One ring to rule them all

A man of many obsessions, Jonathan Self was recently inspired to commission a new signet ring to add to his collection–this one representing his own life, in the style of those worn by medieval merchants

- Jonathan Self

FINE-JEWELLERY workshops are, by and large, extraordinarily quiet places. You may catch the faintest hiss of gold being cast, the muffled rasp of delicate filing or the muted tap, tap, tap of a tiny hammer at work, but, otherwise, you could be in a library or even a church. There is one exception to this: when a jeweller is engaged in die-stamping a signet ring.

Witnessing a signet ring being die-stamped is like standing next to a cannon being fired. The process involves taking a bar of solid gold, compressing it so that it is even denser and then stamping out the ring in flat profile. It is this last stage that makes the serious noise, for it requires a steel die to be dropped down onto the gold with massive force.

Happily, the rest of the goldsmith’s work is more or less silent. The flat profile is heated and bent into the shape of a ring, soldered and plunged into water to cool it off. Forging the ring in this way further hardens it, making it stronger and giving it a superb finish.

Crucially, the dense, compressed gold is the ideal surface for engraving the sharp, highly defined image required for a signet ring. Ostensibly, this article is about one such signet ring, commissioned by me from royal jeweller Bentley & Skinner. In reality, it stretches into other areas, including the role rings play in the human psyche, snippets of jewellery history, traditional craftsmanship, mankind’s search for identity and how we are remembered.