This lead alloy badge from the British Museum represents a medieval hood repurposed as a sack for a harvest of cherries (fig. 1).¹ It measures 38 by 30 millimetres and was cast integrally with its pin and clasp in a three-part mould.² When first made, it would have shone like silver. Badges were purchased in their millions by pilgrims between the late twelfth and early sixteenth centuries, as attractive, wearable and cheap souvenirs of their visits to holy sites (fig. 2). By the later Middle Ages badges were also worn as general symbols of devotion, as livery insignia, and as humorous or amorous tokens; which of these categories the “hood of cherries” badge falls into is debatable. Five of them have been found: three in Salisbury, and another in London (fig. 3), while the provenance of the fifth is unknown.³ Their cataloguers reluctantly associate them with the cult of St Dorothy, whose emblem is a basket of fruit, although Spencer expressed concern that, “a fashionable hood seems far removed from her story.”⁴ There are also possible alternative explanations to its meaning, which will be explored here.

A fifteenth-century date can be suggested based on the style of the hood.⁵ It has a gorget (a collar for the neck) and a tippet (the long band of fabric that replaced the tubular liripipe). These are both decoratively dagged and the hole for the face has a rolled rim, suggesting that it may represent a kind of hood called a chaperon, which was worn on the head: the fifteenth-century descendant of the fourteenth-century gorget, hood, and liripipe.

On all the surviving examples, the seven fruits can be tentatively identified as cherries from their long, sometimes paired, stems. A separate source exists to support this conclusion. On folio 196v of the early fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter, alongside other familiar or popular scenes of country life (fig. 4), a thief is shown scrumping from a cherry tree. He is depicted in the tree with his liripipe hood back-to-front, filling it with cherries. The illuminator is careful to render the tree’s leaves, bark, and ripening fruit identifiable. The hood of cherries on the badge may therefore be interpreted as visually referencing a spontaneous harvest of cherries.

DOI Just such a harvest was a motif central to a story that enjoyed a short burst of popularity during the second half of the fifteenth century, when all five of these badges were probably made. It features at the beginning of the N-Town mystery play for the Nativity (lines 24–44).⁶ In the story, Joseph and the pregnant Mary are travelling to Bethlehem. They notice a tree miraculously bearing cherries out of season. She asks Joseph to pick some for her but he responds irritably that the one who got her pregnant should harvest them, not him (this line also becomes the refrain in the derivative “Cherry Tree Carol”). At God’s command, therefore, the cherry tree bends and Mary is able to gather her fill of the fruit.

The motif of the Virgin’s unexpected glut of cherries was popular in England during the period of this badge-type’s production, and appeared in other visual and literary works.⁷ Whether or not it furnished the imagery of this badge, the scrumped harvest of cherries is an effective natural metaphor for unexpected wealth, as the rare four-leaf clover is for good luck. As new research explores the many mysterious iconographies borne by medieval pilgrims’ souvenirs and secular badges, the “hood of cherries” badge is a testament to how much may be learned from their study alongside the elite art and popular literature of the Middle Ages.