An enigmatic object has been found and recorded in Leicestershire by Phil Harding*. The record can be found here: LEIC-D62660. At first sight it looks like a fragment – part of the foot – of a narrow cruciform brooch, a bit like NMS-512284 (see picture). Narrow cruciform brooches are one of the earliest kinds of Anglo-Saxon women’s brooches, being found in cremation and inhumation graves at least by the mid fifth century, and possibly even earlier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These narrow brooches are more common as metal-detector finds than in graves, suggesting that they were being worn – and lost – before the Anglo-Saxon fashion of furnished burial had really caught on. Perhaps they were being worn by immigrants from Germany, perhaps they were being worn by women who had been girls in late Roman Britain but who now wanted to follow the new fashions. We may never know, but certainly these brooches are tantalising evidence of the start of Anglo-Saxon England as it develops out of the chaos of the late Roman world.

The story could end there, but I think it’s worth following a bit further. Phil’s brooch has an unusual feature right on the end of the horse-head terminal. Look carefully and you will see, instead of the conventional nostrils, a cylindrical perforation drilled right through the brooch from side to side, and now filled with iron corrosion. What’s going on there?

There is a group of early Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches that have little projections at this end, pierced from side to side to take a pendant. In Germany, where they are also found, they are known as Klapperschmuck – rattle-jewellery – because when these are found intact in graves, they often have one or two little pendants, often quite flimsy, attached to the end, which rattle about.

We now have over a dozen fragments of these rattle-brooches recorded on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database – but none quite like Phil’s. All, until now, have had little narrow loops, almost all broken – although there is one, from Wanlip in Leicestershire, that is intact, with a little ring still held by the loop (LEIC-B9E3F4). Maybe Phil’s object is just an unusual variant of a rattle-brooch, but we felt we should investigate other possibilities.

Might we have been holding it the wrong way up? Once turned upside down, Phil’s object begins to look a bit like another early Anglo-Saxon woman’s dress accessory, this time a girdle-hanger. Girdle-hangers are long key-like objects that appear to have no purpose except to hang from a woman’s belt, again no doubt clattering and rattling. They can have very similar horse heads at the top of their long shanks, looking upwards. An example from the PAS database (pictured) is NMS-BF0AF7. But although this identification is possible, most girdle-hangers tend to be fairly flat on the reverse, and to have narrowed loops. Again, Phil’s new object isn’t very like any of them.

So we have to start trawling through the more unusual objects. One that’s been intriguing us for a while is BUC-8EDFD4.

This is a very mysterious item, and although we have recorded it as a ‘buckle’ because of its hinge and pin, it really isn’t like any other buckle known. It is again almost certainly intended to represent a horse (although some have pointed out that in fact it looks more like a crocodile, especially from the side) and again it resembles a narrow cruciform brooch.

The trouble is, Phil’s object has broken at the top, so we don’t know if it originally ended in hinge loops like BUC-8EDFD4. Also, there are other holes through BUC-8EDFD4 running the other way – as if it was fixed onto something, maybe a box or piece of harness.

We aren’t really any further in discovering what these two peculiar objects are. What the work of the PAS and its volunteers is showing us is that there is far more variety in ancient objects than we ever thought before the Scheme began, and that even if we don’t know what something is, if we record it carefully, then probably something else will eventually be found that does let us identify it – and allows us to understand what it can tell us about the past.

*P.S. Not the Phil Harding with the hat from Time Team – this one’s a detectorist in Leicestershire who records his own finds and gives sterling support to the Leicestershire Portable Antiquities Scheme office.