Sue's Really Tiny Early Medieval Buckle | #CuratorsCornered Ostentatiously Decorated Mundane Object

So, this week for Curators Cornered, we put two curators against each other and asked them

the very simple question: What's the best ostentatiously decorated otherwise mundane object

that you're in charge of and Gareth Brereton, curator of Ancient Mesopotamia and Sue Brunning,

curator of the Early Medieval European collections came up with incredibly different answers. To tell

you what their answer was here is Sue...

Buckles. We've all got them, they fasten our belts, our bags, our shoes,

and they're just really useful objects.

They're a good example of: if it ain't broke don't fix it.

So, you can come to the Museum and you can see a buckle

that's a thousand years old and it'll look a lot like the same types of buckles that we have today.

So really really useful but I think also that their ubiquity and their, you know,

hyper functionality makes them a little bit mundane

and it used to be the same in the early middle ages

because buckles are probably one of the most common finds that we have from graves of this period.

We find them with men, with women, with children and even with animals

and this basic principle of having a loop with a tongue that you pass your strap through like so

tongue goes through a little hole you've made your fastener

and even if you put on a few lockdown pounds your buckle is still going to work for you.

So you really don't need to have any extra bells and whistles,

any fancy designs for this thing to work really really well.

But nobody told the maker of this buckle.

This incredible buckle was found at a cemetery site dating to the early 7th century

at a place called Kingsfield in Faversham and it was called Kingsfield because basically the graves contained so much gold.

Now, the first thing to say about this buckle is just that it's so small.

So I have my lovely little vintage pineapple brooch here which is exactly the same size,

about three centimetres in length, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in decoration.

So, first of all and very obviously the buckle is made of gold which in the early 7th century,

just the same as today, was a prestige material and that suggests to us that the owner of this buckle

was of some significant status or at least was buried as if they had some kind of significant status

but it's actually the decoration on the buckle that I'd really like to focus on today,

because it really has been lavished with the most ornate decoration

some of it actually even, kind of, microscopically detailed.

First of all, we can look at the shape of the buckle and you

can see that it's made by the heads of a pair of birds at the top and at the bottom

and these look to be birds of prey based on the curved beaks that they have.

So they look to be representing either an eagle or a type of hawk, something like that,

and the eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that these look a lot like the birds

that we see on the metal work at Sutton Hoo and because they're birds of prey, they're predators,

these birds are very fierce they seem to tap into these kinds of qualities that are valued at the time.