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Description: | A cast lead spindle whorl in the form of a slightly domed disc, decorated with six pellets. These are evenly spaced round the central collared hole. On the flat side the whorl has a smaller collar around the hole and two raised lines radiating out from it. These may be casting waste that should have been trimmed off.
Helen Geake writes: ?Dating of lead whorls is difficult. The drop spindle with which they were used continued in use until the end of the medieval period in London and Winchester (Egan, 1998, ?The Medieval Household: Daily Living c1150 ? c1450?; and Biddle, 1990, ?Object and Economy in Medieval Winchester?), and for perhaps a century longer in Norfolk (Margeson, 1993, ?Norwich Households: Medieval and Post Medieval finds from Norwich Survey Excavations 1971 ? 78?). The excavated assemblage from Winchester contains one lead whorl from a mid to late tenth century context. Decorated whorls are exceptionally rare finds on excavations, but are fairly often found by detectorists. At Cottam in East Yorkshire detectorists found decorated whorls in ploughsoil over the site of Roman buildings, but in Leicester a decorated whorl was found, still on its spindle, in a thirteenth to fifteenth century context (Mellor and Pearce, 1981, ?The Austin Friary, Leicester?)?. It thus seems possible that decorated whorls can be Roman, Medieval or Post medieval in date. | Format: | text/html | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ | Publisher: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Rights holder: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Subjects: | archaeology | Temporal: | 1066
1500 | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Creator: | Jennifer Moss | Identifier: | http://www.finds.org.uk/database/artefac... | Language: | en-GB | Format: | text/html | Go to resource |
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