Arms and Armor: In his attempt to defeat his enemies Man has probably used more time and energy than in any other pursuit and his well-known desire to make objects not only functional but also attractive has thus applied his decorative talents, engraving, etching and embellishing with many skills as well as constantly seeking after improved design and means ofproduction.

There is a fairly clear, discernible line of development in all branches of arms and armor, and the skil devoted to their production, the mechanical ingenuity, and their aesthetic appeal, have all played their part in attracting collectors, who see them, perhaps mistakenly, as collectable items in their own right, entirely divorced from theirprime functions of war and injury. The collector has a temendously wide choice- indeed the only limiting factors are those of personal fancy and financial resources. The number of collections has steadily increased over the last few years, and this increased demand, together with the vagarities in the world's economy, has caused an astonishing increase in value. Regrettably, the posibility of large profits has encouraged the production of fakes and forgeries of very high quality, and today it is more important than ever to know one's subject.

Firearms can for all practical purposes be regarded as a fourteenth century innovation; for the collector there is little hope of acquiring anything pre-dating the second half of the sixteenth century, and the chances of these are pretty remote. There are some good quality pieces from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and for the average collector the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century is likely to prove stimulating and worthwhile.

Swords offer wider scope for it is possible to obtain examples, albeit in excavated and somewhat deteriorated condition, of swords dating back to the Bronze Age. In good condition swords from the fiftheenth century to the present day, are comparatively common.

Armour is less certain and demand varies; However, the field is one offering the collector good opportunities for varied acquisitions and perhaps more unusual objects to display in a modern setting.

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Bottle and Boxes: Flass has been used to make containers certainly since the second millenium B.C. Narrow-necked containers are generally known as bottles: those with wide mouths as jars. Specialized shapes of bottles sometimes have generi names, e.g. vial or phial (small narrow bottles for pharmaceuticals or perfumery), or flask, which is used to describe a number of bottles but is often used for one with a wide flattened body and narrow neck. At certain periods other material, especially clay and leather have been used for particular kinds of container (e.g. black-jacks and stoneware wine jugs) but they have not achieved the lasting universality of the glass, wich has been used for scent and toilet preparations, pharmaceutical products, food, wines, spirits and all kinds of beverage.

Boxes are another field with a wide choice of material - everything from tin and wood to precious metals set with stones. They often exibit miniature versions of the jeweller's arts, enamelling, the use of hardstone plaques, incredibly detailed painting, and finely-worked gold or silver. But other examples, of boxwood, pewter, or horn are found, and the loving care that went into beautifully-fashioned objects, and well worth the time and trouble spent in building up a collection.

Both bottles and boxes are a fruitful source of pleasure, and of historical as well as aesthetic interest to the collector.

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Carpets and Rugs: The oriental carpet has been an object of veneration in the west for many centuries. Like other expressions of art emanating from the East, the painstaking obsession with detail so exquisitely carried out at no matter what cost in time - and effort - awes the Western world into humble acknowledgement of this peculiar genius of the Eastern craftsman.

It is not only in the mechanics of production that the Oriental weaver excels, but also in the art of design as applied to this particlar field. Indeed, in Persia there have been Shahs in the past who have devoted their very considerable gifts to creating designs for carpets, and many exquisite patterns have been created by these Royal patrons of the arts.

Fine carpets have been made by hand in the West too, as is witnessed by the old Axminsters of England, the products of the killybegs factory in Donegal - - wich still, by the way, produces hand-knotted carpets to order - - and the famous Savonnerie carpets of France, wich firm still produces State carpets at a fabulous cost. But none of these carpets have a fineness of knot that will in any way compare wit the products of the East, where large carpets are made with two hundred, three hundred or more knots to the square inch, each individually tied by hand.

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Ceramics: Today the love of all types of antiques is probably greater than at any time in history. Those fortunate ones who were able to participate in the Grand Tour during the eighteenth century were very few, and usually very wealthy. At the present to,e easy, comparatively cheap, travel has brought the art treasures of the world within the range of the majority of those interested in such subjects. This familiarity with beautiful art objects has inspired today's collectors, and there is little doubt that of all the deorative arts, thise in the field of pottery and porcelain are the most popular, normally requiring less experience to identify, and collectable according to one'es purse.

The matierial of earthenware, and later porcelain, has always been used to serve a dual purpose; first, the essential needs of cooking and serving food and drink, secondly to give visual pleasure. The great houses of Europe would have looked very stark without their treasures; the palaces of Italy had their colourful tinglazed earthenwares (maiolica), the courts of France their Vincennes and Sèvres porcelain, and the great houses of the Adam period were brought to life by the neo-classical creations of such potters as Josiah Wedgwood.

One of the most succcesful ways of learning about ceramics is to acquire an example of almost every type. Expensive? By no means - - individual pieces can be so badly damaged that they are worth very little, but the material is right, the various styles of decoration similarly so, and in this way, you will be able to train your eye to discover which of the many kinds of ceramics appeal to you, and why.

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Clocks, watches and barometers: The mechanical clock made its appearance about 1300; the earliest examples were for ecclesiastical use. The material was wrought iron and he parts were large but by the 15th century, smaller clocks were made for domestic use - still of iron but with the metal worked cold. During the fifteenth century, the spring was applied as motive power in place of the weight and the clock became portable. As techniques advanced, these portable clocks became small enough to be carried on the person and so the watch came into being. About 1560, brass began to replace iron: the movements were now more finely finished and themselves objects of beauty; previously, all decoration had applied to the outer cases.

The greatest revolution in the history of timekeeping was the application of the pendulum by Huygens in 1657, which was followed by the balance spring (hairspring) for watches in the 1670s. For the first time real accuracy was possible, and further technological improvements resulted in clocks and watches of exquisite workmanship and fine performance.

Production in specialized workshops had begun by the end of the seventeenth century, replacing the independent craftsman, but it was the nineteenth that saw real factory production taking over from the hand worker and by the twentieth, this transformation was complete.

Because clocks have been produced in factories does not mean they are devoid of interest. Many of the exaples here are factory products: their applea depends on what one's collection is attempting to illustrate rather than on the characteristics of the piece itself.

Barometers show less variety. They were first made in the mid-seventeenth century when timekeepers were first developed as precision instruments and can be broadly divided into two groups: those for scientific and those for domestic use. We are here only concerned with the secound group, which tended to follow contemporary furniture styles to suit a room's decor. The shape of a barometer is controlled by scientific requirements and mercury instruments must be at least 33'' long, but the invention of the aneroid about 1850 made much smaller instruments possible.

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Embroidery and Needlework: Embroidery is the decoration of material, and, unlike tapesty with which it is often confused, has no existence without a basic fabric. It is a craft which has flourished for several thousand years, and the Book of Exodus in the Od Testament refers in detail to the work of seamsters and embroiderers. It is not too much to suggest that the craft stems from the time when animal skins were first sewn together with the stiches forming a pattern.

It is infinite in variety, ranging from stitchery so fine that it has to be held up to the light to be seen, to work in vivid colours in thick rug wool on hessian. It has been and is practised by men and women, rich and poor, professional and amateur with the minimum of equipment. In fact, it is probably this immense versatility which has prevented embroidery from being collected and enjoyed except by the percipient few. There is just too much variety. The range includes ecclesiastical vestments and church furnishings, dress and accessories, domestic articles, coverings for furniture, stage decorations and curtains, enormous wall coverings for office foyers and purely decorative hangings and panels for the house. An incomplete list, but already formidable in extent.

As embroidery is not seen in isolation, but is usually part of another craft such as furniture or dress, it follows that is changes and develops according to the current fashion. Thus, it varies in both style and technique according to the period and the country it comes from.

Embroidery is sometimes an art as well as a craft, and the combination of designer\craftman in one person often produces superb results; but in general it is a craft which has been practised by generations of ordinary men and women, and in some part it is the history of the lives they led.

Furniture: An introduction to the subject of furniture is an encyclopaedia of antiques call for a definition of 'furniture'.

The 'wardrobe' of a monarch originally included the beds, tables, cupboards, stools, chests and so forth, which we would now call 'furniture'; these and other items in their turn included the velvets, damasks and other 'rich stuff' with which they were padded or decorated, together with the tapestries or carpets which clothed the walls. All these things moved with the court from palace to palace. Now it iis usual to divide the contents of the wardrobe, in its old sense, into 'furniture' and 'furnishing', or 'soft furnishings', as department stores describe them.

Nevertheless, antique upholstered chairs, sofas, couches, beds, etc., are regarded as furniture, although their modern equivalents might find their way to the 'soft furnishings' department; and this usage holds irrespective of the amount of 'show-wood' or visible framing which the piece displays.

Furniture therefore, is chiefly of wood, but it is also necessary to encroach on the subject of metalwork which not only plays a structural part in many objects, but is extensively used for handles, drawer-pulls, inlays, mounts and other adornments. Papier mâché is also included as so much domestic furniture was once made of this material, which may be regarded as a distand cousin of the modern moulded plastics.

Of all the wide variety of antiques collected - - and the term covers the spectrum from pre-Christian artefacts to wireless sets of the 1930s - furniture probably gives the most pleasure, as it can still perform its original function. Few would risk drinking wine from a rare seventeenth century porcelain pot, but the owner of a find eighteenth century chair may happily sit in it as he contemplates the harmonious proportions and mellow colour of the even older bureau at which he should be working.

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Glass: Glass is an extraordinary material - brilliant, transparent, easily worked hot but brittle and fragile when cold.

We do not know how glass was invented, nor even when the first experimetns took place. As far as research has been able to establish, glass objects were first made about 4.000 years ago, somewhere in the Middle East, or Western Asia. And that is all. Yet this very old craft has been strangely selective in its history. Even the most primitive societies had some form of pottery, and metalworking of various kinds, but not glass. This is perhaps understandable in one sense; to fuse the basic components, a temperature of over 2,500 degrees F. is needed, and few primitive kilns would be able to achieve the necessary heat. Pliny's apocryphal story of how glass was discovered is perhaps misleading l he reported that early Syrian traders built a fire on the beach, using blocks of soda they carried as merchandise to support the driftwood they used as fuel. The heat of the fire was enough, he wrote, to fuse the two basic components of glass (silica, which is usually sand of some kind, and soda or potash) and the surprised merchants found their fire swimming in a pool of liquid glass.

It is a delightful tale, but unlikely. A more probable explanation lies in the potter's kiln. A fairly simple kiln will reach such temperatures, and perhaps Mesopotamian potters, experimenting with glazes, found they had discovered a material of value and beauty in its own right.

It is perhaps strange that the potters who achieved the earliest, and perhaps the finest glazes ever made - - the Chinese - havenever exploited the potential of blown glass, but were content to use it as an imitation of porcelain or precious jade.

In any case, it was left to craftsmen farther to the West to make the first glass objects, and then to the Syrians and Alexandrians who probably invented glass blowing, and finally to the Romans who spread the craft throughtout their empire, to make glass part of our everyday life.

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Jewellery: The history of jewellery design is as much the history of techniques as of taste and fashion. The forms of fashionable or symbolic ornaments have, from the earliest times, been dictated by the special properties of the materials of the jeweller's art; the malleability and surface texture of gold and silver, the colour and shape of pearls, the natural fire and colour of precious stones, the effects obtained by polishing or carving hardstones and the many techniques of fusing colours with metal to produce enamelled decoration. The separate skills of the goldsmith, the gem-engraver, the enamellist and the lapidary or stone-cutter, have been employed in ways that have remained virtually unchanged in several thousand years, beyond the development of elaborate facet-cutting for precious stones (dating from the mid-seventeenth century) and the replacement of much hand work with machine production in very recent times.

Although ancient jewellery is very fragile, a sirprisingly large amount has survived; beautiful Egyptian, Persian, Indian or Greek and Roman jewellery can still be bought by the collector. In theory it should still be possible to make a collection of jewellery covering a period of nearly five thousand years, but in practice it is probably advisable to specialize. The jewellery of the earlier periods, notably Egyptian, Greek and Roman, mediaval and Renaissance was much copied - - and faked - - in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Although it seems ludicrous to suggest that even a relatively inexperienced collector would be deceived by the fashionable 'Egyptian' or Etruscan jewels of the mid-nineteenth century, this certainly happened in the past, particularly with the best of the real fakes, a number of which may still be undetected.

A collection of jewellery from the period between the early eighteenth century and the first Wolrd War offers many advantages, the chief being that a reasonable number of pieces - some of no great intrincic value - have survived in good conditionm and many of these pieces are not only objects of interest for the collectors but they can be used for their original purpose, adornment.

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Metalwork: Metalworking is among the oldest crafts, and basically some of its tehniques have remained unaltered dinve biblical times. Despite refinements introduced over the centuries, if it were possible to ressurect a metalworker from 3000 years ago and put him in a workshop, he could with little adjustment begin work at once.

But this continuity of method has in no way restricted the proliferation of applications or the development of design. There are, on the one hand, tiny artefacts like finger-rings and snuffboxes, and on the other, large architectural works like choir-screens, gates and aqueducts, with every passing phase of fashion reflected in their designs.

Apart from objects of pure metalwork, metals have sometimes been used in conjunction with other materials. Iron has been used for decorating and strenghtening wooden doors; iron and brass have provided decoration for much furniture (sush as brass inlay in boulle cabinet-work), in addition to providing such working parts and details as hinges, handles, locks and escutcheons. These embellishments can provide a reliable guide for dating a piece.

It is difficult to think of any artefact that has not at some time, or in some way, been affected by metalworking. In the old metalworkers' legends, much emphasis was placed on the way in which other trades relied on their products - the carpenter for his tools, the tailor for his scissors, the butcher for his knives. Indeed our lives would be very different without metals.

Other human activities also have been much affected by metalwork: architecture would be unimaginable without ironwork; the home would be unimaginable without at least a few utensils in brass or copper, and without metalworking there would be no coins or medals, no jewellery, no machinery, nor many other objects in long-familiar forms.

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Musical Instruments: Musical instruments are precision tools producing a wide range of highly complex sounds - in short, functional works of art. Their construction and development involved craftsmen in the applied and decorative arts; scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and, naturally, executant musicians and composers. This unique co-operation resulted in instruments of striking elegance, long collected for appearance alone, and with little regard for their inherent function.

In recent years, this attitude has changed to an interest in playeble instrumetns, or those which can be restored to playing order. This has revived the co-operation between science and art, bringing early instruments to such excellent condition that knowledge about the correct performance of early music has gained incalculable benefits.

A principal aim will be to guide collectors towards an evaluation of sound potential.

There is no 'best' period for any one class of musical instrument. The earliest and simplest Italian harpsichords were triumphs of precision and elegance. By the same standard, there are no 'primitive' instruments in the sense of being faulty or inadequate. But there are instruments of deceptively simple appearance - like a cornett or a recorder - which, although difficult to play well, fulfil their function admirably.

Change in structure and sound was not necessarily a sign of dissatisfaction. Often, it was dictated by fashion, with a result that the history of instrumetns reflects the rise and fall of empires (musical automata were considered suitable gifts even for Royalty), the variety of architectural enclosures (brass for the high-domed, galleried chathedrals and virginals in tapestry-hung boudoirs), and clothes (the pochette would be too big for anyone's pocket today). To some extent, the pace and sounds of life in the past can be re-created; in the cloister dormitory nuns could play the quiet voiced clavichord without disturbing their sisters. Even more precisely, the nature of that environment can be defined by the materials used, whilst embellishments in precious metals and stones indicate wealth, trade and commerce generally. To give one obvious example, the start and development of the Industrial Revoution is clearly marked when mass production took over from the skilled craftsman and quality deteriorated. By about 1870, the collectors' interest in early instrumetns began in earnest, but ironically enough, at the same time and with some exceptions, the period over which instruments are worth collecting comes to an end.

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Pewter: With the exception of sporadic references to tin, or stannum, in early Roman literature, the first written records of pewter in more modern Europe are of the ninth century A.D. in France ; slightly later, but much more specific records have been found in England, in ecclesiastical visitation lists, where such things as processional candlesticks, chrismatories and cruet were frequently mentioned. Hoever, the history of pewter in England goes back to the Roman invaders when, in the third and fourth centuries A.D., plates, small cups and ewers in particular were made.

The Anglo-Saxons made small articles including brooches and beads of a poor quality pewter and there were possibly other uses of this period as yet undiscovered.

Various small plates, of from 4" to 5" diameter have come to light in excavation, one from a site securely dated in the period 1290-100. Of the same date, or perhaps slightly later, are two relief-decorated pewter cruets , one of which is shown here.

Pewter spoons have been made at least ffrom the thirteenth century. There is comparatively little extant pewterware of British origin of the period before the end of the sixteenth centiry, and this is mainly in the form of small plates or spoons, and very little hollow-ware; a far larger quantity of mediaval items of all descriptions seem to have survived elsewhere, in Holland and the Netherlands in particular, due no doubt, to its safe preservation in the soft mud of the dykes and waterways, and its discovery during later and extensive drainage operations.

In Britain, the 'Golden Age' of pewter, when some of the finest examples were produced, was in the sixteenth and seventeentg centuries, and on the Continent perhaps a century earlier ; even up to about the third quarter of the eighteenth century, much excellent quality pewterware was still produced. About this time, however, the guilds both in England and elsewhere begain to lose control of their members and, as a result, the quality of the products often declined. Pewter, which had been a virtual necessity in the home, was being superseded by pottery, porcelain and even silver.

Despite the decrease in the home trade, an expanding market was openig in the colonies; not only was pewterware exported in large quantities but pewterers themselves because of the local decline in trade, emigrated to the new countries, taking their moulds and skills with them.

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