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Description: | Incomplete cast copper alloy harness fitting with a large circular rivet in the hollowed back of the attachment terminal, which is tear-shaped in plan. The terminal narrows into a recessed section which is oval in plan, beyond which is a raised bifid border, looking like a sepal from the end of the stem of a flower. The handle then tapers to a straight-sided stem which is oval in section, and broken at the end so the the other terminal is missing. The back of the rivet is 15 mm in diameter, so it would have held something of some weight, but the strap that it was attached to could only have been about 3 mm in thickness, as this is all that is allowed between the hollowed back and the inside of the rivet. So even though the fitting looks too substantial to be a strap fitting, it could not have been mounted on to wood or any thick material. Rather something thin so that it needed the breadth of the rivet to hold it firmly in place. It may have been used with heavy horse harness, such as a horse collar, and might have been something like a trace hook from the side of the hame of the horse collar, which hooked the collar to the trace strap which went down the side of the horse. See NLM4733 on the database for a Post-medieval harness fitting with similar tear-shaped riveted terminals.The style of the fitting looks 18th-century in date. Alcock & Hall (1994) illustrate a latch with a similar design of a tear-shaped terminal, central rivet, and recessed section at the neck, on page 28, Fig.28, dated to 1713, and a door handle with riveted tear-shaped terminals on page 26, Fig.26, dated to 1743.
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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