As part of this exciting day of activities organised by BBC Arts I have produced a small presentation about a Roman Polden Hill brooch. We see many of these brooches, discovered by metal detectorists. In fact there are over 3,000 recorded on our database.
In this presentation I discuss a specific example on display at my workplace, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. My hope is you will understand a little more about this specific brooch type and come and visit it in Gallery 36 once we are open again.
The brooch is displayed with the foot at the top and the head from which the pin extends at the bottom. It is believed they were worn like this to fasten clothing together, such as a tunic. One theory is that they were worn this way as it stopped the fabric of the garment gathering up, so the orientation was mainly for aesthetic reasons. They often now have a green coloured surface patina that has developed due to oxidisation. If you imagine in their original state they would have been a shiny magnificent copper colour. There are also examples made of silver that have been gilded and some of the bronze versions also have enamel detailing along the bow.Polden Hill is the name of a place in Somerset where a large number of these brooches were discovered. In fact, despite these brooches being named after a site in the South West with the help of PAS data it is believed they may originate from the West Midlands. The large distributions of the brooches are evident on this map which shows the high concentration in the area around the Severn and Avon Valley’s. We can also begin to see clusters of finds close to known Roman sites in the Midlands such as Wroxeter, Wall, Droitwich and Alcester.Detectorists have also found the lead patterns here in the midlands that would have been used in the manufacture of these brooches adding weight to the argument that this particular type of brooch was probably manufactured in the area The pattern was formed from lead so that a two-piece mould could be created around the object in clay. Molten bronze could then be poured into the mould to produce the copper alloy versions that are more commonly found. It is thought that the clay moulds were only used once; however, the pattern provided a method for producing these brooches on a much larger scale.These brooches are dated to 80 -120 AD. So this is some 37 years after the Roman invasion of Britain. To put the brooch in to context, AD 80 is the same year that the Colosseum was completed in Rome by the Emperor Titus. The end of the period when this type of brooch was produced Hadrian ruled, who famously commissioned the building of a wall in the north in AD 122.
