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Dress Accessońes

late 13th century onwards. The alloys used in buttons prior to that could suggest that the metalworkers who madę basemetal finger-rings and brooches may also have produced buttons. The connection with brooches may be a strong one in view also of the similar function of closing two parts of a garment together.

Ali of the datable composite buttons of copper-alloy sheeting are attributable to ceramic phase 9 (c.1270-c.1350); most are plain and biconvex, but no. 1402 has a fiat front (fig 179). Number 1403, madę from at least five pieces, of a variety of copper alloys, is the most complicated of these buttons in terms of manufacture and of decora-tion, and is also the biggest one (fig 179). Its quatrefoil motifs were probably stamped repeat-edly rather than once for the whole design - a very common techniąue in the decoration of metal and leather. This is one of the smallest objects recovered from the recent excavations to have been treated in this way. The damaged central device, possibly a letter, could mean that this was a forerunner of the livery buttons of later cen-turies.

Both the solid and the hollow forms of button continued well into the post-medieval period with little change, though there was a far wider variety of designs available then (cf Noel-Hume 1970, 91) than is suggested for the 13th to 15th centuries by these recent finds. Number 1404 (fig 179) in particular is not visually distinguishable from some 16th- and 17th-century buttons.

Although the existence of bonę buttons has been inferred for the medieval period on the basis of waste offcuts from which circular objects have been cut, it seems strange that so far no corres-ponding bonę button of has been reliably identi-fied. Until an unequivocal medieval button of bonę is found (cf MacGregor 1985, 101-02) it is better to regard the waste-bone panels as evidence of the manufacture of other items (see nos. 1557-81 under Beads).

Nonę of the above medieval buttons from London excavations is of precious metal. A very tiny gold filigree button-like object (MoL acc. no. 87.51/10, d 5mm) was found in medieval spoił from the Billingsgate site - it is presumably too smali to have been functional. In 1376, a Richard Bor was imprisoned in London for silvering 240 buttons of latone in order to try to sell them as pure silver (Riley 1868, 397-98). Silver-gilt buttons from the late 14th century have been found in Denmark (Lindahl and Jensen 1983, 140-141).

The buttons from the recent excavations do not include examples of all the medieval types now attested in London. Figurę 179 (bottom) shows one of a handful of known composite sheet copper-alloy buttons with holes roughly gouged to make pierced decoration. These came from 14th-century spoił removed by contractors from the Billingsgate site (private collections) and they have also been recovered from the Thames Ex-change site. At present these few examples provide the sole evidence for what was quite probably a popular linę.

The recent London finds of buttons from securely dated medieval deposits provide first-hand evidence for the use of base metals for these items from the early 13th century onwards. The variety now recorded, despite the plainness of most examples, suggests that functional buttons were probably used widely in the lower levels of urban society at that time. The documentary and monumental evidence, which primarily relates to upper-class usage, has thus been put into per-spective as only part of the picture. A number of phrases with a proverbial ring, current from the beginning of the 14th century onwards and each amounting to ‘not worth a button’ (Whiting 1968, 65 nos. B630-635), can now be related to actual examples produced for the popular market.