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Description: | Late Medieval or early Post Medieval cast copper-alloy chape from a scabbard. The chape is broadly shield shaped in plan, with curved sides which converge at the base, ending in a rounded point. A raised rib runs down the centre of the front of the chape ending in a projecting rounded knop at the base. To either side of the rib there are openwork designs consisting of a long rectangle with a circle above. On the left the joint between the rectangle and circle and between the circle and top have broken and distorted. On the right the upper outer corner is missing with the top of the rectangle and most of the circle. The sides project backwards creating a concave back and are thickest at the bottom, the upper right side is missing along with this section of the front. They have a slight inner lip at the back to help hold the back plate in place, traces of a silverly material may suggest it was soldered. The top was probably originally shaped with projecting sections in the middle and sides and concave sections between but this is not fully clear due to the breaks. The chape is now 43.6mm long, 15.2mm wide, and 5.8mm thick; it weighs 5.68 grams.The chape is most similar to Type II in the typological scheme published in the London Museum Medieval Catalogue (Ward-Perkins, 1940:285 Figure 87). It lacks the stepped central projection at the top but this could have been lost to old breaks. SOM-3502C2 on this database is similar. Ward-Perkins (ibid.) dates these chapes to the late 15th or 16th century based on contemporary illustrations and dateable contexts of excavated of chapes from Fetter Lane, London. He suggests (ibid: 284) "Metal dagger chapes were only used on the sheaths of military daggers or of the more elaborate forms of civilian dagger. The great majority of surving leather sheaths belonged to ordinary knives or knife-daggers and these have no metal terminal."
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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