5 - Spurs and Negotiations of Masculinity in Early Modern England

Summary

The simple spur is an often described but rarely analyzed item of armorial dress. It was a minor riding accessory: a handful of pieces of metal and leather strapped to the foot used to apply pressure and guide the animal's movements. An iron tool in its earliest forms, the medieval spur – now cast in copper alloy, gilded and tinned – became intrinsically connected with knightly status and chivalric masculinity. Ambiguity followed, as negotiations of masculinity changed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the semiotic resonance of spurs declined. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they became a highly symbolic article of dress as they moved into the contemporary fashion system, bringing with them an embodiment of the masculine ideal now distilled into portable form. This change in the way spurs were perceived and used was an expression of the rising anxieties about gender and the body that rippled through this period.

This research project began with a question, one about significance and symbolism, and about performances of masculine display in an early modern colonial setting. The Acadians, French colonists who arrived in modern-day Nova Scotia in the 1630s, have historically been represented as isolated peasantry and farmers. Archaeological investigations of Acadian homesteads and villages in the mid-to-late twentieth century, on the other hand, unearthed counterexamples to this archetype of poverty. The Melanson settlement, across the Annapolis River from the English Fort Anne, was first excavated in the summer of 1984. Among the finds was a partial copper-alloy spur buckle cast with floral designs, curling leaves, and a pair of fleur-de-lys (Fig. 5.1). Far fancier in design than the other known Acadian spur – a rowel spur of plain metal, likely iron, found at the Roma site on Prince Edward Island – this decorated buckle seemed incongruous. Why would one of the Melanson men have worn a fancy pair of spurs on a small farming settlement in the early eighteenth century? They had horses, certainly, but the predominant forms of riding gear in the region were cruder iron and pewter.