From earliest times frauds have been committed in connection with the precious metals. The goldsmiths and jewellers of the Middle Ages were forbidden to work in base metal, to use false stones of glass, or to put coloured foil beneath real stones. They were further expressly forbidden to manufacture personal ornaments for secular use of gilt or silvered copper or brass. Documents in the archives of the City of London contain many references to the perpetration of fraud in passing off as real, objects of brass or latten that had been silvered or gilded. In 1369 a conviction and punishment by the pillory took place for selling to "divers persons rings and fermails of latten, of coloured gold and silver, as being made of real gold and silver, in deceit, and to the grievous loss, of the common people"; and in 1376 a workman was imprisoned for having silvered 240 buttons of latten, and thirty-four latten rims for gipcières, and having "maliciously purposed and imagined to sell the same for pure silver, in deceit of the people." From actual objects that have survived it would seem that the more heinous offence was not infrequently committed of plating with silver the baser metals of tin, lead, and pewter. The statutes of the goldsmiths ordained that no jeweller should sell any article of silver unless it was as fine as sterling, "nor sett it to sell before it be touched" with the leopard's head and maker's mark. But exceptions were always made in favour of small articles of jewellery "which could not reasonably bear the same touch." Such materials as _pinchbeck_ and _Similor_ and the plated objects of modern times hardly fall within the present category. Actual forgeries of personal ornaments can scarcely be said to have been committed until comparatively recent years--not, in fact, until the demand for specimens of old jewellery on the part of the antiquary and connoisseur rendered their reproduction profitable.[191] [191] Munro (R.), _Archæology and false antiquities_. Eudel (P.), _Le Truquage_, 1887. _Trucs et Truqueurs_, 1907. Owing to the high prices they command from collectors, or to various facilities afforded for their production and disposal, three classes of objects--Greek and Etruscan jewellery, mediæval rings, and enamelled pendants of the Renaissance--offer the strongest temptation to the forger; and he on his part displays such an amount of skill and ingenuity, that the fabrication of spurious antiquities of this kind may be said to have amounted almost to a fine art.