The words inside the ring

In 1550 John Bowyer of Lincoln’s Inn bought a gold ring for his bride. It was inscribed DEUS NOS IUNXIT, God joins us together, with their initials and the date of the marriage.

A ring of that kind was called a posy, from poesy, a short verse. By 1430, the Victoria and Albert Museum records, a love ring with a line cut into it was already called a posy. Lines of love had been cut into rings since the fourteenth century, and the rings were given in courtship, at a betrothal and at a wedding. On the earlier ones the words ran around the outside. Later they were cut inside the hoop, against the finger. One English ring of about 1500 to 1530, in the same museum, has “my wordely ioye” and “alle my trust” on the outside, and “hert tought lyfe and lust” on the inside. Through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the line was usually French. From the fifteenth century, English became increasingly common.

The hoop left little room. In Hamlet the prologue is three lines, and Hamlet asks whether it was a prologue or “the posy of a ring.” Ophelia answers that it was brief. The exchange only works if the audience already knew how few words a ring could hold. In The Merchant of Venice Gratiano has parted with the ring his wife gave him, and he quotes what was cut inside it: “Love me, and leave me not.” He calls it cutler’s poetry, the rough motto a knife-maker put on a blade. Lines like his were ordinary enough to be bought ready-made. Goldsmiths kept hoops already engraved, and a giver could choose a sentence from a printed book. One, from 1674, was called Love’s Garland or Posies for Rings, Hand-kerchers and Gloves and such pretty tokens that Lovers send their Loves.

The British Museum has a gold ring marked WH, which it links to the Harsell family of goldsmiths in Bristol, at work from about 1580 to 1665. The band is four millimetres wide. Inside it reads “I doe reioice in thee my choyce.” A silver ring in the same collection says only “A kiss for this.” Another runs to a couplet: “Wit wealth & beauty all do well But constant loue doth far excell.” In 1931 Joan Evans published a catalogue of the lines, English Posies and Posy Rings. In 1960 she gave the Victoria and Albert Museum a gold ring of about 1695 whose inside still reads “God above increase our love.” A skeleton and an hourglass were cut into the outside later, and the museum takes that as a conversion into a mourning ring. The love line was left in place. In 1961 she gave the British Museum the rings she and her family had gathered, the Bristol ring among them.

A plain gold band, with nothing written on it, became the usual wedding ring only in the later seventeenth century. Posy rings were still made after that. A giver could take a line from a book or have one cut specially, and the hoop decided how long it could be. The Bristol ring carries seven words. The silver one manages with four. Someone had to choose a sentence that would still be true on an ordinary day.

The line was for the person whose finger it sat on. Gold keeps an engraving after the wedding is over, and often after the name is forgotten. What remains is the sentence, still on the inside, where it was cut.