Jewellery and Watches

The Taunton ‘Beauty of Death’ Ring

A 15th century gold posy ring,
the broad slightly concave band within raised beaded borders to each side, the central panel decorated with two sprigs of foliage each topped by a five-petal flowerhead, and spaced with inscription in Medieval French black letter script “Beau de Mort’, translating as ‘Beautiful of death/beauty of death’, band width 5.5mm, ring size J (leading edge).£2,000-£2,400

This ring was discovered by a detectorist near Taunton in 2020.

The ring is recorded on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database, Ref: DEV-A918D2, and has subsequently been disclaimed as Treasure.

The inscription ‘Beauty of death’ may allude to death as peace or freedom, with dying perceived as a pure form of beauty.

A series of Hebrew poems, written by Medieval French Jews living in Northern France in the 12th and 13th century, record the persecution suffered by the Jews and the intense pressure to convert to Christianity. Many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of their Christian persecutors, their defiant deaths adding to the concept of ‘Beautiful Death’, and the narrative of the Medieval Jewish martyr was born. The tragedy of the Martyrs of Blois, the murder of 32 Jewish men and women burnt at the stake in the French town of Blois on the River Loire, in 1171, was recorded in eight of the surviving Hebrew poems.