with a local historian and metal detectorists have discovered an Iron Age weapons deposit that is the largest ever found in the northwestern German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Between 2018 and 2020, volunteers coordinated with archaeologists from the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe (LWL) to scan the top of the Wilzenberg mountain in the hilly Sauerland region. In three seasons, the survey recovered more than 150 metal weapons, armour and horse fittings from the pre-Roman Iron Age. Most of the objects date to around 300 B.C. through the 1st century B.C., with the coins and blades dating to the later part of the range.

The Wilzenberg, a mountain 658 meters (2159 feet) high, stands out on a ridge of smaller forested hills in what is now the Sauerland-Rothaargebirge nature park. Known as the Holy Mountain of the Sauerland, the geographic singularity has been held in reverence at least since the 3rd century B.C. At the summit is the Wallburg, the remains of a hill fort built in the 3rd-2nd century B.C. from wood, stone and earth. Christian worshipers added a second circular structure in the 9th or 10th century. A chapel was documented at the site in 1543 when it was already a site of pilgrimage. The last hermit to renounce the world and choose an ascetic life atop the Wilzenberg only died around 1850, and pilgrims still flock to the mountain for processions on Ascension Day (39 days after Easter) and Trinity Day (first Sunday after Pentecost, May 30th this year).

In 1950, a small cache of three spear tips was discovered wrapped by two swords that had been deliberately coiled around the points. Among the recent discoveries are around 40 spear tips. There are also fragments of shield bosses, belt hooks, tools, a fibula, three silver coins and an extremely rare horse bridle that has handles at the bit. These were likely used for horses that were pulling chariots; the handles allowed for precision steering necessary in the heat of battle.

But there was no battle on the Wilzenberg, or at least no archaeological evidence of a violent clash has ever been recorded. The damage to the weapons and armature was not inflicted in a war. The tips of spears and lances were blunted, the iron bosses broken off the shields and left in place. A few pieces were buried, but most of them simply subsided into the ground. It’s not clear whether they were scattered on the mountaintop in a single event or over time.

“According to current research, it is conceivable that a fight took place in the area around Wilzenberg and that the winners completed their triumph by bringing the captured weapons, belts and harnesses to the Wallburg”, explains LWL archaeologist Dr. Manuel Zeiler. The winners apparently willfully damaged many of the pieces before they were then put on display on the Wilzenberg and left to their own devices. These assumptions are based on the results of French research, which shows that such cult acts in Iron Age Europe took place primarily in the Celtic culture and on its periphery. Weapons of inferior opponents were ritually destroyed; these actions were usually preceded by a battle. […]

Especially in the last centuries BC In the area between France in the west and Slovakia in the east, such weapons depots were set up again and again. Now the hoard find from Wilzenberg in the Sauerland can possibly close research gaps.