HANGING BOWL

A copper alloy hooked mount made as a fitting for a hanging bowl, a specialised type of early medieval metal vessel. A curved hook of circular cross-section ends in a stylised animal-head with notches marking the ears. The eyes may also be marked but detail here and on the plate is obscured by corrosion and modern preservative. The underside of the jaw is flat and recessed. The hook was cast with an attachment plate with an outer convex surface, now incomplete and with the remains of enamel inlay; a yellow lozenge in the centre of a ring or spiral of tinned copper alloy is visible on the right side, but the details are unclear. The slope where the plate meets the neck suggests that it was originally leaf or 'bird' shaped, rather than circular (the other common shape) although this is unclear.

This piece was originally one of a set of hooked-mounts, normally three, attached by their plates around the body of a circular copper-alloy bowl and fixed below the rim so that each hook projected above it. Each hook held a metal ring with a cord or strap attached used to hang the bowl from a central point. Hanging-bowls are specialised luxury vessels with Roman-period origins, and were made in the early medieval period only in Britain and later Ireland. They were much prized in the new Anglo-Saxon cultures of eastern Britain and included in furnished burials, contexts that date them to the mid- sixth and to mid-seventh century, although later types were made and found more widely distributed in the Viking period.

The motifs are interesting but unclear, 'ring-and-dot' inlays on hanging bowl mounts are very uncommon, as on a complete bowl from Hildersham, Cambs and on a bowl used as a cremation vessel at Tranmer House, Sutton Hoo Suffolk (Bruce-Mitford with Raven 2005, Corpus 13; S Youngs in C.Fern ed. forthcoming). Similar examples on the database are DOR-14E3B2, LON-554844 but these lack the well-defined animal head to the hook. This hanging bowl mount probably dates from the 7th century.

S M Youngs 'Medium and motif: polychrome enamelling and early manuscript decoration in Insular art' in C. Bourke (ed.), 'From the Isles of the North' Early Medieval Art in Ireland and Britain, Belfast, 1995, pp 37-48.