Badge, enamelled brass, London, 1660-1685

This badge, which may have once adorned a coach or a set of horse bits, is from a distinct group of 17th-century cast and enamelled brasswares that include stirrups, mirror-frames, fire-dogs, sconces, candlesticks and sword-hilts. The colours used for the enamelling were limited to matt black, white, blue, green, yellow and red and the cast work is usually roughly finished.

Some like this badge, have Royalist associations and are decorated with the Royal arms. The items in the group are distinguished by their method of production: the fields to be enamelled were cast in the original moulds and not, as was more common, engraved (champlévé) or enclosed (cloisonné). They were for a long time referred to as Surrey Enamels after the author Charles R. Beard ascribed their manufacture to a factory in Esher, Surrey, but documentary evidence makes a strong case for their reattribution to the London workshops of Anthony Hatch and Stephen Pilcherd.

Hatch, a prominent member of the Armourers and Braziers Company, supplied an enamelled brass chimney piece to the Company, which was placed in the Court Room. This was presumably similar in style to the other enamelled wares from this group, which of course included other wares associated with fireplaces. Hatch worked with Pilchard, another member of the Armourers and Braziers Company. The comparatively small output of work and the repeated use of identical moulds for the stems of candlesticks, firedogs and cups suggests these objects are the products one workshop. Even domestic wares decorated with enamel would have been expensive, which implies that the workshop that produced them would have had a small but comparatively wealthy clientele.

Badge or ornament of cast brass, with red, white and blue matt enamel, the fields for the enamels cast in the mould, decorated with a portrait bust of Charles II among flowers and garlands, with an oversize crown at the top the finial of which protrudes from the circular profile of the badge. A fixing hole is at the bottom of the badge.