Image: Early medieval silver hooked tag (FindID 468363)

Description: An Early Medieval silver hooked tag. Description: Silver hooked tag with large circular plate, three broken attachment lugs, and sharp hook. The plate has the remains of three D-shaped lugs at the top, the central one right in the middle of the top of the plate. Each one is about 4mm wide at its base. The plate has relief decoration within an undecorated border. There is a central separate boss, riveted through the plate, in the centre of a relief cross dividing the circular field into four. Each arm of the cross has a central expanded circle before ending in a flared triangle. Each field has a profile Trewhiddle-style animal lying with legs bent under the body pointing forwards, and with heads turned to look backwards. Two animals are seen from the left and two are seen from the right, so that they are in pairs which either look towards or away from each other depending on which two you choose to take as pairs. Each animal has a dot eye, an open mouth, a square-ended snout with a nick coming up from the mouth to define the nose; there is a tiny upright ear in three cases, where there is space, and a nick at the back of the head for the animal in the lower right-hand panel where there isn't space for an ear. There is a pair of nicks at the junction of the long neck and the body, another double nick on top of the rump, a foreleg and hind leg each with a three-toed foot, and a short curled-up tail. The grooves are deeply keyed for niello, but none now survives. The plate has partly broken through at one groove. The hook has a broad transverse moulding between a pair of narrower mouldings at its top. It survives complete, and is long and sharply pointed. Dimensions: Width 23.6mm. Surviving length 35.9mm. Thickness of plate c. 0.75mm, thickness of rivet 2.4mm, thickness including hook 4.7mm. Weight 3.2g. Discussion: Hooked tags were relatively common fasteners in the middle and late Anglo-Saxon periods, and may have been used for a variety of purposes. The decoration of a single Trewhiddle-style animal in each of four fields is paralleled on two circular silver hooked tags, one from Huntingdon, now in the British Museum (Webster and Backhouse 1991, no. 198) dated to early in the 9th century, and another from High Wycombe (Farley 1991). The separate but decorative boss is also known from many 8th- and 9th-century objects, for example an unprovenanced hooked tag and a hooked tag from Costessey (Norfolk), both made from silver (Webster and Backhouse 1991, nos. 196 and 197c). Date: The use of the Trewhiddle style dates this hooked tag broadly to the 9th century AD.
Title: Early medieval silver hooked tag
Credit: https://finds.org.uk/database/ajax/download/id/351228 Catalog: https://finds.org.uk/database/images/image/id/351228/recordtype/artefacts archive copy Artefact: https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/468363
Author: Museum of London, Kath Creed, 2011-10-24 16:38:22
Permission: Attribution-ShareAlike License version 4.0 (verified 23 November 2020)
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Attribution Required?: Yes