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Description: | Gold and cloisonn?? garnet setting from the tongue plate of a high status buckle. The setting is sub-rectangular with curved cutaways defining the shoulders. It is made with a sheet gold back plate to which is soldered a single strip of gold sheet set on edge to form a frame for the cloisonn?? cell work. This is inlaid with well cut garnets over pointill?? foil and fills the panel with a design of two skilfully entwined snakes: their heads with well defined open jaws fill the lower corners and their sinuous bodies interlace across the centre of the panel to end in tails tucked beneath the jaws. The spaces between the inlaid garnets are filled with cells lidded with gold sheet. The back of the panel is plain, showing that it was secured in place at the base of the tongue with some form of adhesive.
The panel was originally part of a high status buckle and would have been placed at the base of the buckle tongue over the hinge through which the loop was attached. Its shape, sub rectangular with cutaway shoulders, implies that it belongs to a rectangular rather than a triangular buckle. It can best be compared to a silver-gilt buckle with garnet cloisonn?? inlay found at Gilton Ash, Kent and to a buckle with a continental provenance, decorated with Style II animal ornament, but with a cloisonn?? frame to its tongue plate(George Speake, Anglo-Saxon Animal Art and its Germanic Background, Oxford, 1980, pl. 9g (Gilton Ash) and 9b(Rjinsberg, Holland)).
The use of cloisonn?? interlace is rare and is known from only a very few objects of exceptional quality of early seventh century date. The style of the interlace can be compared to a remarkable but unprovenanced gold pyramidal scabbard mount which is decorated on each face with a single ribbon bodied zoomorph executed in cloisonn?? garnet inlay (Leslie Webster and Janet Backhouse, The Making of England, Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture, 600 – 900, London, 1991, 57, cat. no. 41). The pyramidal mount shares other points of similarity with the Thurnham setting, particularly in the use of lidded cells to fill the spaces between the garnets. The heads of the zoomorphs with simple open jaws are also similar in design and cut from a single plate garnet. Other examples of similar garnet cloisonn?? interlace can be seen on a mount now in the cathedral treasury at Tongres, Belgium, but arguably of Anglo-Saxon manufacture, on a brooch from Wynaldum, Friesland (Rupert Bruce-Mitford, Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, London 1974, pls. 90, 91 (Tongres) and 88 (Wynaldum)) and on both the purse-lid and the shoulder-clasps from Sutton Hoo Mound 1 (Angela Care Evans, The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, London, 1986, pls. vi and viii). | Subjects: | Setting | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Creator: | Richardson, Andrew - Canterbury Archaeological Trust | Identifier: | http://www.findsdatabase.org.uk/hms/pas_... | Language: | en-GB | Go to resource |
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