The Dark Ages: Men of the North

Back in Bolton, Shaun Greenhalgh has engraved the symbols of the four evangelists round the edges of his silver brooch. And he’s now ready for the really difficult bit in the middle, the Anglo-Saxon king, created so carefully, with Cloisonné enamels.

Shaun Greenhalgh “The Cloisonné enamel technique is a very old technique, practised by the Romans, and the Celts even, before them. It’s just powdered glass, ground up, and mixed in with water and just fired in the kiln.

The Anglo-Saxons and other people in the dark ages, and into the middle ages, we’d use of Roman Glass tesseras, ground up, the kind of thing you see in wall mosaics in Ravenna and such places, Constantinople, and suchlike, because although they had the technology to make the glass, they didn’t have the oxides to get the various colours, as you can see, of the yellows and greens and blues.”

The first stage is to lay down their kings outlines in a delicate framework of itsy-bitsy bits of pure gold. Then the really tough work begins. Getting the powdered glass into this labyrinth of gold cells.

While Shaun prepares to pop his Anglo-Saxon king into the kiln I’m thinking that his brooch reminds me strongly of the most, famous of all Anglo-Saxon jewels, the so-called Alfred jewel. They said that originally it was the top of a reading implement, sent out to the bishops like King Alfred himself. It’s now found in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and what a beautiful thing it is.

So this style of brooch was obviously a late Anglo-Saxon…

Shaun Greenhalgh “Yeah, probably 10th century, I imagine, in the design.”

A lot of people always said that the Anglo-Saxon jewellery was at its peak earlier than that. They think of the Sutton Hoo horde.

Shaun Greenhalgh “I prefer the later stuff. I think it’s more elegant and there’s far more to it. Anyway, that’s the Cloisonné finished. Beautiful.”