Animal Equipment

Bronze-gilt disc, perhaps a horse-trapping, perhaps re-used as a brooch. Cast as a solid disc with plain bronze rim and (broken) rectangular loop at top. At back 1 central rivet and one at centre bottom. Traces of rivet removed at top and on one side, on the other a patch has been run in (liquid bronze) to plug a hole perhaps from another rivet. No real trace of brooch fastenings, unless the two surviving rivets were left deliberately and in some way re-used to secure a pin. The front decorated with very fine Style II ornament in chip carving technique. Plain bronze roundel in centre, flat and obviously imitating a garnet, surrounded by chip-carved gilded ridge. Between this and the rim there is a gilded zone of Style II work: four ribbon animals in pursuit and interlinked. Each has a head with an eye, obtuse angled squared 'helmet' with upcurled lower end, a detached jaw biting its own doubled body, jaws then crossing each other and lower jaw biting across the loop of the next animal body. The body is triple stranded. The neck is curving down and under next one animal's lower jaw, over own lower jaw and under upper, and continuing to terminate in bent leg with oval hip and 4 toed claw, which rests upside down against the rim close to the creature's own head. A curious single feature bends and angles up and across above the creature's head from behind, and this may be the foreleg. The decoration is technically very well executed, perhaps the only error that occasionally the animal has one-strand loop. The bronze rim at the centre shows traces of tinning. The gilding is very thick and bright.