Jewellery. The word 'jewel' is from the Old French jouel, a diminutive of ioie; Ital. gioja, 'joy'; Lat. gaudia. Jewellery embraces primarily articles intended for personal decoration, made of precious metals, which may be enriched with stones or enamels. But objects, also, not intended for personal use, such as caskets, when decorated with precious stones are said to be jewelled, and the term jewel has a further restricted signification when it is applied to one of the insignia of the knightly orders. Popularly, there is much confusion between the terms gem and jewel; the former belongs especially to engraved stones (see GEM). The love of personal ornamentation is a primal passion of humanity, which sways with equal force the rudest of tribes and the most advanced and luxurious communities. The craving which impels the rude savage to decorate his or her person with beads and circlets of seeds, shell, bone, horn, and wood is the same which has caused monarchs to lavish their treasures on the costliest materials and the most exquisite workmanship of their crowns and insignia of state. Jewellery thus in its wide acceptance as a purely ornamental adjunct to the person has been in use at all times and by the entire human family. And as on these adornments the highest art and skill at the command of any people was always lavished, they afford some measure of the condition of the handi- crafts and of the artistic development of the people and the period to which they belong. Further, in the days when banking and money-lending were not a factor in commerce, the accumulation of jewellery formed one of the most convenient of methods for the storing of realised wealth. It is so in India at the present day.
Before the use of metals was known, jewellery, if it can be so termed, consisted of carved beads and fragments of such bright substances as were at the command of prehistoric man. Gold is the first metal of which there is any mention in literature, and there is no doubt that, being always found native, it was the first to be used by mankind. The earliest gold ornaments would be the native pellets of the metal as found, and when mankind possessed no mechanical resources beyond rude hammers of stone, with which to beat out these pellets, the possibilities of decorative treatment of gold were very limited. The ability to melt metals and so to obtain masses of large size upon which to work implies a very advanced knowledge, to which, however, artificers must have attained at a very early period. Among the numerous finds of gold jewellery of prehistoric times there are many specimens which show that the early artificers possessed considerable command over their material in the way of hammering out plates to uniform thickness, drawing or beating the metal into wire, and plaiting and twisting it into torques, armillæ, rings, and other forms of ornament. In these earliest gold ornaments there is no attempt at decorative treatment other than what could be produced by the hammer; and it is only by degrees that simple efforts at chasing, engraving, and embossing make their appearance. The most archaic gold ornaments discovered by Dr Schliemann in his excavations at Hissarlik, which he regards as ancient Troy, are treated with the hammer alone; the later gold ornaments of Mycenæ are of a much more developed character, showing a knowledge of chasing and embossing. It is only when we come to historical times that we find artificers had obtained command over their material and tools sufficient to enable them to produce jewellery which bears a distinct impress of the art and ornament of their period and nation.
To trace the development of jewellery throughout ancient and medieval times would simply be to follow the course of art and the arts among the leading civilised communities. Fortunately the tombs of the dead, and hoards which have apparently been hid to escape the ravages of enemies, have been the means of preserving to our days a number of examples of jewellery of all times and all peoples sufficient to illustrate the nature of their ornament and the style of jewellery they wore. In this way examples of the jewels of the ancient Egyptians remain to the present day, from which we learn that the civilised people of the Nile valley even in very early times had greatly improved on the arts of our prehistoric ancestors of the bronze period. For we find the Egyptian artificers could engrave, chase, solder, enrich with enamel, and set precious stones in their jewellery—they were in fact complete masters of the most important processes of the modern jeweller. The jewellery of ancient Greece shows that perfection of form and purity of ornament which was only to be expected of the most highly-gifted artistic race of all times. The jewellery of the Romans was, like their art, inherited from the Greeks, and partook of their more robust but less refined character; but with the lapse of time and the influence of northern incursions it modified into Gothic forms. Contemporary with Greek art of the best period, the jewellery of the Etruscans forms the most remarkable example of fine metal-working of ancient times. The Etruscan jewellers were able to produce on the surface of their gold a rich granulated appearance, as if it were dusted over in a perfectly equal manner with gold powder, which it has long been the despair of jewellers to imitate. About 1860 the late Alessandro Castellani, of Rome, discovered at St Angelo, among the Calabrian mountains, a race of peasant gold-workers who appeared to have inherited the traditional secret; and with the aid of these craftsmen he succeeded in producing fairly satisfactory reproductions of the marvellously fine work of the ancient Etruscans; but, after patient experiment, Castellani himself acknowledged the Etruscan method to be still a lost art. Not less noteworthy is the jewellery of the Celtic and Scandinavian races, which shows remarkable vigour and individuality of character. It is best seen in the ancient brooches of the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, in which the arts of engraving, inlaying, enamelling, filigree-work, Niello (q.v.), and jewelling all in their turns were made use of in the production of works of art of a highly distinctive character (see BROOCH, Vol. II. p. 478). It is well known that a taste for rich and gorgeous jewellery is one of the most outstanding characteristics of the Hindu; and throughout all classes in the East Indies bright, glittering, and richly-coloured personal decorations are looked on as indispensable. The jewellery of India in its styles and methods of manufacture brings down to our own days traditions of the earliest skilled craftsmanship of the world. No other race of jewellers can with so small a weight of gold produce works of such remarkable airiness, grace, and elaboration as the Hindus. Their skill in Filigree-work (q.v.), the gorgeous colouring of their translucent enamels, and generally their masterly and bold use of colours and bright fragments of stone are in the highest degree admirable. Traditional skill and ancient forms are also perpetuated in the 'peasant jewellery' of the various European communities, which yet show in their purity the styles, combinations, and methods of working in use before the harsh mechanical forms of modern cheap jewellery came in to corrupt taste and supplant simple arts.
The distinction between jewellery of the present day and that of earlier times is found in the fundamental fact that the old work is the creation of the craftsman, while the modern jewel is the product of a manufacturer who adopts all labour-saving machines and appliances for the economical finishing of his wares. The lowest class of jewellery—that which forms the staple of the 'gilt-toy trade' in Birmingham—is made from sheet-copper struck up in dies and moulds by means of the screw-press, then gilt by electro-deposit and adorned with glass pastes in imitation of diamonds and all other precious stones. The cheap and rapid production in limitless numbers of imitation articles is thus secured, but the objects themselves are utterly devoid of artistic significance. To a large extent it is the same with jewellery even of the most expensive description, for although it is not stamped out of the sheet, yet the different portions of the work are allotted to separate workmen who perform their task with mechanical accuracy, but in no case is the whole article at once the conception and the execution of the single individual, as was the case with the work of the ancient jeweller.
The headquarters of the jewellery trade as a manufacturing industry is Birmingham, the city in which nearly all the sham jewellery is manufactured. The district of Clerkenwell, in London, is the centre of the higher-class jewellery trade in the United Kingdom. Silver and pebble jewellery is characteristically Scottish, but a great deal of the cheaper Scottish pebble jewellery is of German manufacture. The manufacture of bog-oak ornaments is a specialty of Dublin, and Jet (q.v.) jewellery is chiefly made at Whitby. All towns of any considerable importance are also centres of jewellery trade; but outside the United Kingdom Paris, Vienna, and New York are the most important places of production. Malta has acquired a reputation for filigree-work; and red coral jewellery comes largely from Naples. See also PRECIOUS STONES.
See Emmanuel, Diamonds and Precious Stones (1865); Jones, History and Mystery of Precious Stones (1880); Chaffers, History of English Goldsmiths (1881); Gee, The Goldsmith's Handbook (1881), and his Hall-marking of Jewellery (1882); Barbat, Guide Pratique du Joaillier (1884); Fontenelle and Malepeyre, Nouveau Manuel du Bijoutier Joaillier (1884); Dèce, Historique de la Bijouterie Française (1889).