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Description: | A largely complete copper alloy early-medieval or medieval stirrup-strap mount (length: 52.3mm; width: 29.5mm; depth: 9.0mm, mass: 26.8g). In plan, the mount has a sub-oval body with a flat bottom with pierced protruding ends and a lobe at the top. This gives the mount a sub-triangular appearance, with heavily curved (convex) sides to the central body. The lobe at the top has the remains of an iron rivet within it. The fixing holes at the bottom of the mount do not show any traces of rivets and the left hand hole is incomplete. In profile, the mount is broadly flat, with a flange projecting at approximately 90 degrees from the flat bottom of the reverse of the mount.
The front of the mount is decorated in relief, and depicts, ????a naked man clutching a pair of snakes while behind him is the image of a spreadeagled beast.?? (definition of the design type is from Williams, 1997, ??Late Saxon Stirrup-Strap Mounts. A Classification and Catalogue??, p.12). The undecorated reverse of the mount has a number of distinct shallow depressions within the sub-oval body.
The front of the mount is largely brown in colour and pitted, but with a smoother brown/ green surface in the recesses. The reverse has a smooth black surface, but where this is missing, the surface is green and brown and pitted. There is a raised area of iron corrosion running down the lower half of the centre of the mount.
The sub-triangular shape identify this as a Class A mount using the classification system introduced by Williams (ibid. p.2). The design on the front of the object identifies it as a Class A, Type 3 mount (ibid.). Williams (ibid.) catalogues ten mounts of this type. The example from Sherborne St John (70) is a fine example which Williams suggests is near to the prototype (ibid. p36), with clear detail on the design. The others exhibit the same elements but in more confused and degenerate forms. The detail in the example recorded here is good, and is similar to (and probably finer than) mount 74 catalogued by Williams (fig 26 and p39) from High Ercall, Sahropshire.
Williams (1997, p. 3ff) believes that these objects are decorative copper-alloy mounts placed at the junction of the iron stirrup and the stirrup leathers. In terms of dating the objects, Williams (1997, p 8) states: ??It is hard to see much stylistic influence before the Ringerike style or beyond the Urnes style and it seems safe to conclude from this and the limited contextual evidence??that these mounts were in use for a comparatively short period, perhaps from the first quarter of the 11th century at the very earliest, to around 1100 or not long after.?? On this basis, the stirrup-strap mount described here can be dated from around 1000AD in the late early medieval period to around 1100AD in the Medieval period. | Subjects: | Class A Type 3 | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Creator: | Slarke, Duncan - Portable Antiquities Scheme | Identifier: | http://www.findsdatabase.org.uk/hms/pas_... | Language: | en-GB | Go to resource |
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