The Tangled Vine — A Medieval Mystery

It's great when you find rare things in fabulous condition. There's nothing like flipping up a spit of soil only to have some wonderfully preserved item of great age without a scratch or dink on it fall out and stare straight back at you after centuries of burial as if nothing but an ever ripening patina had developed meanwhile. I would argue that many things are more beautiful in their beautiful patination than they ever would have been in the polished brass — and I'm sure the aesthetes amongst you would agree on that point.

However, when something turns up made of the 'wrong' metal for the soil, then acids and whatnot make their way under the surfaces and what might have been a finely patinated sheen developing in the 'right' soil, turns to crumbly dust and becomes part of the soil encasing it, leaving behind a pitiful pitted and corroded thing whose aesthetics are only appreciated in consideration of its very survival.

This is such an object ~

It's brooch sized, and brooch is always what I've thought it to be. It has an iron pin that projects from the centre of the face that would have once held a circular mount of probably a small stone or metal decoration. The evidence of its shape can be seen as a circular area of lesser corrosion, which suggests either that the mount was lost long after burial, or, that it protected that area from wear in usage leaving a tough surface of unworn, unpolished and unscratched metal that the acids had a harder time getting under.

It is related directly to the chasse mount I discovered a mile away, by decoration if not by function, because it's the same vine-scroll ornament of the 12th century. It is probably the same age or earlier, because the reverse carries a strip of bronze that looks very much like the type of catch plate fixture used on certain types of late Saxon and Norman disk brooches.

The red coloured corrosion is also identical which tells us that's its made of a very similar copper alloy, and this an alloy that whenever found in the general locality always turns out to be from items of metalwork of either the late Saxon or Norman periods. Later Medieval things are invariably green, and usually very well preserved indeed, whilst red-coloured things are always earlier, always in a parlous state, and are easily bracketed between datable colours of rot. Detectorists know these things instinctively, because we dig a lot of Medieval stuff, but little of it red-coloured.

Its status as an object is unclear. It may be a brooch, and brooch is the most likely thing it could be, however, the 'catch' ends are broken away, so its not clear if it's a catch plate or not. What confuses matters even more is the fact that there's the corroded traces of a thin iron plate under the bronze plate, and that means it must have been fixed to a larger iron object and may not be a brooch after all. Then again, it may have been part of a larger brooch still, and one of iron... But I've never heard of such a thing.

If it's not a brooch then I suspect it may be another mount once decorating something far larger, but what from I haven't a clue. The trouble is with the period between the Norman conquest and the succession of the Plantagenets is that it's a metalwork vacuum, if dates bandied about for the majority of Medieval metal items found are to be believed.

'13th-15th century' is the catch-all phrase used for just about everything, from buckles and tumbrels, to buttons and thimbles. That's George III, till now! Or the height of Turner's extraordinary artistic powers till Hurst's diamond encrusted demise, if you'd prefer things in art terms? Which this must be explained in...

It's as if people used and wore no metal objects whatsoever in the 160 years between 1066 and the Year of our Lord, 1216. And perhaps they really didn't, because there's precious little of it known to make comparisons with here.


This style of decoration was the height of fashion in the twelfth century and adorned only expensive imported goods from Europe, and mostly from Limoge, so far as we know. It is not English work and certainly not provincial in any way— even though its surface now looks crude, that is only the effects of the corrosion — and it would once have been a very fine thing of high style, whatever it actually was to begin with.

Such decoration is also very rare indeed in this country. There's not a single equivalent instance recorded of any contemporary object decorated with this very particular and precisely dateable kind of vine scroll ornament that I can find on the entire PAS website, and there's only the one on UKDFD which out of interest, is made of the same kind of alloy.

Given such rarity, two items decorated with it from the same parish would be remarkable enough, but I have a further example in the form of a buckle plate found in the same place and of course, it's reddish brown in colour so it's made of the same alloy too. Its style is less curvaceous though, but I've no doubt it's the same date.

Why would so many vine-scroll decorated objects of related date occur in the one place when so few occur in others? I don't have an answer to such a question, just as I don't have many clear answers to the puzzles thrown out the ground by detectorists.

They are remarkable things, though, despite the corrosion. What a shame that the alloy reacts the way does — under suitable conditions this odd little thing may have come from the ground as a beautiful decorated golden disk with deep green patinas where the gilding had rubbed to the bronze. What we have though is merely an historical object whose significance will only ever be apparent to scholars, but forever invisible to everyone else.

12th Century gilt-copper brooch or mount, decorated with vine scroll ornament. Dimensions 24mm diameter. Epping Forest District, Essex.

Medieval Gilt-bronze Reliquary Chasse Mount

This marvelous object turned up at the ploughed out site of a small medieval building I worked hard & long back in 2004/5. As mentioned in a previous post about an Edward Confessor penny, there were village rumours about a medieval establishment having once stood nearby — a place the locals called, 'The Priory.'

Before this item was located, I'd found plenty of higher grade medieval material there — nothing spectacular though, just larger and more expensive buckles and brooches than were usual in the locality, and other clear signs of wealth. I had, of course, dismissed the local rumours of the one-time existence of this legendary 'priory' as the product of overactive imaginations and thought the site nothing more interesting than a house.

However, that all changed when this mount flipped out of the soil and saw the light of day for the first time in the best part of a millennium. I hadn't a clue what it actually was at first, the surface covered in impacted fine soil, though I thought I could see curvilinear decoration that appeared almost Iron Age in style.

I suppose the shape of the object conjured up mental images of a miniature Celtic shield, and that, together with the fact that just a few weeks earlier I'd found an Iron Age potin nearby, led to my apprehending what the eye is accustomed to, and that is what it already knows well. However, on washing, the intriguing object now free of much of the heavy soil it was caked in when found, began to take on an altogether different complexion. All thoughts of having found a really special Iron Age object fell away to be replaced with the equally special thought that I'd found something just as remarkable, but Medieval.

I knew that I'd seen something very similar before, but couldn't for the life of me remember exactly where. Trawling through the Internet and scanning through every book I could find on medieval art in search of similar, drew a resounding blank. The style of the decoration rang a bell though. Late saxon period inhabited vine-scroll ornament was similar, but this ornament had no beasts in it, so it wasn't that, but it was a start in the right direction...

Then, on one of my regular trips to the British Museum, after viewing just about every medieval thing in it, both early and late, I was suddenly confronted with the truth of the matter when I turned a corner, peered into a cabinet, and saw the very thing riveted onto a beautifully decorated and sumptuous reliquary chasse covered in enameled gilt-bronze panels.

Copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum

There it was, in all its former glory. The mount on the chasse was almost exactly the same size as the one I'd found, was nearly the same shape, had the same four rivet holes, and still had its original cabochon of a massive rock crystal gem, in situ. The only real difference was the decoration, where my find beat the BM example into a cocked hat, because it wasn't decorated in the same way or to the same degree, however, the gilt-bronze panels of the casket were decorated, and decorated in the very same style - with 'uninhabited' vine-scroll ornament of the 12th century.

Now, examples of medieval ecclesiastical metalwork of any type or form are excessively rare as finds from British soil. Hardly any come up each year, and those that do are usually very rare bits and pieces of altar or processional crosses, such as crucifix figures, figurines of saints, and other decorative elements, but parts of reliquary chasse are almost unheard of. To have found such a thing, a bona-fide item of ecclesiastical metalwork of very high quality and of high style too, in a place where once a priory is rumoured to have once stood, is either a miracle of chance, or clear material evidence that the rumours of 'The Priory' were, after centuries of degenerating folk memory, true after all.


12th Century gilt-bronze reliquary chasse mount, decorated with vine scroll ornament, cabochon of (probably) rock crystal missing. 4 rivet holes, reverse plain. Dimensions 58 x 36 x 6.5mm. Epping Forest District, Essex.