Livery buttons were made from polished, gilded or tinned brass and once adorned the jackets and uniforms of staff and retainers working for large households in the later 18th and 19th centuries. A common type of detecting find, they were designed to demonstrate status and wealth and bore distinctive crests derived from the heraldry of the families employing them. It is easy enough to envision objects like this being lost in the landscape during the course of outdoor activities such as hunting or riding and they are particularly common in areas (like Surrey) containing a lot of aristocratic estates.
Although of relatively recent date, these objects can potentially offer social historical connections to famous individuals and families of the past. The challenge as a finds recorder is then to try to demonstrate such associations; typically family crests, being simplified components from much more complex family schemes of arms, are not quite unique to individual families and may connect with quite a wide range of names. Narrowing these down requires a bit of local knowledge as we would generally expect the represented family to have local properties or social connections. The reverse of these buttons often bears a maker’s mark which can also help date it.
This particular example, recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme as SUR-7404E8 is 25.7mm in diameter, with a convex face depicting a crest of a Griffon walking left with front paw upraised (passant) and gorged with a coronet. The reverse is concave with a stump of a broken loop shank around which is the maker’s inscription REYNOLDS & CO / 50 St MARTINS LANE / LONDON. This mark dates the button to 1871-1873. This crest is listed in the pre-eminent reference work Fairbairn’s Crests (plate 61/14) as related to the names Cleve, Cliffe, Clive, Evelyn, Finch, Finche and Watson.
Given these options and the location of the find, a likely potential association is to the family of diarist and writer John Evelyn (1620-1706) whose estates and birthplace were at Wotton, very near to where this button was found. The family member contemporary to the manufacture date for this button is William John Evelyn (1822-1908), who inherited these estates and lived at Wotton House. He was, among other things, MP for Surrey West in 1849-1857 and High Sheriff of Surrey in 1860. The house at Wotton was extensively rebuilt during this period after a fire and his monogram can still be seen decorating the building’s exterior.
It is relatively unusual to be able to link a button to a famous local name like this, with such diverse connections bridging the local historical, literary and archaeological worlds. Finds like this add a social historical element to the archaeological information recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme and although they may not be routinely recorded given their recent age, when we can establish such connections it is important to document them.