306 (35)

180

180

278

Dress Accessońes

Cloth buttons and corresponding holes on a sleeve from a deposit dating to the second quarter of the 14th century (1:1)

century deposits at the same site. The largest of these may originally have had a separate disc inside as a stiffener, and may have been purely decorative. These items and other textile frag-ments with button holes from the same deposits will be morę fully discussed in a companion volume on the textile finds from medieval London (Staniland in Crowfoot et al. forthcoming).

See Evans (1952, 47-48 fig VI) for a surviving late-medieval French pourpoint (man’s upper garment) with cloth buttons.

The significance of the excavated medieval buttons

Fe w buttons from medieval deposits in England have been published: Goodall & Goodall 1977, 148 nos. 32-34 and 150 no. 34, found in Oxford, are dated to 1250-1325; Frere 1954, 140-41 fig 23, Tebbutt 1966, 53-4 fig 5h - the same type as in Frere above, though described as a hanging ornament; later examples are Palmer 1980, 184 fig 24, & fiche 2 COl nos. 45-48; Rigold 1971, 147-8 fig 11 (this may be a mount); Platt and Coleman-Smith 1975, 258 & 261 fig 242, no. 1772 (possibly a button); Geddes & Carter 1977, 288-9 fig 130 no. 22, dated to 1250-1350, is of a form which can only be paralleled in the post-medieval period; further medieval buttons have been found in Winchester - Biddle 1990. Roach-Smith (1854, 153 no. 757) mentions excavated buttons apparently of 14th-century datę from London, but gives no details.

A stone mould probably of late 13th- or early 14th-century datę from Coventry is published as evidence for manufacturing buttons, but the high-ly decorative motifs are morę consistent with other items among the London finds, and so it would be safer, in the absence of the products themselves, to regard them as brooches, or as mounts accompanying the strap loops and perhaps buckles that were apparently being pro-duced on the site (Bayley & Wright 1987, 86-87 no. 11).

References to ‘buttons’ occur in documentary sources in England from c.1300 onwards (Whiting 1968, 65 nos. B630, B634 & B635). Evidence for functional buttons, that is, ones used to close garments, is provided by monumental repre-sentations from at least the 14th century. The first reliable archaeological evidence for such buttons - ie with corresponding holes along the