Finds

In England a statute of 1300 required silver to be assayed and struck with the leopard's head; by 1478 London was adding a date letter. A hallmark names the city, the year and often the maker. The object carries its own testimony — which is why a small stamp can outweigh the metal it sits on.

After Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria's long mourning made jet and hair-work jewellery a common sight. A mourning brooch was never about its gold. Its worth is the person it remembers.

Who owned it, and when. A documented chain of hands turns an object into a record — the same chair is a different thing once you know whose house it furnished.

A mantel, a door, a run of tile outlives the building it came from. Salvage is a physical fragment of a place that is gone, and the only part of it you can still touch.

Hand-raised silver, hand-cut dovetails, plate fused by hand in Sheffield. Skills that mass production retired survive in the objects they made — and those objects were built to outlast us.

The three golden balls over a pawnshop door are widely associated with the Lombard money-lenders of medieval Italy. Pawn is the oldest neighbourhood credit there is: a loan against an object, with the object itself as the promise.