A Short History of the Engagement Ring

In ancient Rome, a betrothal was often sealed with a ring, sometimes of iron and later of gold, given as a pledge. Some Roman rings were carved with clasped hands, a symbol of agreement and union that appears again and again in the centuries that followed.

In late medieval and Tudor England, sweethearts exchanged posy rings: simple gold bands engraved with a short verse, often inside the band where only the wearer could read it. The custom of a private inscription inside a ring comes from them.

Gimmel rings, popular from the sixteenth century, were made of two or three interlocking hoops that fitted together as one ring. A couple could each wear a hoop during the engagement and join them at the wedding.

In 1477, Archduke Maximilian of Austria gave Mary of Burgundy a ring set with diamonds on their betrothal. It is often described as the first recorded diamond engagement ring, and it set a fashion among European royalty and nobility.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, engagement rings became richly symbolic: clusters of old mine cut diamonds, coloured gemstones, serpents for eternal love, and rings that spelled messages in the first letters of their stones. Many of the diamonds in these rings came from Brazil, which was the world’s main source for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The discovery of diamonds in South Africa in the 1870s made them far more widely available. In 1886, Tiffany & Co. introduced a six-claw setting that lifted a single diamond above the band, the shape of the modern solitaire. In the twentieth century, diamond advertising, including the famous line that a diamond is forever, coined in 1947, made a diamond engagement ring an expectation for many couples.

Today the engagement ring is more personal than it has been for a century. Lab-grown diamonds, coloured stones, antique cuts, rings for both partners and designs made for one person have all widened what an engagement ring can be. The promise it carries has not changed.