A fragment of a gilt copper-alloy buckle frame (Figs 1 and 2) was found by metal detecting in the parish of Soham, Cambridgeshire, in December 2011, and reported by Michael Carlile to the Finds Identification and Recording Section of the Norfolk Historic Environment Service at Gressenhall.Footnote 1 The find-spot lies in the Cambridgeshire fenland, 1.5km south east of the medieval settlement of Soham on the southern edge of the modern village, on a peninsula that arcs around the low embayment of Soham Mere. Wicken Priory, a house of Augustinian canons founded before 1228, is situated 5km to the west, on the other side of the Mere.Footnote 2
The Soham gilt copper-alloy buckle frame (length 26mm; width >33mm; weight 13.40g). Drawing: J Gibbons, Norfolk Historic Environment Service
The Soham gilt copper-alloy buckle frame. Photograph: Norfolk Historic Environment Service
The find comprises part of the broad, angled, openwork outside edge of a broken and incomplete gilt cast copper-alloy buckle frame, with vertical curling lobed tendrils between two robed seated figures. Both sides of the frame, the pin and the separate plate are missing. The two male figures are partly modelled in the round and have their heads slightly inclined towards one another, as if in conversation. They have worn faces with no surviving features, although some indications of their hairstyles remain. The left-hand figure has both hands on his right knee, which is raised and projects forward, with his right foot placed on a globular knop at one end of the convex outside edge of the frame. The figure to the right has his arm bent with his elbow angled towards the central tendril, and with his right hand on his right knee. His left hand is placed on his left knee and his left foot rests on a globular knop at the other end of the outside edge of the frame. Stumps of broken openwork survive at the outer edge of both figures.
The number of finds of Romanesque buckles is small when compared with those of buckles belonging to later in the thirteenth century.Footnote 3 Of these, few have elaborately cast and fettled decoration in high relief.Footnote 4 In a recent survey of Anglo-Norman finds from Norfolk a number of such frames and plates were noted.Footnote 5 However, these are relatively unsophisticated and involve a limited range of stylised zoomorphic motifs with some drilled and engraved modification. Despite its fragmentary condition and areas of corrosion, the high artistic quality of this piece shines through; it is also representative of a crucial classicising phase in European art from the decades either side of the year 1200. Although outstanding examples of manuscript painting, stained glass and stone sculpture from this period can be identified as of English origin, few pieces of fine metalwork can be securely associated with England.Footnote 6 That alone would make it important enough, but it is in fact of major significance as it comes from a rare type of buckle, represented by the complete silver-gilt example from the Dune hoard, from Gotland, now in the Stockholm Statens Historiska Museum (Figs 3 and 4).Footnote 7 Although this hoard's likely deposition was in the mid-fourteenth century (perhaps 1361), it contains many objects of much earlier date and various places of origin, some from beyond Latin Europe.Footnote 8 The Dune buckle, generally agreed to be from north-western Europe (see below), suggests in broad terms how the Soham fragment would originally have been completed, with a framing lobe to either side constituting a trefoil, and with the separate plate connected to it by a hinge.
Silver-gilt buckle and buckle plate from the Dune hoard, Dalhem parish, Gotland, Sweden (inv. no. 6849:65). Photograph: © Ulrik Skans/Stockholm: Statens Historiska Museum
A detail of the silver-gilt buckle from the Dune hoard, Dalhem parish, Gotland, Sweden (inv. no. 6849:65). Photograph: © Ulrik Skans/Stockholm: Statens Historiska
The attribution of the Dune buckle to ‘Lorraine or England’ was made by Hanns Swarzenski but did not initially find widespread support.Footnote 9 In the exhibition L'Europe Gothique in Paris in 1968 an origin in Gotland or the Rhineland was suggested, with l'ouest de l'Allemagne apparently preferred.Footnote 10 Willibald Sauerländer, reviewing The Year 1200 exhibition in New York, inclined to a localisation ‘somewhere between the Rhine and the Seine’.Footnote 11 Subsequent commentators also kept their options open. In Die Zeit der Staufer in 1977, Dietrich Kötsche supported a Rhenish or Mosan centre.Footnote 12 Although both Markus Müller and Martin Blindheim kept England in the frame, neither was able to offer a specific comparison.Footnote 13 The find from Soham provides just such a parallel and tips the balance fairly decisively in favour of an English origin for both buckles. As regards dating, the range offered for the Dune example spans the first forty years of the thirteenth century. However, if we concentrate on comparanda with an English origin, the seals of King John and his first wife, Isabel of Gloucester, demonstrate the existence of this confident classicising style even slightly before 1200;Footnote 14 thus proposing a dating after 1220 seems unnecessary.
Although the figures on the Soham fragment are broadly similar to those on the corresponding trefoil part of the Dune buckle, there are some distinctive differences. Whereas on the latter the right-hand figure is shown kneeling, at Soham both are seated, and apparently in conversation as equals. Each of the Soham figures has one foot placed on the globular knops on the lower border. As a result, the leg above it projects in higher relief, creating a greater sense of three-dimensional form. This is enhanced by the diagonal fall of drapery between the knees. The right-hand figure places his other foot on a volute sprouting from the plant scroll between the two men. This foliate element is more dominant on the Soham fragment, being in the foreground rather than behind the figures and having rather thicker stems. The gap between the two tendrils separating the heads of the seated men is likely to have been meant as a groove for the tip of the buckle pin to rest in. These design changes are possibly prompted by the different materials, copper alloy as against silver, and perhaps also suggest a later stage in the development of the type. However, as it is likely that the Soham buckle was more brittle, as indeed is implied by its broken state, the more substantial volumes of metal and support for the pin may also have been adopted to strengthen the structure.
These formal changes have implications for the interpretation of the subject matter. On the Dune buckle the kneeling figure is, by implication, subservient, and this reading is supported by his simpler attire. He wears a knee-length tunic with shallow folds whereas the man he kneels to has a long tunic, down to his ankles, and is swathed in much deeper folds, perhaps indicating a cloak.Footnote 15 These distinctions are not apparent on the Soham fragment, where both men have long tunics and cloaks with similar quantities of fabric. The presence on the Dune buckle of two half-length angels has prompted its interpretation as a biblical subject, though no plausible identification has been offered. As there are no indications of religious status, such as books, scrolls and staffs, or of secular rank, such as crowns, to help, it seems unlikely that a specific reading was intended. It is therefore reasonable to regard the imagery as generically ‘courtly’ rather than a representation of a specific episode. The differences in the relationships between the figures on the Dune and Soham buckles would thus be explicable as two alternative, but equally acceptable instances of human sociality.
These issues bring back under the spotlight the attribution and analysis of the famous gilt-bronze clasp or strap unifier in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, with two trefoil elements each containing one seated and one attendant figure and foliage (Fig 5).Footnote 16 Here the two main seated figures are a man, probably crowned and possibly holding an orb, and a woman. Their feet rest respectively on a lion and a wyvern with a canine head. A number of potential identifications have been mooted, such as Esther and Ahasuerus,Footnote 17 but the two animals imply a more allegorical reading, such as trampling evil underfoot. In his Gemma Ecclesiastica, Gerald of Wales regarded the lion as representing worldly and the dragon spiritual evil; no doubt this was an interpretation of Psalm 91.13 (‘Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder/the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet’).Footnote 18 In the context of the New York buckle, the implication might be that love overcomes evil.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art gilt-bronze clasp from the Cloisters Collection, 1947 (47.101.48), described in the museum catalogue as an early thirteenth-century clasp from the South Lowlands, Valley of the Meuse, measuring 2 × 3 in. (510 × 760mm). Photograph: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Regardless of any intended or viable text-based interpretation, what may therefore be as significant is the fact that the figures in all three cases are in pairs, in conversation or mutual regard, though separated by an intervening element. This seems especially appropriate for a buckle which unites the two ends of a belt, but which also divides the body at the waist.Footnote 19
Each of these objects, in Stockholm, New York and that from Soham, was produced by the lost-wax method of casting from a unique original model. There is no question here of multiple production made possible by open moulds or dies. The investment of time in detailing the wax no doubt added considerably to the cost and thus limited the ownership of such buckles to the wealthy elite. This has implications for the quality of their artistic conception and execution, for discerning customers would want to display on their person work by the best goldsmiths in which, as the popular Ovidian tag has it, materiam superabat opus (‘the artifice surpassed the material’).Footnote 20 Indeed, the deliberate emulation of Greco-Roman classicism seen in the proportions of the figures, their poses and draperies, may be regarded as the visual equivalent of the revived literary Latin which was so characteristic of late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in north-western Europe. As Walter Map expressed it in the 1180s, in excellent Latin, ‘every age has disliked its own modernity, every era, from the first onwards, has preferred the previous one to itself’.Footnote 21
