An update on the Anglo-Saxon brooch project
Up to the end of March 2004 a total of 180 Early Medieval brooches have been recorded as part of the Kent Anglo-Saxon Brooch Project. Of these, 154 date to the early Anglo-Saxon period (5 th to early 8 th centuries), 7 to the mid-Saxon period (8 th -9 th centuries) and 5 to the late-Saxon period (10 th to 11 th centuries). Fourteen brooches do not currently have enough detail recorded to allow them to be assigned to a period.
Of the brooches dated to the early Anglo-Saxon period, the great majority (95 examples) can be broadly dated to the 5 th or early 6 th centuries, whilst another 39 were of 6 th century date. Only 6 examples could be dated to the late 6 th or early 7 th centuries. No brooches were recorded that could be dated to the mid- to later 7 th or early 8 th centuries.
Thus there seems a clear contrast to the pattern produced by burials in Kent , where there is a general trend towards more objects being deposited during the course of the 6 th century, with relatively few graves or grave goods dateable to the 5 th century. Instead the metal detector finds, along with excavation finds from non-funerary contexts, show a bias towards copper alloy brooches of the mid-5 th to early 6 th centuries. The break down of brooch types from this period (ca. 450-625 AD) recorded by the Project is shown in the chart below:
Figure 1: A graph demonstrating the type of brooches found in Kent.
Twelve brooches recorded as disc' brooches could also possibly be added to this chart, since simple copper alloy disc brooches with ring-and-dot ornament predominantly date to the 5 th or early 6 th centuries. However, in most cases adequate records for these brooches are as yet unavailable and the exact type of brooch that they represent is uncertain. Some examples recorded as disc brooches may in fact be Kentish disc or button brooches and therefore this group is not currently included in the total of 5 th to early 6 th century brooches in the corpus. Notwithstanding this factor, the high proportion of cruciform, small long and button brooches noted in previous reports on the Project has been maintained. It could be argued that small long brooches do not represent a homogeneous class of brooches, in which case cruciform and button brooches are the commonest discreet types found by detectorists in Kent . Cruciforms found in Kent continue to be characterised by relatively simple early types; they are clearly distinct as a regional group from those found in Anglian areas (interestingly, cruciform brooches similar to the Kentish examples have now been recorded via the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Hampshire and West Sussex ). Catherine Mortimer has suggested that the closest parallels for cruciform brooches found in Kent are those from Frisia. A Dutch graduate student, Erwin Brouwer of the Groninger Institute for Archaeology (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), is currently compiling a corpus of Frisian cruciform brooches under Dr Jurjen Bos. To date approximately 140 cruciform brooches have been recorded in this study, the majority of which are metal detector finds. An exchange of data between the two corpuses has now been agreed.
Figure 2: A cruciform brooch from Dover, Kent, drawn by Dom Andrews.
In the meantime, what can be said about the pattern of brooch types being recovered by detectorists? A minority of the brooches recorded by the project seem likely to be derived from plough-damaged burials (for example the broken Kentish disc brooch from Eastry (KENT4547) that is illustrated in the Portable Antiquities Scheme logo). The majority, however, are simple copper alloy brooches, often broken, whose condition and findspot gives no reason to think that they have ever been deposited in a grave. Indeed there seems little reason to regard them as any different from the many other types of dress accessories, of all periods, whose presence in the ploughsoil is usually ascribed to casual loss. In this regard they may be more representative of the everyday wear of the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon Kent than the generally rather higher quality objects often deposited in burials of the 5 th to 7 th centuries. The fact that the single biggest class of brooches is southern Scandinavian cruciform brooches of Jutish/Frisian type may therefore be significant.
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