Cruciform Brooch

heidebrechts
Sat, 19 Nov 2022 22:40:18 +0000
Brooch, Copper-Alloy, Dress Accessories, dress accessories

Sophia Heidebrecht Found in the grave of a woman at West Stow, this cruciform brooch is an elaborate example of Anglo-Saxon metalworking. While the particular significance of the brooch and its symbolism is largely lost to us now, it was important enough to the woman’s identity that she was buried with it. The abstracted design […]

Sophia Heidebrecht

West Stow cruciform brooch

Found in the grave of a woman at West Stow, this cruciform brooch is an elaborate example of Anglo-Saxon metalworking. While the particular significance of the brooch and its symbolism is largely lost to us now, it was important enough to the woman’s identity that she was buried with it. The abstracted design features stylized animal heads, including birds and horses, as well as anthropomorphic faces. A brooch like this one, with its large, eye-catching design, would probably have been used to fasten an outer garment such as a cloak, given its frequent placement in grave finds on the central chest. The cruciform was particularly associated with high-status older women, suggesting that it could have been a symbol of power — beyond its sheer size and extravagance, this is reflected in the martial imagery of the design, perhaps a chance for women to evoke the masculinized language of power within their gendered role in society.

Women’s clothing as fastened by brooches. The central image seems to be the most likely manner in which the West Stow brooch would have been worn.
(Image from Toby Martin, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England, p. 194.)

Because of the dramatic changes in the form of the brooch over time, the design of the cruciform can provide clues as to its date. This example is an advanced “florid” form, probably dating from around the mid 6th century, a sharp contrast from the simpler designs of earlier brooches. The brooches were made from copper alloy, likely from a two piece mold technique, though it is possible that lost wax casting was used. I used a modified version of the two piece mold to make my reconstruction.

I first had to attempt to make sense of the complicated images on the brooch. While I clearly couldn’t recreate the designs exactly, I drew the brooch as a first step towards making my prototype, a process which did help me understand the broad strokes of the design slightly more — I now have a pretty good idea of the basic horse head motif, although the birds’ heads continue to confuse me. I used clay to make the model that my mold was based around, as the design is easier to create in the positive than in the negative, although there were some finer details that I ended up having to make on the mold itself.

The clay model after being pressed into the mold… Now in >5 different pieces. I found myself agreeing with one scholar who argued that wax would have made the most sense as a modeling material — my clay prototype ended up being too brittle to stand up to much pressure.

A less breakable way to press the general shape into the clay. I ended up using a cardboard cutout to press the general shape into the mold, then using the clay pieces as stamps to add detail.

The clay mold. Since I didn’t have access to metalworking facilities, I poured plaster into the mold instead of bronze, and set a piece on top of it to create the curved shape of the bow.

First attempts at pouring the plaster. It took a couple tries for me to take the plaster out without it breaking — I ended up needing to use more plaster than I thought, and the bow ended up being the most fragile part, eventually breaking even on my final take.

The final result struck me with its size — you don’t really get a sense of the scale of these things from an image alone, and the cruciform brooch is striking in its extravagant size as well as its design. The recreation process emphasized to me how delicate a structure the brooch is, evidenced by the repairs needed even on metal examples. Handling my recreation also helped me to imagine these items as living objects, in contrast to the static presentation we see in a museum case — they were worn, broken, repaired and reworn, an integral part of these women’s bodily presentation in their daily life.

Sources & Further Reading

“Decoding Anglo-Saxon Art” on the British Museum blog

Toby Martin, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015.

Toby Martin, ‘Women, knowledge and power: the iconography of early Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches,” in An Offprint of Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History vol. 18, ed. Helena Hamerow. Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2013.

Gale Owen-Crocker, Dress in Anglo-Saxon England: Revised and enlarged edition. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004.