396 (16)

369

Combs

manner. These occur on the continent (Ulbricht 1984, pl 28, no. 1, pl 29, no. 1 and pl 72, nos. 1-3) and in England, where they have been recorded from Northampton and York (Baldwin Brown 1915, 391, pl LXXXVI, no. 2; Waterman 1959, pl XVIII, no. 2) as well as from London (VCH 1909, 165, fig 27, Baldwin Brown 1915, 391, pl LXXXVII, no. 1), the latter comb having fanciful animal head end-plates and an exagger-ated humped back. This form of openwork de-coration may ultimately have derived from that on liturgical furniture such as reliąuary crosses, which sometimes had relics secured within similar cut-out shapes behind transparent panes of hom. Although the Billingsgate comb was originally double-sided, an unusual feature of it, namely the presence of bronze end-plates which extend only to the top of the connecting-plates rather than to the complete height of the comb in its double-sided form, suggests that it could have been reassembled with short metal plates replacing taller ones of antler, perhaps after some of the finer spaced teeth were broken.

Examination of another double-sided composite comb incorporating strips of sheeting preserved from London shows that it too was madę from antler Oames Rackham, pers. comm.) and assem-bled with rivets of copper alloy, rather than of bonę as stated in earlier literaturę (MoL acc. no. A1598; Ward-Perkins 1940, 291, pl LXXXVIII, no. 2). The end-plates and three tooth-plates rangę from 15mm to 17mm in width, and each is pierced with two rivets thereby ensuring that the strips of metal lying beneath each connecting-

246 Antler double-sided composite comb, no. 1719 (1:1), with detail showing the remains of the row of fine teeth