Illustrating History: Charlie's H and K Pendant

                       A wedding                  

The Portable Antiquities Scheme is moving further and further away from being archaeological outreach in " raising awareness among the public of the educational value of archaeological finds in their CONTEXT" (ie the context and its contents as a source in its own right) and towards becoming a superficial "show and tell" that talks about OBJECTS as illustrations of what we know about history from other sources (e.g., written sources). Yet another example of this was the hoo-haa about a metal detected pendant ( Michelle Butterfield Amateur metal detectorist uncovers incredibly rare 500-year-old royal pendant Global News Posted February 7, 2023). It’s a once-in-a-lifetime find for any metal detectorist. Charlie Clarke found it in 2019 in a Warwickshire field. It has been dated to 1521 because of the initials on it plus the general type. In the account of its finding and then display at a BM Treasure-related event four years later, there are the usual human interest tropes:

After turning up mostly “junk,” Clarke was about to call it quits when his detector started beeping loudly. He dug into the soil, about the depth of his elbow, and pulled out a large heart-shaped pendant attached to a gold chain. The find, Clarke told The Guardian, made him scream “like a little schoolgirl, to be honest. My voice went pretty high-pitched.” The piece of jewelry, he would recently come to learn, dates back more than 500 years and features the initials and symbols of King Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. The pendant is attached to a chain of 75 links and crafted out of 300 grams of 24-carat gold, reports The Guardian, and is decorated with a bush bearing the Tudor rose and a pomegranate, Katherine’s symbol. On the other side, the initials H and K appear, intertwined by an engraved ribbon and on both sides the inscription of “TOVS+IORS” appears, a pun on the French word “toujours” meaning “always”.

Writing on it, an "addressed source", the kind the PAS and collectors love. The story goes that this was perhaps "worn or handed out as a prize at one of the jousts the king was known for hosting at the time" (written sources). What can one say? H and K and toujours, so it "must" refer to one of England's fattest kings, Henry VIII surely. 100%, no? Not any Humbert and Kryzylda, Harold and Katrina or any other H and K combination. And of course a pomegranate, well obviously this only points to one person and it's not there at all as an attribute of Venus, a symbol of desire (and marriage and/or fertility because of its many seeds). It simply does not appear anywhere else in medieval art... oh except frequently in sacred images of the Virgin and Child. Like a rose bush. And a "Tudor" rose, well, it was used as an emblem in times of Henry VII, Henry VIII but also (and with a pomegranate) by Mary I - but not only by the monarchs. So, these are assumptions, hypotheses. Why was it dropped in a Warwickshire field? Was it a votum in a chapel that was stolen and dropped by the thief-in-the-night, an old hand-me-down worn on a passionate date behind the haystack by a lady several generations removed from the 1520s recipient, who knows? What actually was the context it lay in? What is the archaelgical context? Who knows, but hey, "Henry VII", eh? H-e-n-n-n-ery!! You can almost touch the past, eh? An illustration of history.

The finder of the chain and pendant associated with Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, Charlie Clarke (left) and Arts and Heritage Minister, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (right) look at the pendant on display at the British Museum in London as archaeological discoveries made by members of the public are revealed via the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS).View image in full screen The finder of the chain and pendant associated with Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, Charlie Clarke (left) and Arts and Heritage Minister, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (right) look at the pendant on display at the British Museum in London as archaeological discoveries made by members of the public are revealed via the Portable Antiquities Scheme