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Description: | Description: A complete silver Early-Medieval hooked tag with a circular plate and two protruding pierced lobes for attachment. The edge of the plate is decorated with a border of pellets made from a groove within multiple transverse lines; the effect is of a ladder pattern or rope pattern.Inside the border, the plate is divided into seven fields by four diagonal lines of the same rope or ladder pattern formed into two V shapes, one inverted and one the right way up. The crossing diagonal lines create a central lozenge-shaped field and six surrounding smaller sub-triangular fields of slightly varying size and shape. Each field has a slightly different reserved design set within engraved lines inlaid with niello, but all the motifs appear to have been intended as two or three leaves with rounded ends and double-line nicks. Apart from one of the sub-triangular fields to the right, niello survives within each field; it is proud of the surface and appears not to have been polished flat, which can in places make the intended motif slightly unclear. There appears to be no niello surviving within the ladder pattern.The rounded projecting lobes containing circular perforations for use as attachment loops. The perforations are approximately 1.5mm in diameter and appear to have been punched from front to back, indicated by a slight raised lip around their edge on the reverse.The integral hook survives complete; it is bent backwards and tapers to a sharp point. At the top of the hook is a flat trapezoidal plate, below which is a small moulded collar before the hook proper begins, and immediately starts to taper. The hook is D-shaped in cross-section, being flat on its inside surface. The reverse of the plate is undecorated.Dimensions: Length is 33.35mm. Width is 21.93mm. Thickness of the decorative plate is 0.88mm. Thickness of the hook at the widest point is 1.91mm.Weight is 3.15g.Discussion: There are several well-known and usually well-made silver hooked tags with fields divided by ladder-pattern. Most tend to have three fields divided by a Y shape, such as one from Thanet (Graham-Campbell 1982, 144-5), another in the British Museum (Webster and Backhouse 1991, no. 197b) and a third, now incomplete, on the PAS database (KENT-E9F568). The double-hooked tag from Barking Abbey has a design based on V shapes, but this may be the result of the unusual double hook (Webster and Backhouse 1991, no. 67b); other examples of V shapes in the design include two from Winchester (Webster and Backhouse 1991, no. 200) which also have seven fields, each filled with leaf ornament.Date: The use of Trewhiddle-style foliate ornament dates this hooked tag broadly to the 9th century AD.
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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