King Edward III of England did not require London goldsmiths to
identify their wares because he liked collecting the objects
they made or promoting individual artisans. No, his motives were
regulatory. He wanted to be able to track and punish smiths
whose wares glittered, but were not quite gold. However, King
Edward's system of hallmarks (Figure 6-1) came to be much more
valuable. As one of the earliest instances of cataloged metadata
associated with manufactured goods, this system of hallmarks
enabled a much different relationship between people and their
possessions. Hallmarks re-associate objects with their origins.
They systematically and consistently connect two people (the
owner and the maker) through an object. The silver knife in
Figure 6-1 is not anonymous: if we can decode the hallmark, we
know who made it, when and where it was made, and out of what
material. In encoding information into objects, hallmarks link
those objects to data. That linkage has continued to prove
valuable and important in un