Gorget

The gorget in this 1772 portrait of Colonel George Washington by Charles Willson Peale, was worn in the French and Indian War to show his rank as an officer in the Virginia Regiment.[1]
Elaborately decorated gilt-brass gorget of c. 1630, probably Dutch

A gorget /ˈɡɔːrɪt/, from the French gorge meaning throat, was a band of linen wrapped around a woman's neck and head in the medieval period or the lower part of a simple chaperon hood.[2][3] The term later described a steel or leather collar to protect the throat, a set of pieces of plate armour, or a single piece of plate armour hanging from the neck and covering the throat and chest. Later, particularly from the 18th century, the gorget became primarily ornamental, serving as a symbolic accessory on military uniforms, a use which has survived in some armies (see below).

The term may also be used for other things such as items of jewellery worn around the throat region in several societies, for example wide thin gold collars found in prehistoric Ireland dating to the Bronze Age.[4]

The Gleninsheen gold gorget, Irish Bronze Age, National Museum of Ireland[5]
  1. ^ Lossing, Benson John (1859). Mount Vernon and its Associations: Historical, Biographical and Pictorial. Selected Americana from Sabin's Dictionary. W.A. Townsend and Company. p. 345. OCLC 9269788.
  2. ^ Norris, Herbert (1999). Medieval costume and fashion. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. pp. 181. ISBN 9780486404868.
  3. ^ Lewandowski, Elizabeth J. (24 October 2011). The complete costume dictionary. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, Inc. p. 123. ISBN 9780810877856.
  4. ^ Gleeson, Dermot F. (1934). "Discovery of Gold Gorget at Burren, Co. Clare". The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. 4 (1): 138–139. JSTOR 25513720.
  5. ^ Cahill, Mary. "Before the Celts: treasures in gold and bronze". In:Ó Floinn, Raghnal; Wallace, Patrick (eds), Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities. National Museum of Ireland, 2002. p. 100. ISBN 978-0-7171-2829-7

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