Horseshoe Jewellery

The horseshoe is one of the most widely recognised good-luck symbols in Western folk tradition, and its curved, instantly legible outline made it a popular jewellery motif in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, especially in brooches and stickpins.

Where the Belief Comes From

The belief that a horseshoe brings luck or keeps harm away is recorded in British folklore from at least the 17th century, when horseshoes were nailed over house and stable doors. Several explanations circulate. Iron itself was traditionally believed to repel witches and fairies, and a horseshoe was the most easily found piece of worked iron; the blacksmith’s craft carried its own associations with luck; and the crescent shape recalls the moon. The best-known legend concerns St Dunstan, a 10th-century Archbishop of Canterbury who had been a smith: he is said to have nailed a horseshoe to the Devil’s hoof and removed it only when the Devil promised never to enter a house with a horseshoe over the door. All of these are explanations offered by folklore, not a documented origin.

A Widespread but Inconsistent Rule

The belief is not applied consistently. Some traditions hold that a horseshoe should be hung with its ends pointing upward, so that it forms a cup that holds luck in; others insist on the opposite, with the ends pointing downward so that luck pours out over whoever passes beneath. Regional and family customs disagree, and neither version can be described as the correct or original one.

Era and Typical Use

Horseshoe jewellery is most closely associated with the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and especially with the years from about 1870 to 1914, when good-luck and sporting motifs were fashionable in everyday jewellery. The outline suited brooches and stickpins, where a horseshoe set with a row of small diamonds or other stones along its curve became a standard design for men and women alike. The plentiful supply of South African diamonds from the 1870s made small diamond-set novelty brooches affordable to a much wider market.

Sporting Jewellery

The horseshoe belongs to the large family of late-Victorian sporting jewellery that also includes foxes’ heads, riding crops, stirrups, hunting horns, jockey caps and racehorses. These were worn by men as stickpins and cufflinks, and by women as brooches - often a horseshoe combined with a crop or a fox mask on a gold bar brooch. They reflect the importance of hunting and racing in late-19th-century social life, as well as the luck symbolism. The same period’s taste for good-luck charms produced brooches combining the horseshoe with a four-leaf clover or a wishbone.

Wedding Jewellery

The horseshoe was a common wedding motif. Brides in Britain from the later 19th century were given horseshoes for luck - real ones, silver ones or decorated cardboard ones - and horseshoe brooches and charms made fitting gifts for brides and bridesmaids, or keepsakes of the day. Double horseshoes, like the brooch above, combined two shoes into a single design suitable for a couple, and were sometimes inscribed with a sentimental word such as “Mizpah” - see mizpah brooch.

Typical Forms

The most common form is a brooch or stickpin in which the curve of the shoe is set with a row of small diamonds, other gemstones or split seed pearls, sometimes with a larger stone at the centre of the curve. Plain worked-metal horseshoe brooches, without stones, were also common and cheaper, often engraved or textured to suggest the nail holes and worn surface of a real shoe. The motif is rarer as a pendant or ring, its shape suiting the flat, linear format of a brooch or pin.

Materials and Construction

Fine horseshoe jewellery was typically made in gold, or in diamonds set in silver-topped gold in the 1870s to 1890s and in platinum after about 1900, with stones in individual collet, grain or claw settings following the arc. Cheaper versions were made in 9 carat gold - a standard legal in Britain from 1854 and widely used by Birmingham manufacturers - in silver, or in gilt base metal, sometimes set with paste. The range of prices matches the horseshoe’s identity as a popular, everyday good-luck token rather than an exclusively luxury form.

Reading Horseshoe Motifs Today

A curved horseshoe outline, set with stones or worked plainly in metal, is an easily identified motif, and in a Victorian or Edwardian brooch or stickpin it is a reliable sign of good-luck symbolism, often combined with sporting or wedding associations. Because folk tradition disagrees about orientation, whether a horseshoe in a piece points up or down is not evidence of one intended meaning over another.