A somewhat similar object is in the Musée de l’Oratoire, at Nantes. Another, found at Grésine,[844] Savoy, has been regarded as the tip for a scabbard. Another was found in the department of La Manche.[845]
— Fig. 285.—Reach Fen. 1/1 ———— Fig. 286.—Allhallows, Hoo. 1/1 ————
What appears to be the hilt of either a sword or dagger was found in a hoard of bronze objects at Allhallows,[846] Hoo, Kent. By the kindness of Mr. Humphrey Wickham I am able to engrave it as Fig. 286. It consisted originally of a rectangular socketed ferrule with a rivet-hole through it, and attached to a semicircular end like the half of a grooved pulley. The socket itself extends for some distance into this semicircular part. From portions of a sword having been found with it, Mr. Wickham has regarded it as a kind of pommel. It may, however, have been the end of a scabbard or a chape, and, if so, should have been described in Chapter XIII. The knife, Fig. 261, was found in the same hoard.
To return, however, to undoubted examples. The most remarkable of all dagger handles discovered in the British Isles are those obtained by Sir R. Colt Hoare from the barrows of Wiltshire.
One of these, from a barrow at Brigmilston,[847] is here reproduced in Fig. 287, taken from the engraving in “Ancient Wiltshire.” It is thus described by the late Dr. Thurnam: “It is of the thin broad-bladed variety. The handle is of wood, held together by thirty rivets of bronze, and strengthened at the end by an oblong bone pommel fastened with two pegs. It is decorated by dots incised in the surface of the wood, forming a border of double lines and circles between the heads of the rivets.” He goes on to say that a similar dagger of the broad variety, having exactly the same number of rivets, was found in one of the Derbyshire[848] barrows. Two buttons of polished shale accompanied this interment. Another, from Garton,[849] Yorkshire, in the collection of Mr. Mortimer, has thirty-seven rivets and two strips of bronze at the sides of the handle, in addition to the four rivets for securing the blade. The bone pommel is shown in Fig. 282.
Another dagger, of somewhat the same character, was found at Leicester, and is preserved in the museum of that town. For the sketch from which Fig. 288 is engraved I am indebted to Mr. C. Read. In this instance the pommel consists of two pieces of bone riveted on either side of a bronze plate, which, however, does not appear to have been continuous with the blade. From the length of the rivets remaining in the blade, the handle appears to have been somewhat thicker in the middle than at the sides.
Fig. 287.—Brigmilston. ½ ———— Fig. 288.—Leicester. ½