Monumental Mistakes — Monumental Discoveries.

Way back in 1994 my then detecting partner and I secured permission to search a small farm in Essex. It boasted four large arable fields and what we thought was going to be an amazing site where we were bound to discover all kinds of bounty because it was the leveled foundations of a Medieval manor house surrounded by a moat. It was a horse meadow and that was exactly what we found it to be despite there being no horses in it. Horseshoe after broken horseshoe was all we ever discovered there —we were crushed, as you can well imagine!

The other arable fields we tried proved unexciting too. One was so barren that it was like searching bedrock — in two hours one afternoon we got not a single signal between us from any metal object including those of iron. It was the emptiest field I have ever been on. Then one day we parked up at the entrance of the last option on our permission and began prospecting. We never got far into the field because we had more signals to dig in the first acre than we'd had anywhere else in many hundreds.

It wasn't exactly thick with finds but what came up was interesting material and kept us at it in hope of better to come. I remember clearly that my friend had already found a very nice Charles I shilling when at the very last he flipped up a strange looking object the like of which I'd never seen before. It was like a buckle—but not a buckle. It couldn't possibly be one with a bar running across the frame which would stop the strap from passing through...

A 'buckle' exactly the same as the one my friend discovered...

On the way home as passenger I sat fondling and pondering the strange thing. It did look very familiar, couldn't work out where I'd seen it before but knew it was Medieval just by its shape. My friend was dead chuffed — he loved his buckles and ignored my reservations outright because it was the best he'd ever found...

A year passed by and I forgot about it. Actually I never forget about things that defy me, so that's a fib, it simply went into mental storage. Then one July afternoon alone and working another farm I found a Medieval coin and right there staring me in the face was the answer... it was the 'E' in Henricus! The penny had dropped...

In seconds I'd computed just what the object had to be. Made of bronze, thick in section, flat in plan, shaped like an 'E' — it just had to be an inlaid letter from a grave slab and even though I'd never seen one before in any book, article or indeed grave slab, sometimes an object is pinned to its function simply because there are no possible alternatives, and this was such an occasion.

I was back on that field just as soon as it was open and my friend came along too. He still didn't believe me when I assured him that the Medieval 'buckle' he loved was no buckle at all but something far rarer and much more desirable. I arched my eyes, let out a puff of disbelief, and set to work.

I always believe that when something good has already turned up that other good things will surely follow. I also believe that when something small is found detached from something larger still and that larger thing was once covered in many of the same then there's a very strong chance that more will be found nearby. I wasn't to be disappointed. Amazingly, within just half an hour of starting but a hundred yards from the first find I was wiping the soil from a second example — an unmistakable Lombardic Uncial capital letter 'R.'

To my amazement, my partner still refused to believe his unequivocal Lombardic E was not a buckle even after I'd found absolutely incontrovertible proof in the form of a matching R from the same grave slab! Our relationship didn't last much longer after that...

 ~

Lombardic Uncial was a script developed in the Lombardy region of Italy, around the eighth century AD. A beautiful form, it coexisted with 'blackletter' in England from the 11th century onwards but was eclipsed by it almost entirely by the late 14th. In the meantime Lombardic Uncial capitals were the script of choice for monumental inscriptions of all kinds.

'Uncial' from the Latin 'uncialis,' or 'twelfth part,' really applies to only two things — either weighing an ounce (roman 'uncia') or being an inch-high and it is the latter meaning that applies to Lombardic script because the beautiful capitals at the start of each paragraph in an illuminated manuscript were an inch high, more or less. 

Chiseled into blocks of stone these large, curvaceous letters must have been very striking and mysterious in a world where only the very rich and powerful could afford access to books and where commoners encountered the written word only on coinage and at church. In Medieval Britain seeing inscriptions meant coming face to face with power because words were power's instrument — in effect, illiteracy meant utter powerlessness.

Most of the extra bronze elements have been removed from this slab and only the central figure remains. The shields, the canopy, stars and the letters are potentially discoverable...

When tomb slabs of high ranking gentry were laid in churches in the thirteenth century and adorned with polished brass engraved representations of the deceased then encountering them was to encounter the bond between secular power and the power of the sacred, the two dominant and often quarreling forces of the middle ages. When inscriptions were cut into the stone too and then inlaid with golden brass reminding all en-route to the pews just whose grave they'd just walked by, or indeed, across, then the message of power was complete. 

I believe these inlaid letters were made from the offcuts and trimmings inevitable in the process of making the large brass figures because they all have a rough reverse side but a smooth face, just like the brasses themselves. Perhaps the sheet of 'brass' (likely bronze... brass is very difficult to smelt by comparison) was created by pouring the molten metal onto a level and well prepared hard and dry floor with a frame to contain it. The figure was marked up and cut out, the offcuts saved, and then fretted out by saw for the inlaid letters and other small decorative elements.

Interestingly, the old word 'fount' for the multi-part metal type used to assemble and print in a particular size and typeface or more recently 'font' which applies to the scaleable typefaces available on a computer derives from the Old French 'fonte' or 'fondre' which means 'melted', and refers to type cast in a 'fonderei' or in England a 'foundry.' Moveable type printing began in 1439 when Johannes Gutenburg invented the letterpress — I wonder if the monumental brass makers having long experience of producing letters in metal then turned their hands to typeface when the fashion for monumental brasses eventually fell out of favour?

 Lombardic Uncial Letter construction showing the form of the capital letters — Egon Weiss, 1932 

These letters are very rare as finds as are all the various metal pieces of Monumental brasses. When I discovered my R all those years ago it later became the first detectorist recorded example when PAS and then UKDFD came into existence around 2005. Since then a few more have appeared but not nearly as many as I thought there'd be. Oddly, E is easily the most common with lots of examples when other vowels, especially the A and O, should be equally well known, but aren't. Consonants are uncommon. Discover a rarely used letter such as W, X, or Y and it is going to be the first known example lost from a slab but even some of the common letters have yet to be recorded.

Of course the reason for this lack of common letters isn't that they haven't been found, they have! The lack is precisely because of my friend's mistaken belief that his E was a buckle. In short they are being classified as this and that and whatever else because of a lack of sound knowledge from which to draw conclusions. Given the find of an I or worse, an O, many would dismiss them as uninteresting, plain plates or rings of metal and never take enquiries any further.

~

As often happens during research, an opportunity arose to acquire another example by serendipitous chance. Trawling through the British antiquities section of Ebay I spied a familiar shape amongst a mixed lot of old buckles up for auction. Up in one corner was what the seller clearly believed was a modern triangular harness buckle but I believed was nothing of the sort — it had serifs and I was fairly sure it was a Lombardic Uncial letter V, which is one of the most interesting letters of all because it can double as U in Medieval Latin inscriptions in the middle of words and triples as the Roman numeral 5 in dates.

It was very hard to gauge scale but I made it around the same size as the R and so I committed myself to winning the auction and succeeded seven days later at a fair price for a lot of old buckles. Just after Christmas the package arrived through my letterbox. I took a deep breath, opened it and carefully emptied the contents on my desk hoping I hadn't wasted good money on a pile of scrap metal.

It was thinner than the R but had the same rough reverse, smooth face, and was exactly the same size at an inch and half high. My instinct had proven correct — it really wasn't a buckle but another letter for what was now the start of a Lombardic Uncial alphabet collection!

Of course the thrust of this article is to inform the detecting public about these lovely and interesting finds so that mistaking them as buckles or whatnot, or binning them as 'hedgefodder' no longer happens. Of course that makes collecting an entire alphabet more likely because of awareness but more costly too because no-one should ever again sell a quite common Lombardic Uncial E or a very rare V as a buckle! I think I might get an I or O easily enough though... there's bound to be plenty of those lurking in detectorist's junk boxes unrecognised, unloved, and given the difficulty of knowing what they really are, eventually sold as what they never were or tragically, consigned back to the crucible from whence they came...

How long would it take to collect the lot? Well, a lifetime — two lifetimes! To be honest it's all but impossible, but until I complete the monumental task of collecting even a quarter, here's a collection of the letters I've found at various sources on the Internet. As you can see, it's almost half way there but there's a long, long way to go ~

                           
                         
PS. I've since found two more letters, the W and the Y ~