295 (31)

Brooches

267

private collection

Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum collection

173 Griffin and wild man brooches; (drawings 1:1, photograph 2:1)

apart, on a fish, which has a mortar on its head; the pestle is being used to pound the contents of the mortar, which include the urine being added at the same time. The wild man’s forcefully opened mouth may be intended simply as a grimace, or to indicate howling, chanting etc. A figurę in a similar pose but from a cruder mould is part of another brooch of this kind (Ward-Perkins 1940, 264 & pl LXXIV no. 60). Three further examples, have been found in the south Netherlands. Two, from Reimerswaal and Nieuwlande are in the van Beuningen collection (nos. I 0143 & I 1406), and one in which only the main figurę, with a canine head, survives, has been published (Hopstaken 1987, 52, no. 277 - dated to the early 15th century and interpreted as a badge from a carnaval en erotiek). The thought underlying this obviously secular design is obscure. A pun on ‘pestle/piss’ could explain the allusion, but nonę has been traced, and such an explanation would have to account for the Continental parallels as well.