Sponsored by TWIST - Tablet Weavers International Studies & Techniques from Crowfoot, Elisabeth and Sonia Hawkes, "Early Anglo-Saxon Gold Braids," "Medieval Archaeology" XI, 1967: 44-46. "Of the clothing itself only a few small fragments of cloth and a great mass of gold threads have survived. ... the flat gold strips had formed part of two decorative braids [sic], one of which was brocaded to a width of 3 cm, the other to a width of 1.4 cm. In the pieces of textile from the widest braid [sic] a basic 4-hole tablet-weave was used, with the tablets turned normally in 1/4-turns to produce an even fabric. The thread, now dark brown in colour, is a very fin, well-spun wool, which has left such slight pressure-marks on the gold strips that it is extremely difficult to make out the brocading pattern where the gold alone survives. The cut lengths of this gold rarely exceed 26-27 cm and are frequently shorter, and they are also very narrow, so that each of them accounted for less than 5 mm of pattern on the wider band. Tangled and out of sequence, the majority of them are hopelessly difficult to use in determining the pattern. The only piece on which the design is at all clear is the better preserved of the two fragments of textile, barely 1 cm long, still woven with two brocading threads. This shows a section of main pattern, based on lozenge-, rectangle- and, probably, corss-motifs, with a diagonal strap-pattern in a narrow border along one side. The less well-preserved textile fragment, which probably joined the first appears to show a continuation of the cross-pattern, but it should be noted that Mrs. Crowfoot's woven version of this braid [sic] is only a reconstruction of the type of pattern the remains suggest, and not an actual reproduction. With the narrower braid [sic], however, she was on safer ground. The gold strips are of the same length as those on the wide braid [sic], and therefore made up about twice the length of pattern. From the more intact of these fragments, mostly about 1 cm long, the design could be made out as a continuous band of running chevrons interspaced with rectangles similar to those on the wide braid [sic]. Finally, in addition to the regular gold strips, there are four (originally perhaps five) pieces woven into triangular units, which show patterns related to those on the two braids [sic]. With modern gold thread, as Mrs. Crowfoot found, it is difficult to reproduce the original appearance of this brocading. The bright gold was passed to and fro so that the flat strips lay nearly edge to edge, with the patterns picked out as though in dots, dark or coloured, where the twists of thread cross over them. The resulting braids [sic] must have resembled bands of solid gold inlaid with niello or coloured stones, or sheet gold cut in openwork to permit the colour of an underlying fabric to show through from behind. "From the number of metal threads still preserved it is clear that there must have been an unusually large amount of gold braid in the Taplow grave. ... The total length of this costly stuff was ... somewhere between a minimum of 150 cm (c. 5 ft.) and a maximum of 254 cm (c. 8-1/2 ft.) -- an estimate which is on the conservative side, since some threads are likely to have been lost in the course of the excavation." They go on to hypothesize that the wide band probably decorated a baldric (worn for the suspension of a sword) while the smaller band, if not a belt, may have been the border of a garment such as a tunic, over which the belt and baldric or cloak, would have been worn. I have scanned and sent to Janis the drawings of the Taplow brocading patterns from this article and asked her to please add them to the photographs. We will let you know when they are viewable. Nancy Mistress Ingvild Send private reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------- To stop receiving tabletweaving (not tabletweaving-digest), send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: unsubscribe tabletweaving. To stop receiving tabletweaving-digest, see the end of a digest.
