BRACELET

Fragment of a Roman bracelet of the uncommon wide early type, which appears to have been re-used. It is 19.5 mm wide and has longitudinal decoration, of a central groove flanked by two pairs of dotted lines (the dots themselves possibly set in shallow grooves), plus outer borders of single dotted lines. At one end the bracelet is bent and broken; the break is very fresh and it is remarkable that the metal has retained enough flexibility to bend before breaking. At the other end there is a zone of transverse decoration forming a terminal; a broad concave moulding, with a double dotted line to either side. One corner survives intact as the end of the bracelet, but the rest is broken (old breaks). The fragment is perfectly flat and decreases in thickness from 2.5 mm at the terminal to 1 mm at the broken end. The flatness may be due to re-use, as there are two circular holes drilled just outside the double longitudinal lines of dots, one closer to the terminal than the other and filled with iron corrosion, the other a little further away and empty. This re-use might have been to turn a broken bracelet into a mount, perhaps in the early Anglo-Saxon period.

This type of bracelet is also sometimes called the 'wide strip' type and has been associated with the Roman term 'armilla'. This example was included in Crummy 2005 as an example of her Group A, with two bands of decoration (Crummy 2005, 99, 103; no. 40).