BUCKLE

A fragment of a copper-alloy buckle plate dating to the Roman period. The fragment comprises the attachment end, with three D-sectioned hinge loops. The loops are decorated with longitudinal grooves around their outer ends, and have circular perforations obscured and filled with iron corrosion from a separate bar onto which the pin and buckle frame would originally have been hinged. The loops extend from a flat openwork plate with arched perforations bordered by two surviving projections, each one behind a loop and ending in a three-pronged fork. The projection behind the third loop is missing, and the plate is damaged at both ends, appearing originally to have extended widthwise towards further loops and with further arched perforations. The fragment has a length of 16mm and a surviving width of 23mm.

This buckle plate is Roman, of Hawkes and Dunning's type IIA, with a particularly close parallel from Caistor-by-Norwich (Hawkes and Dunning 1961, fig. 17g). It can be compared with several others on the PAS database: SF-DD6561, NARC-5E9CA2, KENT378 and SUR-00DEF4. This type of buckle plate starts in the middle of the fourth century and is still occasionally found in fifth-century Anglo-Saxon graves.

It is superficially similar to the medieval buckle plates NMS-61E218, NLM-53B266 and IOW-969AE4, but these all have two hinge loops.