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Description: | An incomplete cast copper alloy hanging bowl escutcheon, dating to the Early Medieval period. Length: 47.1mm; width: 19.3mm; thickness at hooked end: 7mm; weight: 7.60g. The escutcheon has a tear-drop shape and seems flat in cross-section. There is a splayed triple-lobed terminal at one end, with the remains of a hook at the other end where the artefact would have originally been attached onto the shoulder of the bowl; as these hooked escutcheons are thought always to have been attached to the curving shoulder of the bowl, the flat cross-section seems odd. The combination of the hook and the tear-drop shape creates a form rather like a bird with folded wings.The escutcheon is decorated with a badly corroded enamelled design, surrounded by a border. A little of the original brown patina survives; the enamel has decayed to a pale yellowish colour but may originally have been red. The design contains at least three spirals, but appears to have been inexpertly executed.Similar examples of spiral-decorated bird-shaped escutcheons come from Benniworth in Lincolnshire and Faversham in Kent (Brenan 1991, nos. 8 and 26). Brenan comments that the Benniworth escutcheon is quite rare, both as a bird-shaped escutcheon with enamelled decoration and as a hanging-bowl escutcheon with definite yellow enamel (rather than red enamel decayed to a pale yellowish colour). More distant parallels come from Hadleigh Road in Ipswich, St Paul in the Bail in Lincoln, Seagry in Wiltshire and Whitby in North Yorkshire(Brenan 1991, nos. 32, 48, 51 and 67).Kilbride-Jones (1980) classified the Benniworth escutcheon as his Group B, with a purely 'Celtic' decoration, appearing from the fifth century onwards but with earlier beginnings. This attractive theory was undermined by Brenan in 1991, who showed conclusively that the archaeological contexts of hanging bowls (found almost exclusively in early Anglo-Saxon graves) could not be dated earlier than the middle of the sixth century AD. Geake took this further in 1999, arguing that all graves containing hanging bowls should be dated to the seventh century.The Faversham escutcheon is also illustrated in Dalton's 'A Guide to the Anglo-Saxon and Foreign Teutonic Antiquities', 1923, page 50, fig 53, found at Faversham, Kent.
Original Image | Publisher: | http://finds.org.uk | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/r... | Go to resource |
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