In his prologue, Mackreth marks the start of this magnum opus back in 1963. What began as an essay on brooches for a course taught by Graham Webster became a determination to gather enough data to produce a clear overview of the variety of Late Iron Age Romano-British brooch forms, methods of manufacture, chronology and stylistic associations. At the start he only had access to the series from Late Iron Age and early Roman Camulodunum (Hawkes and Hull 1947), which is limited both geographically and in date range, and Collingwood's ‘useless alphabetical system’ (v), ‘rightly castigated’ (3). He notes various stages along the route to completion. By 1965 he knew he had to have at least 2,000 brooches to achieve a working dataset; next he realised that he would need 5,000 brooches; then he settled on 10,000, as after that new types would rarely appear; he finally ended up with 15,000!
The text is simply ordered. Ch. 1 explains any bias in the sample, materials and manufacture, and his methods of dating and classification. Chs 2–10 deal with the types, in general grouped by major forms and families (bow brooches in particular are often best viewed as a number of inter-related family trees), and ch. 11 dips into some of the social and economic aspects of brooch use. There are three appendices dealing with dating, of which two are clearly personal bugbears: the dating of the King Harry Lane cemetery at Verulamium, and that of the brooch assemblage from the south-west gate at South Cadbury, the ‘massacre deposits’. The data for all this are given in various formats on the accompanying CD.
This is not a book for a faint-hearted beginner with no foreknowledge of the family groupings, and M. admits that his system may prove intractable for some (3). That given, it is surprising that his publisher did not guide him into making it easier to access, as the principal yardstick by which to judge any classification system is its user-friendliness. Feugère's 1985 study of the brooches from southern Gaul led researchers into his typology by a summary visual index, and the success of the late Richard Hattatt's four brooch volumes (1982, 1985, 1987, 1989) was ensured by the inclusion in the last of a full visual index, which proved to be so useful that Oxbow reissued it as a separate volume (2000). Such a visual aid would have helped here. Also down to the publisher is the cluttered page layout and unfortunate choice of typefaces. Rapid navigation through the text is necessarily by plate numbers, but they are given in italic and are too faint to stand out on the page, while the words in bold that do stand out are the much-repeated ‘dating’ and ‘distribution’.
Few brooch specialists agree wholly on nomenclature, which is rife with misnomers, and M. has sometimes stuck with existing usage and sometimes devised his own. He has dealt with family subdivisions in an entirely practical way, naming obvious types or groups, numbering or naming obvious sub-types or sub-groups. He gives short shrift to eccentric individual pieces. For example, on p. 68 he has ‘Complete Bastards’, ‘Odd’, ‘The Rest’, and on p. 78 ‘olla podrida’. (I'm not too sure what some users will make of these.) His no-nonsense approach to a paucity of dating evidence is similar: ‘it would be a brave man who would care to pick over the details’, ‘not enough evidence to shake a stick at’ (78). Readers may be left unenlightened, but will be pleased to know that they are not alone in the murk and that their companion has a sense of humour.
Ch. 11 is headed ‘Usage, Tribes, Fashions and the Demise of the Bow Brooch’. Often only summaries of topics are given, rather than full explorations of the evidence, and the lack of references shows that he has not engaged with recent work on gender and identity. The same is true for religion, where his discussion of horse-and-rider brooches does not refer to the seminal work of Ferris (1986) and Johns (1995). Researchers into regionality, which is M.'s great strong point, should browse the typological chapters as it is by no means all gathered together here. In contrast, the demise of the bow brooch is neatly charted and the section on militaria opens up new perspectives, attributing specific types/sub-types of Aucissa, Bagendon and Hod Hill brooches to particular legions, and exploring the distribution of Knee and Crossbow brooches in some detail. This patchiness is understandable — there is so much data that M. has necessarily pursued his own interests rather than attempted to keep up with every strand of every topic — but it is a shame that researchers coming fresh to some of these subjects will not be led into the wider literature.
Despite these problems, the book is a great achievement. Rarely does an individual temperament shine though a work such as this, but M.'s quirky approach to problems and lacunae in the data reflect his tenacity, clarity, flexibility, occasional exasperation, and rising above all his sense of humour. Has he achieved his aims? Of course; what a student essay — Graham Webster would be immensely proud of him.
