The Poignant Reason Behind Morgan Freeman's Famous Hoop Earrings

Morgan Freeman's notion that earrings would pay for a funeral is an oft-repeated nugget of pirate lore, one with some basis in fact. According to Atlas Obscura, sailors of all kinds wore hoop earrings of gold or silver, universally accepted currency in the Age of Sail. If they died away from home, the story goes, the earrings would guarantee a burial service.

Payment for burial is a popular myth explaining the earring fashion among sailors, a practice with no clear start date. But if that was why honest seamen wore the earrings, pirates couldn't count on the same service in death. As historian Gail Selinger told Atlas Obscura, thieves of any kind wouldn't be given burials. For them, the earrings could have been a way to display their wealth and keep it close — out of easy reach of other thieves — or a way of defying sumptuary laws that restricted the dress of the lower classes in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Another theory, repeated in the San Diego Reader, is that pirates and sailors thought that gold earrings would improve their eyesight. But all these theories assume that pirates really dressed as we often picture them — in flamboyant hats and coats, colorful bandanas, and earrings. Some historians believe this depiction is the invention of 19th-century illustrators. 

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