PILGRIM BADGE

Lead-alloy pilgrim's badge depicting St Andrew, now bent in half. An upright rectangular plaque, it has a surviving projection at one lower corner that would originally have extended to a stitching loop; the other three corners are broken. St Andrew is in the centre of the plaque, wearing a striped or pleated gown drawn in at the waist; his limbs are splayed as if attached to an X-shaped cross. He faces the observer, but his face is very crude indeed with two large round eyes, a round nose and two large straight lips filling the whole of the space.

The arms emerge from the gown to either side of the head; they appear to have some transverse lines, perhaps indicating ropes binding the saint onto the cross, and terminate in hands with visible fingers. What may be a spindly leg seems to emerge from the gown at the lower left-hand corner and turn two right-angles forming a knee and then a foot. Down either side of the crucified saint are crude letters; on the right-hand side they may read upwards ARTY (possibly part of the word MARTYR) and on the left by the legs there is an N. There is an A for Andrew beneath the feet. A badge of St Andrew found in Hockwold, Norfolk, in 1986 had the lettering MARTY[R] and the letter A between the feet.

These badges are discussed by Spencer (1998, 270-2); they were souvenirs of pilgrimage to St Andrews in Fife. It is interesting that they follow the Continental pattern of attachment using stitching loops rather than the English pattern of using an integral pin. Dimensions as bent, 19 x 25 mm; unbent length c. 41 mm.