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Description: | Gilded copper-alloy suspension mount for a horse-harness pendant. The mount is made from a single rectangular sheet, with five circular rivet holes, two at each end and one roughly in the centre. All but one of the rivet holes at the corners are broken.
One long edge of the rectangular plate has three projecting hinges, all folded around a single thin circular-section copper-alloy axis bar (now bent and broken) and with central slots to accommodate the suspension loop of the pendant(s). The central hinge is shorter than the other two, and so the single axis bar would always have been angled towards then away from it. The side hinges appear to be complete, but have partial rivet holes on the reverse as if the lower corner rivets passed through their edges only. The central hinge is certainly incomplete on the reverse and its relationship to the central rivet hole is uncertain; the centre of the central hinge and the rivet hole do not coincide.
The rectangular plate is decorated with an engraved border, and an engraved linear pattern which may be an animal but which is hard to decipher. The lines are slightly wavy as if made up of individual jerks of the engraving tool. The mount measures 48mm in length, 26mm in width and 3.5mm in thickness and weighs 9.52g. It was photographed on its side as it was originally identified as a buckle plate.
No exact parallel has been found for this particular type of suspension mount, but Steven Ashley has seen an image of the object and has dated it on more general parallels to the 12th or 13th centuries AD. | Subjects: | pendant suspension mount | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Creator: | Marshall, Anna - Portable Antiquities Scheme | Identifier: | http://www.findsdatabase.org.uk/hms/pas_... | Language: | en-GB | Go to resource |
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