Preface

Summary

This book is the result of two principal aims. The first was to provide a useful reference guide outlining practical matters such as typology, chronology, types of decoration, geographical parameters, usage as a part of dress, and the nature of the archaeological contexts in which cruciform brooches occur. The second aim was to couch each and every one of these observations, traditionally presented as worthwhile in their own right, in terms of their social significance. I decided that if it was of no social import, it was not to be included in the book. However, I soon found almost every such detail to have some bearing on early Anglo-Saxon society and over the course of my writing the greatest challenge became not the recognition of social significance, but the linking of all these aspects together into a coherent narrative, which I hope will become evident through the thematic progression of the book. Though this is not how specialist studies of artefact types have traditionally progressed, this seems to me now to be a useful model.

During the last few years, it has been a privilege to work under the inherited advice and knowledge of so many of our discipline's founders and major protagonists, including Haakon Schetelig, Nils Åberg, Edward Thurlow Leeds and many other highly influential scholars whose work has touched upon the seemingly ubiquitous cruciform brooch. Research on Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches has historically not progressed easily, with Edward Thurlow Leeds and Hayo Vierck both sadly never completing their accounts. It was also a loss to the discipline that Catherine Mortimer never published her doctoral thesis on the subject, which must be among the most cited unpublished works in early Anglo-Saxon archaeology. I wrote this book sorely aware of the shadows all these esteemed scholars cast. I hope that finally seeing something substantial published on cruciform brooches might have been, or still yet might be, a satisfaction to them, given their direct contribution to many of its themes and all of its subject matter.