BROOCH

Description: Large flat cross-shaped brooch made from silver, gold and niello, now incomplete and bent. The cross has outward-curved ends to the arms and inward-curved angles between; the end of one arm is missing.

The cross has a narrow undecorated border, and in the centre is a circular reserved area with a central perforation for a missing rivet. Reserved strips run from the border to the central reserved circle, forming a diagonal cross. In the centre of each surviving arm-terminal is another reserved circle, each with a separate silver rivet. The rivets are set within a beaded gold wire collar which appears to have been soldered to a separate silver washer; in places one can just see the cut edges of this washer. The beading has been made with a swage, and most beads have a central medial seam or Äquatorschnitt. Three further very short reserved strips run between the outer rivets and the border, forming edges to a single panel of animal ornament on each arm and two subsidiary triangular panels at the terminals of the arms.

Each of the panels on the arms has reserved ornament within an engraved field; there is surviving decomposed niello inlay in some parts of the engraving, and this probably originally extended throughout. Each of the surviving pairs of triangular panels at the ends of the arms has a slightly different design. One pair is filled with a triquetra each; another three drop-shapes, the points extending into the corners of the triangle; and the third has a central clockwise scroll with three pointed tendrils or leaves.

The main field on each arm has a single profile animal, the bodies facing the centre but the heads turned to look backwards. The animals are bold and almost cartoonish, with big round reserved eyes and three-toed front paws; there is a nick into the body to the front and back of each foreleg, and the hindquarters are absent, having seamlessly changed into a plant scroll with fleshy single or triple leaves. All of the animals' heads are slightly different. The arm with the triquetras has a head with a high rounded brow, no ears, and a long tongue crossing the centre of the body and ending in a little rounded lobe. The arm with the plant-scroll ends has three oval lobes at the back and top of the head, perhaps an ear and a horn, and another long tongue crossing the body and ending in a small lobe. The third complete surviving panel is now bent, so a little harder to see; it has a comma-shaped ear curving forwards, and open jaws with a short upward-pointing blunt-ended tongue. The fourth animal (opposite the third) has a similar head with comma-shaped ear, but also has the long tongue crossing over the body. One animal (the one over the pin spring) is in mirror-image both with its two adjacent animals and its opposite animal, rather than having two pairs in mirror-image.

The 'spandrels' (in the sense of the spaces left over between the cross-arms) are filled with profile animal heads that spring from the reserved border at the outer corners of each arm. The outer edge of the cross-arm continues round to sweep under the animal heads, the line continuing underneath a projecting downward-curving ear which ends in a small circular lobe, and eventually becoming the lower jaw of the animal head. The eye is a ring-and-dot, and the muzzle is decorated with five curving grooves giving it a wrinkled appearance. There is a longitudinal groove along the upper but not the lower jaw; the upper jaw touches the edge of the cross, leaving an openwork perforation between the two. A long tongue issues from the open jaws, bends down and curls upwards to touch the edge of the cross and then end in a rounded lobe.

Of the original eight of these animal heads, five now survive; a pair at either end of the pin and one other. They are all now bent, but do not appear to have originally touched each other.

On the reverse are the remains of a one-piece spring and pin mechanism made from silver and originally attached by three rivets; the central one, as already said, is missing. This consists of a flat rectangular strip 5-6mm wide that becomes circular in cross-section at either end, one end coiling a full turn to form the start of the spring, and the other end curled over to form the catchplate. The pin proper is missing. It appears that the catchplate would not have protruded beyond the edge of the brooch, but the spring probably did just a little. The presence of the pin mechanism appears to have strengthened the part of the brooch that it runs across, as the two cross arms supported by it are more complete, and are less bent and distorted, than the other two.

The reverse is undecorated. All of the breaks appear neither very fresh nor very worn.

Dimensions: The maximum diameter of the brooch in its slightly bent form (along the axis of the pin mechanism) is 56mm. The plate is 0.8-1mm thick. The wire collars around the rivets are c. 7mm in diameter. the diameter of the beaded wire is difficult to measure, but is about 0.7mm. It weighs 18.1 g.

Analysis: Non-destructive X-ray fluorescence analysis of the surface of the brooch indicated a silver content of approximately 96%, the rest being copper, lead and gold. The beaded-wire collars showed a gold content of 69-75%, with 15-26% silver and 5-11% copper. There is no evidence for gilding anywhere on the brooch.

Discussion and Date: This brooch fits into a series of medium-sized circular or almost-circular brooches with separate one-piece pin mechanisms held on by rivets. Examples include the truly circular early 9th-century copper-alloy brooch from the Evington Brook, Leicester (Webster and Backhouse 1991, no. 186) and the 9th-century brooch from Elmsett, Suffolk (West 1998, fig. 24.6).

Brooches in this style continued to be made into the late 9th century, for example the smaller Beeston Tor silver brooch (Webster and Backhouse 1991, no. 245(a), Wilson 1964, no. 2), found in a hoard of c. 875 and, from the Trewhiddle-style animals it bears, made not long before. The mid 9th-century Strickland brooch (BM 1949,0702.1) gives a good parallel for the general decorative schema, with independent animals not enmeshed in interlace; this brooch also has beaded-wire collars to the rivet heads, and the decoration is partly in silver and partly in inlaid gold.

It is difficult, however, to find precise parallels to the animal ornament. The high rounded brows of the animals on the cross-arms can be paralleled on the Tiberius Bede of the early 9th century (Webster 2012, fig. 92), and the wrinkled muzzles recall the muzzle of the animal at the end of the crest on the late 8th-century Coppergate helmet (Webster and Backhouse 1991, no. 47); the fleshy triangular leaves at their rears are like those on the smallest of the Pentney brooches (Webster and Backhouse no. 187f), dating to the end of the 8th century. The downward-curving comma-shaped ears and the kinked tongues of the spandrel animals are difficult to parallel.

Leslie Webster has commented that the ornament has an unusual, archaic look, with the backward-biting beasts echoing those on 7th- century (Style II) and 8th-century (Franks Casket) objects.

It may be that the bold cartoonish feel derives from the well-modelled figure style of the 'Tiberius' group of manuscripts (Webster and Backhouse 1991, 195) of the mid and later 8th and early 9th century. Taking all of this together, it seems likely that this brooch dates to the late 8th century.

Update: The downward-scrolling ears on the Wilden brooch have now been paralleled by similar spirals on a small mount from near Chelmsford, ESS-D6ACD5.

The almost-circular cross shape of the brooch allocates it to Weetch's Type 16.