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Description: | An incomplete Roman copper-alloy knife handle of the ?hare and hound? type. The hound is well defined with long front legs, a long and narrow face which is triangular. The ears consist of slightly enlarged, elongated ovals, with raised borders and look slightly too large for the hound?s head. The body is well defined and of slender build (possibly a grey hound). The legs are well defined and appear outstretched. Only the top of the hind leg remains.
The hare is much smaller than the hound. The hound's head is on the hare?s back and the legs of the two animals are in direct contact. The front legs of the hare are short and angled, the angle representing the joints in its legs. It has a small well defined body. The hind legs are larger than the front, more curvaceous and outstretched, so as to highlight the muscles and joints in the legs. The hare has large ears which consist of enlarged pointed ovals with raised borders around the edges. The ears are laid back against the head. Again, the ears look slightly too large for the small and sub-circular head. Two very fine longitudinal incised lines indicate folds in the hare?s neck. The very tip of the head is abraded and is missing. The angle of the hare's body (with the hind leg being higher than the fore leg) and the outstretched hind legs indicate that the hare is running. The ground surface is slightly scalloped, with sub-triangular grooves having been made along the base.
Examples of similar handles from London (Wheeler, R. E. M. 1930. London in Roman Times. London Museum Catalogues: No. 3: London, fig. 19, no.4), Richborough (Bushe-Fox, J. P. 1949. Fourth Report on the Excavations of the Roman Fort at Richborough Kent. Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, No.XVI, plate XXXVI, p.129), Freckenham (Suffolk) and Paulerspury (Northamptonshire, see Portable Antiquities Database records SF-4895 and NARC-907C55) suggest that the handle originally had a rectangular recessed socket to attach it to the blade. The handle was then fixed with a copper rivet (SF-4895). These features are now missing on the knife from Weston under Penyard. However, on the underside of the handle one can see that it has a slight recess approximately 8.0mm deep. It is probable that the knife had a folding blade and that the recess was used to store the blade when folded. A portion of the recessed ground surface is now missing.
The object has a dark grey-green patina. One side of the handle is well preserved and is only slightly pitted, but the other is quite abraded. This is probably as a result of how the object was deposited in the ground, by lying on one particular side, or that one side was more protected than the other. The handle is 48.2mm in length, 15.2mm wide, 5.0mm thick and weighs 12.08g. The ?hare and hound? design was quite a common design in the Roman period in Britain. | 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: | 43
410 | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://www.finds.org.uk/database/artefac... | Language: | en-GB | Format: | text/html | Go to resource |
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