The annotation cards
Every piece on this website comes with its own annotation card. The card is modelled on a museum label, so it stays short and specific, and it tells you more about the piece than you would usually get from an antique store.
Our favourite pieces to annotate are the ones with a clear provenance or a person attached. A photograph with a name on it, a book with an inscription, an engraving that points at somebody. We try to find out who they were, so you can remember their life for a moment.
This is what ships in the box.
Printed on cotton stock and packed against the object. The same card renders on every listing, from the same record.
Where we are guessing, it says so.
What is on the card
Accession number
Each piece gets a number, the way a museum does it, in the order things are catalogued. Sold pieces keep their number and stay in the archive.
Object
What it is, in a line.
Date made
The date we can support. Sometimes it is a single year. More often it is an estimate within a decade.
Origin
Where it was made, as far as it can be established, or its provenance history (where we purchased it from)
Materials
What the object is made of.
Context
Some context on the item. Where a piece has a longer history, that becomes a story on this site, linked from the listing, and a printed copy ships with the object.
Why dates are written the way they are
A full set of London marks is close to a birth certificate. Almost nothing else in the catalogue is that lucky.
English silver is the easy case. A statute of 1300 under Edward I brought in the leopard's head mark, and London added an annual date letter in 1478, so a full set of marks read together will place a piece in a specific assay year. That is close to a birth certificate, with the caveat that the assay year is when the metal was tested and not necessarily when the object was finished (Assay Office London).
Almost nothing else in the catalogue is that lucky. A brooch with no marks gets dated from its construction, its findings, its materials and its style, and the answer is usually a range. So the date on the card is text and can hold a range, and there is a hidden year behind it that the catalogue sorts on.
Eras
Eight of them, cut around design and manufacturing more than around reigns.
The Georgian boundary in particular is a choice: Royal Museums Greenwich closes it at 1830 with George IV, English Heritage runs it to 1837 to take in William IV. We use 1714 to 1837, because a William IV mourning ring and a George IV one belong on the same shelf.
Sources: Assay Office London, History of hallmarking; Royal Museums Greenwich, The Georgian era; English Heritage, The Georgians.