Image: Medieval harness pendant (FindID 34240)

Description: Copper-alloy horse-harness pendant in the shape of a shield. Within a border the centre of the shield is sunken for enamel. Most of the space is taken up with a counter-relief butterfly. This has an oval head with pointed top, with a sunken oval cell in the centre with two pellet eyes. To either side are long antennae, and below is the body which is made up of four cells to give a transversely striped effect. The wings have three rounded cells in each lower half, and three rounded cells below a long curved cell and a small triangular cell in each upper half. Above the shield is a complete suspension loop at right angles to the plane of the shield; this is quite worn internally at the top. All of the front of the pendant, except for the cells, is gilded, and there are traces of gilding on the reverse too. There are traces of red in the cells of the head, the body and the background, but it is very hard to tell if this is the remains of red enamel or a corrosion product which results from the contact between the copper alloy and the enamel. A gold butterfly on a red background was the badge (not, strictly speaking, heraldic) of the Audley family, a large and wealthy medieval family who had lands in Essex, among other places; but known Audley badges tend to have a very simplified butterfly which is not very like this example. Nick Griffiths has commented that the more detailed butterfly pendants (e.g. from Fornham All Saints, Suffolk and from South Petherton, Somerset) may either be the badges of an unrecorded family, or may be merely decorative with no 'heraldic' or badge significance.
Title: Medieval harness pendant
Credit: https://finds.org.uk/database/ajax/download/id/8148 Catalog: https://finds.org.uk/database/images/image/id/8148/recordtype/artefacts archive copy at the Wayback Machine Artefact: https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/34240
Author: Suffolk County Council Archaeology Service, Faye Minter, 2003-09-09 14:48:29
Permission: Attribution-ShareAlike License version 4.0 (verified 29 November 2020)
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Attribution Required?: Yes