September’s birthstone is sapphire, assigned to the month by the American jewellery trade in 1912, by which point the stone had already spent several centuries doing a quite different and much better recorded job.
Twenty rings have been recovered from the graves of English medieval bishops. Twelve of them are set with sapphires.
One sapphire ring of that period is in the Victoria and Albert Museum and carries a name. The hoop is gold and shaped like a stirrup, the shoulders are chased with floral sprays that were once enamelled, and a six-cusped setting holds an octagonal sapphire with a hole drilled through it. Inside the hoop, in black letter, a goldsmith cut the words wllms wytlesey. That is William Wytlesey, an English bishop of the later fourteenth century. The museum dates the ring to about 1362 to 1374, says it may have been his consecration ring, and adds that it is said to have been found in his tomb, though it may equally have been kept in the cathedral treasury.
The birthstone list came 550 years after that ring and had nothing to do with any of it. What the ring belongs to is a different story, and a far more specific one.
A ring given at consecration
A bishop’s ring did no decorative work. The ring was handed to a man at the ceremony that made him a bishop, and everyone present understood the gesture as a marriage.
Honorius of Autun, writing in the twelfth century, put the reasoning directly. In his account the bishop bears a ring so that he may perceive himself as the bridegroom of the Church, and, if it becomes necessary, lay down his life for her, like Christ. The tenth-century investiture formula, spoken as the ring went on, asks the new bishop to receive the ring as the sign of faith, so that adorned with pure faith he may preserve without harm his bride, namely the holy church of God. Isidore of Seville, three centuries earlier still, describes it more coolly, as a mark of the episcopal dignity or as a seal of things hidden.
The most detailed instruction of the four comes from William Durandus, writing his pontifical for Mende around 1294. Durandus specifies a ring of gold, round, its roundness signifying perfection, and jewelled, the jewel signifying the splendour of the gifts of the Spirit, which Christ received without measure.
Gold, round and jewelled, and no further. None of the four names a stone.
The twelve sapphires out of twenty are therefore a pattern of choice inside a rule that left the choice open. Nobody made these men pick blue. They kept picking it anyway, across generations who never met each other, and they left enough rings behind for the preference to be counted.
Why so many of them are blue
The museum’s own explanation starts with the colour. Sapphires, its note says, were thought particularly suited to bishops because of their heavenly colour.
After the colour comes a list of what the stone was held to do. Sapphire expelled envy, comforted the heart, detected fraud and witchcraft, and obtained the wearer esteem from his lord. Set that list against the life of a senior churchman and every item on it answers a real difficulty. Rivals below him. Anxiety at three in the morning. Deception in the accounts and in the diocese. A patron above him whose favour decided everything. A man choosing that stone was equipping himself for the job he had just accepted.
Two other rings in the same collection show the preference without a name attached. A gold ring with forked shoulders and a projecting four-claw bezel, holding an irregularly polished sapphire, was made somewhere in western Europe between 1200 and 1400, and the museum’s note observes that rings found in bishops’ tombs suggest sapphires were particularly favoured. A fourteenth-century ring with a chased flower-shaped bezel set with a sapphire, a garnet in one shoulder and the other shoulder setting empty, is said to have been found in the tomb of a French bishop. Neither is a masterpiece, and that is the useful part. A preference visible only in the grandest objects would tell you about goldsmiths and budgets. These are the ordinary end of the same habit.
Look at the count again. Twelve out of twenty is not a number that turns up by accident, and it is not a landslide either. The other eight rings hold something else, and the museum does not say what, which is its own small reminder of how much of this survives by accident. Whatever was going on was strong enough to be a habit and loose enough to leave room, which is what a preference looks like when no rule is enforcing it.
Then there is the hole. Piercing a sapphire in the fourteenth century was slow and expensive work, because corundum sits at 9 on the Mohs scale, harder than anything a medieval workshop could bring to it except diamond dust. Somebody paid for it anyway, and paid a lapidary who would have had to sit with the piece for days rather than hours. The museum offers two explanations and declines to pick between them. Drilling a stone was believed to increase its virtue, its power in the older sense of the word. Or the hole is simply older than the ring, and the sapphire had already been something else before Wytlesey’s goldsmith acquired it.
Both readings say something the birthstone calendar never asks about. Either the stone was worked on to make it do more, or the stone had a previous life and was carried into a new one. In the fourteenth century a good blue sapphire was scarce enough to make the second answer entirely ordinary.
One more thing separates a medieval ring from a modern one, and the change is in the stone. GIA writes that “a large amount of the sapphire on the market, both blue and fancy colors, has been treated to alter its color by heat or by lattice diffusion.” A medieval goldsmith took whatever blue arrived along the trade routes and set it, and a stone that came out of the ground a poor grey-blue stayed that shade for the rest of its life. A modern buyer is looking at material that has usually been through a furnace. That is neither a scandal nor a secret, and a seller should be able to describe it on request, but it does mean the even saturated blue in a shop window is a modern expectation.
That hardness of 9 runs through the whole story, the ring that outlasted the man whose name is cut inside it and the drill that struggled to get through its stone. The Crystalance Mineral Library files sapphire under corundum, where the figure sits alongside everything else about the species.
What a September birthday inherits is not a tradition about September. It is a stone that a particular kind of man, in a particular kind of job, reached for again and again for reasons he could have explained if asked, and that a trade meeting later attached to a month. Wytlesey put his ring on the day he took the office, and expected to go into the ground wearing it.
Sources
- Victoria and Albert Museum, William Wytlesey’s ring, gold and sapphire, England, ca. 1362 to 1374, accession M.191-1975, including the count of twelve sapphires among twenty bishops’ rings, the Honorius of Autun passage, the tenth-century formula, Isidore, Durandus, and the two readings of the drilled stone: collections.vam.ac.uk
- Victoria and Albert Museum, gold ring with forked shoulders set with a sapphire, western Europe, 1200 to 1400, accession 645-1871: collections.vam.ac.uk
- Victoria and Albert Museum, gold ring with flower-shaped bezel set with a sapphire, 1300 to 1400, accession 90-1899: collections.vam.ac.uk
- The Jewelers’ Circular and the Horological Review, 14 August 1912, the adopted list giving September to sapphire: archive.org
- Handbook of Mineralogy, corundum, for the hardness of 9: handbookofmineralogy.org
- GIA, sapphire buyer’s guide, on treatment: gia.edu
