Dunstable Swan Jewel

The Dunstable Swan Jewel is a gold and enamel brooch in the form of a swan made in England or France in about 1400 and now in the British Museum, where it is on display in Room 40. The jewel was excavated in 1965 on the site of Dunstable Friary in Bedfordshire, and is presumed to have been intended as a livery badge given by an important figure to his supporters; the most likely candidate was probably the future Henry V of England, who was Prince of Wales from 1399.

The jewel is a rare medieval example of the then recently developed and fashionable white opaque enamel used in en ronde bosse to almost totally encase an underlying gold form. It is invariably compared to the White Hart badges worn by King Richard II and by the angels surrounding the Virgin Mary in the painted Wilton Diptych of around the same date, where the chains hang freely down.

The jewel is formed as a standing or walking mute swan gorged (collared) by a gold royal crown with six fleur-de-lys tines. There is a gold chain terminating in a ring attached to the crown, and the swan has a pin and catch on its right side for fastening the brooch to clothes or a hat. The swan is 3.2 cm (1.3 in) high and 2.5 cm (0.98 in) wide, and the length of the chain is 8.2 cm (3.2 in). The swan's body is in white enamel, its eyes are of black enamel, which also once covered the legs and feet, where only traces now remain. Tiny fragments of pink or red enamel remain on the beak.

The jewel is a unique survival of the most expensive form of livery badge, otherwise only known from inventories and representations in paintings. These were badges in various forms made for a leading figure bearing his personal device, and given to others who would demonstrate by wearing them that they were in some way his employees, retainers, allies or supporters. They were especially common in England in the age of "bastard feudalism" from the mid-fourteenth century until about the end of the fifteenth century, a period of intense factional conflict which saw the deposition of Richard II and the Wars of the Roses.

A lavish badge like the jewel would only have been worn by the person whose device was represented, members of his family or important supporters, and possibly servants who were in regular very close contact with him. However, the jewel lacks the ultimate luxury of being set with gems, for example ruby eyes, like the gems on the lion pendants worn by Sir John Donne and his wife in their portraits by Hans Memling, now in the National Gallery, London, and several examples listed on the 1397 treasure roll of Richard II. In the Wilton Diptych, Richard's own badge has pearls on the antler tips, which the angels' badges lack. The white hart in the badge on the Treasury Roll, which the painted one may have copied, had pearls and sat on a grass bed made of emeralds, and a hart badge of Richard's inventoried in the possession of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1435 was set with 22 pearls, two spinels, two sapphires, a ruby and a huge diamond.

Cheaper forms of badge were more widely distributed, sometimes very freely, similarly to modern political campaign badges and t-shirts. However, wearing the wrong badge in the wrong place could lead to personal danger. In 1377, when the young Richard II's highly unpopular uncle, John of Gaunt, was Regent, one of his more than 200 retainers, Sir John Swinton, unwisely rode through London wearing Gaunt's badge on a livery collar (an innovation of Gaunt's, probably the Collar of Esses). The mob attacked him, pulling him off his horse and the badge off him, and he had to be rescued by the mayor from suffering serious harm. Over twenty years later, after Gaunt's son Henry IV had deposed Richard, one of Richard's servants was imprisoned by Henry for continuing to wear Richard's livery badge. Many of the large number of badges of various liveries recovered from the Thames in London were perhaps discarded hurriedly by retainers who found themselves unwisely dressed at various times.

In 1483 King Richard III ordered 13,000 fustian (cloth) badges with his emblem of a boar for the investiture of his son Edward as Prince of Wales, a huge number given the population at the time. Other grades of boar badges that have survived are in lead, silver, and gilded copper high relief, the last found at Richard's home of Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, and very likely worn by one of his household when he was Duke of Gloucester. The British Museum also has a flat lead swan badge with low relief, typical of the cheap metal badges which were similar to the pilgrim badges that were also common in the period.

Apparently beginning relatively harmlessly under Edward III in a context of tournaments and courtly celebrations, by the reign of his grandson, Richard II, the badges had become seen as a social menace, and were "one of the most protracted controversies of Richard's reign", as they were used to denote the small private armies of retainers kept by lords, largely for the purpose of enforcing their lord's will on the less powerful in his area. Though they were surely a symptom rather than a cause of both local baronial bullying and the disputes between the king and his uncles and other lords, Parliament repeatedly tried to curb the use of livery badges. The issuing of badges by lords was attacked in the Parliament of 1384, and in 1388 they made the startling request that "all liveries called badges [signes], as well of our lord the king as of other lords [...] shall be abolished", because "those who wear them are flown with such insolent arrogance that they do not shrink from practising with reckless effrontery various kinds of extortion in the surrounding countryside [...] and it is certainly the boldness inspired by these badges that makes them unafraid to do these things". Richard offered to give up his own badges, to the delight of the House of Commons of England, but the House of Lords refused to give up theirs, and the matter was put off. In 1390 it was ordered that no-one below the rank of banneret should issue badges, and no one below the rank of esquire wear them. The issue was apparently quiet for a few years, but from 1397 Richard issued increasingly large numbers of badges to retainers who misbehaved (his "Cheshire archers" being especially notorious), and in the Parliament of 1399, after his deposition, several of his leading supporters were forbidden from issuing "badges of signs" again, and a statute was passed allowing only the king (now Henry IV) to issue badges, and only to those ranking as esquires and above, who were only to wear them in his presence. In the end it took a determined campaign by Henry VII to largely stamp out the use of livery badges by others than the king, and reduce them to things normally worn only by household servants.