STRAINER

An incomplete sheet copper-alloy handle attachment from a strainer or skimmer of probable late-Medieval to early Post-Medieval date. The base of the handle attachment and a small fragment of the skimmer itself survive, the remainder now missing due to old breaks. It has a flat, rectangular back plate that tapers to a rounded base. On the back face of this plate is a second rectangular plate of equal dimensions and form, but which projects at its centre to form a rectangular socket that runs the length of the plates and would have enabled attachment of a handle. The two plates are held together by a series of three folded sheet copper-alloy rivets with irregular, flattened heads. At the top centre of the socket is a central circular rivet hole, presumably to secure the handle in position. On the front face of the flat plate the lower half of the fragment has the remains of a separate sheet copper-alloy strainer, again held in place by the same rivets keeping the two attachment plates together, and with the remains of several sub-circular apertures. The upper edge of the strainer fragment is curved, sugesting it may have been circular in form and therefore that this is a handle attachment from a skimmer rather than a vessel fragment. It measures 73.46mm in length, 48.38mm in width, 15.72mm in thickness (at socket), and 46.02g in weight.

This is a handle attachment/socket from a strainer or skimmer of Medieval to Post-Medieval date. It finds close parallels in examples from London (Egan, 1998: no. 439, fig. 126) and Norwich (Margeson, 1993: nos. 743-745) and probably dates to the end of the Medieval period or later, c.15th-17th centuries AD.