Quoit Brooch Style Buckles

Abstract

During excavation in 1967 of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Mucking in Essex, bronze belt equipment (pls. liii, liv) was found in situ on a body stain in grave 117. Its importance is immediately obvious, for not only is it a fine piece of craftsmanship and the only complete set of its kind, but it supplies the missing link between the late Roman military belt equipment and metalwork in the Quoit Brooch Style of Anglo-Saxon England. At much the same time that this buckle came to light at Mucking, another buckle of the same period, but of a different type, was found in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Orpington in Kent (fig. 2 a), and a few weeks later another was found in a cemetery at Bishopstone, Sussex. With the advantage of the information provided by these new buckles it is now possible to distinguish other works belonging to the same milieu, and to see problems connected with them in a different perspective.