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Dress Accessońes

are fiat (no morę than 0.5mm thick) and are in the form of a disc with an extension incorporating two holes which are normally circular, although they may also be rectangular. They are decorated in relief on one face only, the other face being blank. The disc part carries the main design element, which is usually geometrie or zoomorphic and is often contained within a beaded border. The extension is sometimes hatched.

The present catalogue of spangles from ex-cavations represents only a fraction of those found in London during the last decade. Of finds not included below, the Museum of London has to datę recorded two from the Thames at the Vintry, eight from Buli Wharf (Mills 1983, 6; Mitchiner and Skinner 1983, 46), 69 found in spoił removed from contractor’s excavations at the Billingsgate Lorry Park site, and large numbers are at the time of writing being recovered at the Thames Exchange site (Museum of London and private collections). Collectively, this body of materiał, and indeed the Billingsgate and Thames Exchange finds alone, represent the largest con-centration of spangles found so far. Other finds known to the writer are three from the High Street excavations in Perth (Scottish Urban Archaeological Trust), two from Eastgate, Bev-erley (pers. comm. D Evans), a single example found in a field in Norfolk (pers. comm. Sue Margeson), at least five from excavations at Dundas Wharf, Bristol (pers. comm., Les Goode), those from the Seine in Paris (Forgeais 1866, 242-219) a single example from St Denis near Paris (Meyer et al. 1983, 119 no. 69), and a few from the Netherlands (van Beuningen collec-tion). Judging by this volume of finds, it is elear that they would have been morę familiar to contemporaries than may have been thought.

Discussing the finds from the Seine, Forgeais proposed that the design of these objects was reminiscent of a purse, presumably of a kind gathered at the neck by a drawstring, and thus that they were intended as a miniaturę imitation and were wom to mimie the affectations of the rich, who wore purses conspicuously as a demon-stration of wealth and prestige. He also suggests that they may have had an additional religious character as imitations of the bags carried by pilgrims (Forgeais 1866, 215). Thus he applied the name aumonieres (alms purses) to these objects, a name which has continued in use in

France (Meyer et al. 1982, 119). He dated them to the 13th and 14th centuries.

Further discussion of spangles (Mitchiner and Skinner 1983; Mills 1983) took the view that spangles (also called sewn tokens, ampulliform tokens, ‘jangles’ (sic) and alms-purse tokens in the former article) had a monetary function, and that they were forerunners of the kind of 13th-century bifacial leaden tokens found in Dublin (Dolley and Seaby 1971, 446-48), Paris (Forgeais 1866), London (Roach-Smith 1854₂ 156-57; Mitchiner and Skinner 1983, 47-54) and elsewhere.

Spangles account for all but one of the earliest lead/tin items from the recent excavations to be listed here as mounts. Unlike virtually all the other objects in this category, spangles have no undoubted connection with straps. The two holes strongly imply that they were intended to be stitched, and the fact that they are designed on one side only indicates that they lay fiat against some kind of surface, hence the adoption of the term ‘spangle’, denoting a smali metallic ornament. There is, however, no obvious evidence of wear around the holes which might have been expected if they had been sewn in place. On the other hand, there is a tendency for bending and breakage to occur immediately adjacent to the holes, perhaps as a result of suspension, or because the metal is here at its thinnest and most vulnerable. But there is no evidence so far to suggest in what situations spangles were used.

The archaeological evidence suggests that the production and use of spangles began as early as the late 12th century. Two examples (nos. 1269— 70) were found in deposits dated to this period, and this is supported by the results of excavations in Perth and Beverley. The context of one of the spangles from High Street, Perth has been dated to the later 12th century by pottery and den-drochronology, while those from Eastgate, Bev-erley, appear to have been deposited between the 1180s and the early 13th century, as they were found with a pottery assemblage inter-preted as being contemporary with a documented fire in 1188. To be consistent with their supposi-tion that spangles were an early form of token coinage, Mitchiner and Mills suggested that they ceased to circulate after the introduction of pew-ter tokens, which the former places in the early 13th century (Mitchiner and Skinner 1983, 46) and the latter c.1260 (Mills 1983, 6). By contrast,