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MEDIEVAL SEXUAL BADGES
AMULETS AND TOKENS
some notes on his life and discoveries
a roughly translated extract from Enseignes de Pèlerinage et Enseignes Profanes by Denis Bruna MUSÉE NATIONAL DU MOYEN AGE THERMES DE CLUNY (Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 1996)
Two of the medieval amulets found by Forgeais in the River Seine
In 1843 completion of the rail link between Paris was to remain the premier river port in northern France: condition of the shipping channels, the quays and bridges were all in a deplorable state of disrepair. Work began in 1848.
Bridges, covered with houses and shops, had proved to be an exceptional hazard to shipping because their massive supports created dangerous currents: all but three were demolished and rebuilt; another major hindrance to navigation was the shallowness of the river through an accumulation of rocks, gravel, sand and mud. A powerful steam-powered dredger was engaged to dig out this debris. The metal buckets threw up many articles of archaeological interest amid the huge quantity of extracted material, ranging from the Neolithic until modern times, and including several thousand small oxidised metallic objects mixed up with the mud and slime. Everyday, during this work, a young man could be seen sifting carefully through the heaps of rubbish. His name was Arthur Forgeais.
Arthur Forgeais was born in Paris in 1822 where he studied science before going on to research ancient seals: he was fascinated by the great achievements of the past as well as the extensive archaeological adventures of his contemporaries. But he was unable to fulfil his dream of travelling due to financial constraints that cut short any hope of making long distance journeys and had to content himself with making Paris his place of study. But he was very fortunate in that, when in his early twenties, the massive programme of public works was causing great physical upheaval in the city that would reveal many secrets of its past history.
The amateur archaeologist was on good terms with workmen employed in dredging the river and this helped considerably in his endeavour to assemble, what eventually became, a remarkable and unique collection. In 1850 Forgeais began a thorough examination of his finds. Every piece of metal that had left the waters of the Seine reached him in a ‘blind’ condition – almost totally coated with filth – and he meticulously cleaned each item, studied it at length, identified it, sketched it and then classified it. The small metal objects, mostly of pewter, proved to be what he considered were a mixture of tokens from workshop guilds, assorted religious medallions, and hundreds of badges depicting religious and profane subject matter. The objects were later carefully arranged in a series of cabinets possessed by the Carnavalet Museum (Paris) before being displayed to antiquaries.
Medieval
'phallic' tokens of the type found in the River Seine
At this time Arthur Forgeais resided on the Îsle de la Cité at 54 Quai des Orfèvres bordering the River Seine, and immersed himself in Parisian history in general and its great river in particular; a river that each day revealed more and more as the process of dredging continued. He was intrigued by the designs, character and novelty of these small leaden objects that turned out to be mostly medieval pilgrim badges; they had far more appeal for him than more commercially valuable artefacts, and he was probably attracted to them both for their archaeological uniqueness and for their broad similarities with ancient seals. He called them his plombs historiés (historic leads) and Forgeais became the foremost expert in their assessment.
Although there had been several previous collections of medieval badges that of Forgeais was the most comprehensive (and also included many ceramic and other metallic objects from earlier Parisian cultures) despite the fact that, between 1848 and 1869, his poor financial circumstances necessitated selling off many pieces to private collectors – a factor that accounts for their present wide dispersal.
In 1852 Forgeais became a founder member and president of the Société de Sphragistique (devoted to the study of seals) and contributed to publications of the society. Soon after his original discoveries of the ‘leads’ he published his first work on the subject in 1858 – a small volume entitled Notice sur des Plombs Historiés trouvés dans la Seine – that gave an insight into his discoveries and aroused the curiosity of Parisian intelligentsia, such objects then being virtually unheard of. Most ‘leads’ collected were subsequently offered to the Cluny Museum, the Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the Louvre. The factory Museum of Sèvres, famous for its pottery, also found itself enriched by a collection of over six hundred pieces of Roman and medieval ceramics.
On the 21st January 1860 Forgeais sent a letter to Edmond Du Sommerard, administrative curator of the Cluny Museum, in which the first tentative steps were discussed for eventual acquisition of his collection by the museum: the curator was always seeking an opportunity to enrich the museum founded by his father and was instrumental in not allowing this chance to slip by. In March 1861 Forgeais proposed his price but later reduced his initial claim and indicated he would sell his collection for 18,000 francs. The French Emperor, Napoleon III, stepped in and consented to buy the collection from his personal funds, requesting that it be placed in the Cluny Museum. So it was that some three thousand three hundred leaden objects, mostly from the Middle Ages, came to enhance the museum’s collection between December 1861 and February 1862; other pilgrim badges taken daily from the Seine during 1863 and 1864 were later left to the museum by Forgeais. However the Cluny were unable to acquire the whole collection and Forgeais sold many items to the Carnavalet Museum, to the Museum des Beaux-Arts in Chartres, to the Museum of Antiquities in Rouen, and to private collectors.
Although the astuteness of Du Sommerard led to the purchase of this important collection his decision was not shared by many of the French intelligentsia. Ever since publication of his first title Forgeais was subjected to ridicule and accusations of fraud; his enemies accused him of having produced these ‘sham antiquities’ himself as it seemed inconceivable to them that so many items could be found on a daily basis in such a relatively short time. One critic wrote in an archaeological journal that it was a disaster for the world and a calamity for all those who loved interesting and beautiful authentic artefacts, and he considered the best place for the plombs historiés was at the bottom of the Seine from where they were supposed to have come. Forgeais was not disheartened.
After 1858 his discoveries had become so numerous that he decided to undertake production of a catalogue illustrating nearly all of his collection. Between 1862 and 1866 he published five volumes corresponding to the five groups of ‘leads’ he had defined: in 1862 counters and tokens from various corporations of medieval Parisian workshops (méreaux, jetons), in 1863 signs of pilgrimage, in 1864 Variétés Numismatiques, in 1865 L’Imagerie Religieuse, and in 1866 Numismatique Populaire. This massive project was well received by the Academy des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres even before it was completed, and Forgeais received a gold medal at a public assembly held on 5th August 1864. His critics remained unimpressed.
In 1874 Forgeais completed work on Numismatiques des Corporations Parisiennes, a work that is particularly precious since it describes many items that disappeared in 1871 during a fire at the Hôtel de Ville where artefacts were being stored before final conservation work and dispatch to the Carnavalet Museum. During 1874 and 1876 he made public the rest of his collection of ‘leads’ as well as sketches and other personal work items. On the 22nd July 1878 Arthur Forgeais died at the age of only fifty-six. Paris lost a human being whose patience, care and knowledge unlocked some of the secrets held by the little pewter items that he so painstakingly collected from the depths of the river flowing by his home.
Many, probably the majority, of sexual ‘leads’ found by Forgeais have since gone missing, some sold off to private collectors while others have vanished altogether – some even finding their way to Prague.
At some unknown time, but probably towards the final years of his life, Forgeais had published a little sixteen page miscellany of his sexual ‘leads’ found between 1850 and 1865 entitled Priapées – a work practically ignored since then – that illustrates twenty five items in which, although phallic tokens are described as such, those displaying a vulva are coyly described as contre-partie.
Arthur Forgeais, who may be described as the founding father of medieval sexual amulets and tokens, revealed his true feelings about the ‘leads’ he discovered in this booklet. Although there are some twenty-five illustrations the text has a strong moralising tone reflecting the author’s views on the dangers of man’s intelligence being enslaved by his physical organs, always ready to explode when the opportunity arises; that the roots of vice are within us all and can quickly supplant true love – that obeys laws reining in licentiousness – into a ‘servitude of the senses’, especially when drunkenness is involved; he pointed out the frequent admonishments in the New Testament against lust and bodily desire.
It was not Forgeais’ intention to merely collect and classify these objects so that they might be exploited by future scholars – that would not appeal to him or encourage his collecting – but to have a serious intention with regard to assembling these ‘immoral areas’, even though he considered the imagery to be sufficiently crude so as not to inflame the imagination. He obviously found it an awkward and embarrassing subject to place within a context of a, supposedly, pious Christian society and fell back on the ideas of earlier excavators of Pompeii who initially considered such a vast quantity of erotica could only have been associated with brothels and prostitutes. (Priapées was even published without any date or publisher’s imprint.)
Forgeais supposed that badges designed to be fixed to clothing may have been worn by women of easy virtue to advertise their profession, or to be a mark of notoriety they were compelled to wear, or that these badges were a sign of visiting a place of ‘evil repute’. Sexual tokens could have been a ‘saucy joke’ on the part of some noble or local law court claiming to control and fix prices of this ‘most vile’ of activities within their jurisdiction; or that, since regulation of immoral women was usually controlled by brutish junior officials, often the local gaoler, tokens may have related to the money they took for this privilege.
The wings on phalli were assumed to designate eagerness and restless passion, while bells, that can call or warn the listener, did not, in this case, have any intention of shouting beware! The author thought it remarkable that a certain religious light was conveyed – sexual tokens always have a cross on the reverse – ’even into these sewers’ in order to lull lax consciences; he recognised that his proposals did little to clarify the situation and hoped that a long-lost document waiting to be discovered might throw more light on the subject.
It must have been difficult to fix a date for the objects that had been completely mixed up with detritus from the riverbed, yet Forgeais, even though he recognised them to have similar details to images from antiquity, considered them to belong to the late 15th and early 16th century – only a hundred years later than more accurate recent dating from archaeological strata has confirmed. However, curiously, he continued by suggesting that iconography of one of the phallic objects found was not native to his country but was a foreign import: phallic amulets having been brought back by French soldiers returning from the campaign in Naples (c.1806) where such amulets were still commonly worn against the evil eye, and that reverence for Neapolitan amulets had then been degraded by memories of their Classical counterparts.
Despite his obvious misgivings Forgeais tried to find some moral message. ‘What is quite clear is that a woman stupefied by carnal desires is depicted; as elsewhere an image is drawn of man reduced to the final degree of abjectness by lustful vice’ and that such unworthy images were well-matched to those who enjoyed them. That the engraver could never have foreseen the moral of his allegory that, nevertheless, appeal ‘to the worst desires which are shown hereunder several symbols’; ‘Brutish man, however, is always with us that so many ages are alike regarding the more deplorable side of our nature!’