BROOCH

An incomplete Early Medieval copper alloy and gilt saucer brooch dating to AD 450-550. The brooch is circular in form with a turned-up rim or edge. The edge is abraded with some cracks on the exterior. There is a pierced hole close to one edge of the plate. The brooch is decorated with five running spirals around a central ring and dot inside a circular border. Gilding survives on the inside of the saucer edge and within the crevasses of the engraved spiral motif. To the reverse there is one partially broken U-shaped lug, and some white metal residue around the hole where the other lug would have been attached. This may indicate resoldering of a repair or for some other form of attachment which could suggest the possible re-use of the brooch as a pendant.  Initially there would have been two lugs and a catchplate where a now missing pin would have rested. There is also a small indentation just south east of the hole. The brooch has a dark green patina.

The brooch is 33mm in diameter from the top of the rim, and 22.8mm in diameter at the base, 8.3mm maximum thickness, and weighs 11.2g.

Similar types of saucer brooches with varying numbers of running spirals can be found on the PAS database including: OXON-43560B, SF-1A6E47, SUSS-5C6A12, and an almost complete well preserved example see HAMP-005BE3.

Saucer brooches are discussed in Tania Dickinson’s 1993 study on ‘Early Saxon Saucer Brooches: A Preliminary Overview’, in Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 6, pg 11-44. More specifically fig. 10 on page 17 found in Hastings is very similar to this example. Some other similar types were found in graves in Abingdon (ibid page 20). Dickinson states that from her findings saucer brooches are found to be associated with women (ibid page 38).

Additionally from record HAMP-005BE3:

‘A number of similar saucer brooches with running spirals are shown in MacGregor and Bolick 1993, pp.42-45. MacGregor and Bolick comment that brooches of this type were produced characteristically as single castings, whose dished forms give rise to their name. Normally, women (and, occasionally, young girls) wore them in pairs at the shoulder or the breast. Tania Dickinson in Dickinson, T. 1991 'Material Culture as Social Expression: The Case of Saxon Saucer Brooches with running Spiral Decoration' Studien zur Sachsenforschung Hildesheim, has concluded that the five spiral running design originated on the Continent and developed from the late 4th to mid 5th centuries. In England the burials are more likely to have taken place between the late 5th and mid 6th centuries.