Norfolk Heritage Explorer

Hands up  if you know what a dragon looks like. So that’s everyone, then. How about a unicorn? All of you again. 

But how about an amphisbaena? 

Ah, thought not. 

Back in medieval times, though, it would have been a very different story. Mythical animals were everywhere, from stone carvings to illuminated manuscripts. If you considered yourself an educated person, you would have known exactly what their names were and what they looked like. 

A find by a detectorist north of King’s Lynn has opened up a window on one of the most obscure of mythical creatures (to our eyes, at least). The finder discovered this buckle plate – dating from circa AD 1250-1425 - with a fascinating subject depicted on it. Similar buckles often turn up with the decorative plate broken, so it’s easy to interpret this beast as a snake or a crocodile, say. But thanks to the plate being intact, we tell what it really is: an amphisbaena, a lizard-like creature with a head at each end of its body. 

NMS-AFFCBD

Ancient Greek and Roman writers were convinced that the creature existed. The most influential was Pliny the Elder, most famous these days for perishing in the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius. But for 1500 years or more, his fame was down to his mammoth encyclopaedia Naturalis Historia (Natural History). In Chapter 25 ‘Different kinds of serpents’ he writes:  

”The amphisbæna has two heads, that is to say, it has a second one at the tail, as though one mouth were too little for the discharge of all its venom” (translation by John Bostock and Henry T. Riley). 

And for centuries afterwards, people believed him. It wasn’t until the 17th century that this particular tale was debunked– along with many others – by the Norwich scholar and writer Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) better known as ‘Vulgar Errors’. After setting out his arguments, he concludes in his typically elegant way:  

“We must crave leave to doubt of this double-headed Serpent until we have the advantage to behold [it].”

Almost 400 years later, we’re still waiting 

Statue of polymath Sir Thomas Browne statue in Norwich: Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Thomas_Browne_statue,_Norwich#/media/File:Thomas_Browne_statue.jpg/2

Take a closer look at the buckle plate by visiting its Portable Antiquities Scheme record.

Remember those ‘hidden 3D’ picture books that were all the rage once upon a time? You know the sort of thing: colourful abstract patterns which you could suddenly turn into a three-dimensional image if you made yourself go a little googly-eyed. You definitely needed the knack to make it work – but once you did, then it all fell into place.

Anglo-Scandinavian interlace patterns are a bit like that. The people of the Early Medieval period both loved to create these sometimes astonishingly intricate patterns of interwoven bands of decoration. Like those 3D pictures, there is more to them than meets the eye. What appears to be an abstract pattern often hides animals, birds, mythical beasts and people. The most remarkable examples are on such spectacular objects as the Sutton Hoo treasure and the stunning Lindisfarne Gospels.

But even humbler and much simpler objects have their secrets too. Take a look at this example, discovered near Dereham by a local metal detector user. It’s what is known as a ‘stirrup-strap mount’, something which was used from roughly AD 900 to 1200 to protect the strap on an iron stirrup. These are often decorated, and this is an interesting recent example, probably dating from the tenth century.

NMS-DAF1F7

So what’s going on here? You’ll spot the large animal which dominates it easily enough. Look out for its bushy tail, and the possible tree depicting behind the animal’s back. It looks like a large dog or a wolf. But that isn’t all that seems to be happening here.

Let’s dig a little deeper. Take a look at the beast’s head. If you look closely you can see a row of small zig-zag incisions depicting its sharp teeth. But only the top jaw is visible, because the creature has something in its mouth. Or, rather, part of someone. There’s a right arm belong to an individual who is out of the picture on the left. The creature has clamped its jaws round this person’s right hand and is biting – and biting hard (look at the effort in those neck muscles).

And now the picture falls into place. This isn’t a dog, it’s a wolf – a very large and nasty wolf called Fenrir, from Norse mythology. And the hand belongs to the warrior Týr, who decided one day to tie up this giant wolf. A bad idea: the wolf bit off the god’s hand when it realised what was going on. This object shows the scene at that (very) painful moment…

Fenrir and Tyr, pictured by Swedish artist John Bauer (Wikimedia Commons)

Find out more by visiting the Portable Antiquities Scheme record here. Thank you to the finder for submitting the object for recording https://finds.org.uk/database/search/results/q/NMS-DAF1F7

It’s not often the Norfolk County Council Find Team are left scratching their collective heads over a discovery. But this very unusual object, found at Brundall, was one of them.

Stone tool: a Mayan chert stemmed macro blade. (© Norfolk County Council).

The first thing to say is that it isn’t a handaxe or a giant arrowhead. Its actual technical name is a ‘stemmed macro blade’, but it’s easier to think of it as a large handheld knife, or a stone dagger. But it’s unlike anything else that’s ever been found in Norfolk: the shape’s wrong, the size is wrong and that stone looks nothing like our own famous and very distinctive black and grey flint.

So what is it – and where did it originally come from?

I mentioned we were scratching our heads. And so were until our flint specialist Jason Gibbons stepped in. There was something about the object’s heft (it’s almost 11cm long, and was once much bigger), the way it had been worked and the colour of the stone which seemed instantly familiar to him. His answer was truly astonishing: this object wasn’t made in Norfolk at all, but 5,250 miles away in Belize in Central America. And the people who made it were one of the most famous from history – the once-extensive 'Maya' civilisation, which survived until the fateful encounters with colonising Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.

Ancient culture: A painted plaster cast of a Mayan sculpture from Chichén Itzá, Lower Temple of the Jaguars. (© The Trustees of the British Museum).

Jason takes up the story: ‘I could see it was made from a massive struck blade, there are a few cultures that make them (we made long blades in the Upper Palaeolithic, 40,000 to 10,000 BC) but nowhere remotely near that big, apart from only one culture, and that is in Belize, so it was narrowed down very quickly.’ This stone is known as Colha chert, and is found in abundance in the north-east central area of the country, formerly known as ‘British Honduras’.

He adds: ‘I studied these back around 2012 along with trying to familiarise myself with both North and South American worked flints and flint types. I’m still working on that as there are thousands of variations.’

This type of tool was used for more than 1000 years, from circa 250 BC to AD 900. This example is a little battered, having lost its point and handle. It would have been used as a large knife or dagger.

‘They were also used by the "elite" class of Maya society in ritual caches,’ Jason says, ‘the favoured deposition of which appears to be in rivers.’

So that’s the object identified. But how on earth did it arrive in the Broads?

The tool was actually found in the 1950s, from the surface very near to Brundall Gardens. This was a popular tourist attraction founded in the 1880s, its attractive slopes giving rise to the nickname of ‘Little Switzerland’. The name of the attraction lives on in Brundall Gardens station. An old map shows the gardens once had a small museum. Was this Mayan tool one of the exhibits perhaps, a curiosity accidentally dropped and then lost one day? Decades after its rediscovery it was brought to Norwich Metal Detecting Club for identification and recording by the present owner.

Beauty spot: Brundall Gardens, pictured in the 1920s. (Image courtesy of www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk)

We may never truly know how it came to Brundall in the first place, although Jason has an interesting theory about that. You can find out what it is – and more about the story behind this fascinating object – by visiting the full record on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database under NMS-E80743.

Well we have been looking at our recent archaeological records of Norfolk finds hoping to find something fitting for the current 2018 Christmas festive season.  We were drawing a blank until we came across this rather nicely preserved Iron Age to Roman quern stone. What has that got to do with the festive season I hear you ask, very little I guess, until you know that it’s made out of ‘puddingstone,’ sourced just down the road in Hertfordshire.  There are no figs in this though and it’s a bit on the crunchy side, so we made it a bit more festive with a sprig of holly.

Usually we provide a link to the PAS database so you can see the record for the Quern in full, on this occasion however we have included a screen shot of the database page allowing you to see the format and the precise description and interpretation of the object. If it is too small to read press Control and + together on your keyboard to magnify the screen. If you are still unable to read the description the link to the database record is as follows  https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/930847

Merry Christmas to one and all.

There is a wonderful array of archaeological finds made by the public in Norfolk.  In general, because of the sheer volume involved we are only able to record artefacts that are more than a nominal 300 years old.  However, if an object has additional merit, for example through its cultural history then we will often try to make an exception.

This artefact unearthed recently in a field near Dereham is one such example. It’s a copper alloy token struck in 1788 to commemorate the jubilee of the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-1699 when James II was removed from the throne in favour of the Dutch William and Mary. 

This was a pivotal time in British history with politics and religion dividing the kingdom into civil unrest.  The Dutch invasion force of England assembled by William was four times the size of the Spanish Armada of 1588 and landed in Torbay, Devon on 5^th November 1688.  Apart from a skirmish near Reading the invasion was largely uncontested with James’s army and supporters defecting in the support of William, including his daughter Anne.

Our chosen find this month is a middle to late Saxon copper-alloy bow brooch. It was found recently on farmland in Breckland and is notable because of its size, richly cast decoration, and excellent level of preservation. It never ceases to amaze that an object can spend well over a 1000 years in the ground, be subjected to the vagaries of the weather, chemical fertilizers and ploughing and still survive in relatively good condition. Not so for the iron spring and pin mechanism though, as the rusty concretion on the back bears witness to the original location. Iron corrodes much more readily than copper alloy in the ground. 

The date of the brooch is circa AD 800-910 and it is of a brooch form now described as Ansate. The term Ansate means ‘handle-shaped’ and it is clear how the brooch style got it's name.  The adjacent distribution map uses national data from the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) database and illustrates that the type was particularly popular in Anglo Saxon East Anglia. Full details of the brooch can be found at https://finds.org.uk/database  using the reference NMS-EB5046 in the search field.

Found in Broadland our Find of the Month this month is a rather large and hefty 13^th-14^th century sword pommel. Pommel styles are many and varied and this type goes under the unsurprising name of a Wheel pommel. What makes this particular pommel stand out is the decoration and the rather unusual incised inscription which ‘reads’ along the following lines…

+ * + B S PCA EIS [small cross, circle with eight radiating rays, cross potent, retrograde B, retrograde S, P, C, inverted A with broken cross bar, E, I, retrograde S]. The inscription is indecipherable to modern interpretation, but bearing in mind that by far the majority of the population in the medieval period was illiterate, it may just be meaningless. The sword Pommel has a number of functions. Firstly, it prevents the hand slipping off the handle and aids a firm grip. Secondly it provides a counterweight to the heavy blade, meaning that the point of balance is shifted just forward of the hilt making the weapon more balanced and easier to handle fluidly. Indeed, to help facilitate this, the inside of the pommel is part-filled with lead.  Finally, Pommels can be used as a weapon in their own right and used to strike the opponent, particularly around the head.  Interestingly, this latter usage is where our modern term pummelling is derived from. 

Full details of this find can be seen at https://finds.org.uk/database using the reference NMS-567099 to search against.

For February's Find of the Month we have selected a rather unusual post-medieval nutcracker to show you. It was discovered in a field near King's Lynn in West Norfolk and is exceptional in both its preservation and its unusual form. It is designed around a miniature of a tripod cooking pot or cauldron, of a type that was in use from circa CE 1200-1700.

Cleverly the nutcracker uses the miniature pot as the container for the nut. A threaded shaft with an openwork handle enters from the side which when turned crushes the nut against the side of the pot.

Screw threaded nutcrackers did not appear until the 17^th century so this example probably dates from circa CE 1600-1800

The full record on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database for this lovely object can be found at: https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/879671

In honour of Halloween, we have something a little different for October's Find Of The Month. The Norfolk Historic Environment Record is full of strange entries. We have everything from The Great Stone of Lyng, which supposedly bleeds and stops birds singing, to four mummified cats! 

This month we will focus on one of my favourite entries which I discovered, in my first week on the job, over five years ago. While familiarising myself with the secondary files (the collection of sources our records are based on) I decided to look up my new office. In among the photographs, building plans, newspaper clippings and badger excavations I found a typewritten sheet of paper titled 'The Ghost Of Gressenhall Workhouse". Intrigued, I read on to discover that this was in fact our most thoroughly recorded haunting! 

What follows is a copy of the file.

Further updates followed:

For more of our peculiar records check out Norfolk's Archaeological Curiosities

Happy Halloween!