About Jewelry in Sixteenth Century England

In a letter, Lady Compton wrote to her husband about two pieces of expensive jewelry which she would like to purchase and a traveller writes that the goldsmith's shops in London are exceedingly sumptuous.

In a curious characteristic letter of Lady Compton to her husband, apparently written (end of the sixteenth century) on the paternal wealth of the "rich Spencer," as he was called, we find among other items which she terms "reasonable":--"I would have pound 6,000 to buy me jewels, and pound 4,000 to buy me a pearl chain."

"The goldsmith's shops in London," observes Fynes Moryson, the traveller (died 1614), "in England (being in divers streets, but especially that called Cheape-side), are exceedingly richly furnished continually with gold, and silver plate, and jewels. The goldsmith's shops upon the bridges of Florence and Paris have, perhaps, sometimes beene as richly or better furnished, for the time, on some nuptuall feast of the princes or like occasion, with plate and jewels borrowed of private persons for that purpose: but I may lawfully say, setting all love of my country apart, that I never see any such daily show, anything so sumptuous, in any place in the world, as in London."


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