What Happened to the Jewels of the Lancaster Women?

Medieval gold posy ring, England, late 14th–15th century (Portable Antiquities Scheme). Rings inscribed with brief phrases invoking love, loyalty, or fate were widely worn in later medieval England. While such rings are sometimes associated—by tradition rather than evidence—with named historical figures, most survive without identifiable owners, illustrating how personal jewellery circulated and lost attribution over time.

Licence: Creative Commons (PAS / British Museum via Wikimedia Commons)

Medieval gold finger ring set with a sapphire, England, 14th century (Portable Antiquities Scheme). Gem-set rings of this type were fashionable among the gentry and nobility during the period associated with the Lancastrian household. Comparable in form to the ring traditionally attributed to Katherine Swynford, this example demonstrates the style and materials without implying personal ownership.

Licence: Creative Commons (PAS / British Museum via Wikimedia Commons)

I have often asked myself the seemingly deceptively simple question: where are their jewels? When we imagine Lancastrian women, we tend to picture necklaces heavy with sapphires, rings bright with heraldry, crowns worked in gold. Such objects feel as though they ought to have survived. And yet, when we look for jewellery that can be securely associated with women such as Blanche of Lancaster, Katherine Swynford, or Joan Beaufort, we find almost nothing at all.

This absence is not accidental. It is itself historical evidence.

In the later Middle Ages, jewellery was not cherished as a personal keepsake or preserved as an heirloom in the modern sense. It was power made portable: worn to display rank, exchanged to secure loyalty, pawned to fund households or wars, reset to suit a new marriage or a changing political moment. For women in particular, jewellery functioned less as private adornment than as a visible marker of marital status, legitimacy, and dynastic position. It belonged to the lineage as much as to the woman who wore it (Cherry, 1992; Laynesmith, 2004).

Blanche of Lancaster brought immense wealth into her marriage with John of Gaunt, and contemporary inventories leave no doubt about the richness of her possessions (Walker, 1994). Yet nothing identifiable as Blanche’s jewellery survives. On her death, such items passed swiftly back into the Lancastrian sphere: to her husband, to her children, or into the wider circulation of the ducal household. Her jewels did their work and then dissolved into continuity. The woman remains visible in record and memory; the objects do not.

Katherine Swynford presents a similar, and in some ways more striking, case. Her life is unusually well documented in terms of landholding, household position, and later commemoration, yet her personal material culture has almost entirely vanished. If Katherine owned jewellery—and it would be extraordinary if she did not—it was used, redistributed, or transformed long before anyone thought to preserve it as evidence of a remarkable life. As with her lost tomb brass at Lincoln Cathedral, we are left not with survivals but with traces and absences. Here too, loss becomes part of the story (Binski, 1996).

So where are the jewels now?

Women’s jewellery was especially vulnerable to change. Stones were removed and reset for daughters or daughters-in-law; heraldry was altered to reflect remarriage; gold was melted to support households or finance marriage portions. A jewel might survive for centuries, but rarely as a stable, named object. The materials endured. The woman did not (Cherry, 2008).

Even burial offers little comfort. Noblewomen’s effigies frequently depict elaborate necklaces, rings, and crowns, but by the later Middle Ages these were largely symbolic. Valuable jewellery was removed before burial, replaced in stone or brass by an image of splendour rather than the thing itself. What we see on tombs is an idea of wealth, not its physical reality—a distinction familiar from the wider problems of medieval commemoration and memory (Binski, 1996; Saul, 2016).

Any remaining medieval regalia associated with royal and ducal families faced a final reckoning in the seventeenth century. Political upheaval completed what everyday use had already begun. Objects that had survived by chance were seized, dismantled, melted, or sold, erasing much of England’s medieval royal material culture (Keay, 2011).

So the question is not really where are their jewels? It is what were jewels for? For Lancastrian women, jewellery marked moments—marriage, alliance, legitimacy—rather than memories. It moved on, just as their influence did: reshaped, unnamed, absorbed into the next generation.

In that sense, these women are not absent from the record at all. They are everywhere—in lineage, in land, in political consequence—even if the gold itself no longer glitters.

A Ring Attributed to Katherine Swynford?

One object is frequently cited as an exception to this pattern: a late-fourteenth-century gold posy ring set with a sapphire and inscribed with the motto “alas for fayte”. This ring has appeared in modern auction catalogues and dealer listings described as the “Duchess of Lancaster” ring and is often associated, by tradition, with Katherine Swynford. Its form and date—c.1360–1400—are consistent with the period of her relationship with John of Gaunt, and the inscription sits comfortably within the language of medieval posy rings, which commonly bore brief phrases invoking love, fate, or loyalty (Cherry, 2008).

However, there is no surviving medieval documentary evidence that securely links this ring to Katherine herself. No inventory, gift record, or contemporary description identifies it as hers. The association rests instead on later provenance, stylistic dating, and modern tradition rather than on primary medieval sources (Keay, 2011). As such, the ring cannot be treated as firm evidence of personal ownership.

Its significance lies elsewhere. The very plausibility of the claim reminds us how little survives of women’s personal material culture, and how strongly later generations wish to anchor remarkable lives to tangible objects. Whether or not this ring ever touched Katherine Swynford’s hand, it reflects the kind of jewellery she may have worn—and the difficulty of attaching certainty to objects that were never intended to remain fixed in time.

References 

Binski, P. (1996) Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. London: British Museum Press.

Cherry, J. (1992) Goldsmiths. London: British Museum Press.

Cherry, J. (2008) ‘Jewels and Plate’, in Saul, N. (ed.) The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 211–227.

Keay, A. (2011) The Crown Jewels. London: Thames & Hudson.

Laynesmith, J. (2004) The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445–1503. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Saul, N. (2016) Lordship and Faith: The English Gentry and the Parish Church in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Walker, S. (1994) The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399. Oxford: Clarendon Press.