Ring

This ring engraved with a solemn bearded man and the name 'Aufret' was long believed to be associated with King Alfred the Great. However, recent scholarship has drawn attention to its resemblance to a group of Lombard rings dating from the 7th century. The fine quality of the ring suggests that it belonged to a person of some importance.

It was found in 1726 in the central Italian town of Bagnoregnio in the ruins of the church of St Peter, destroyed in an earthquake in 1695. It was acquired by a Roman antiquarian, collector and bibliophile , the Marquis Alessandro Gregorio Capponi. Capponi's manuscript diary, with a description of the ring, survives in the Vatican Library. After Capponi's death in 1746, it is believed that the 'Aufret' ring joined the collection of the Museo Kircheriano in Rome and from there went into the Vatican collections. In 1857, the ring was presented to the British collector and aesthete Edmund Waterton. Waterton was a noted ring collector but also held a post in the papal household of Pius IX. He displayed the ring at the Society of Antiquaries, London, in 1859, erroneously suggesting that it had been found with 'a considerable number of coins of Alfred' and suggesting that 'Aufred' might be a corrupted spelling for 'Alfred', an attribution which survived unchallenged until the 1980s. Waterton's financial problems led to the sale of his collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1871.