This horse harness pendant was recovered from the ditch beside the road just inside the gate of Nevern Castle. Might it have been dropped by Gerald of Wales? Figure 1: X-radiograph or horse harness pendant from Nevern It is a kite shaped pendant broken into two fragments (broken in antiquity), originally 45mm long, 16mm wide, and unusually is made of iron. It has a broken loop at one end and would have originally hung from the harness of a horse, usually the headband or breastband. Horse harness pendants are normally made of copper alloy, enamelled and come from the 13th – 16th centuries. They demonstrated the wealth, status and allegiance of the rider often depicting armorial devices (heraldic symbol) of the lord to whom the horse (and rider) belonged. The actual object is very fragile, little more than a lump of rust, and even cleaned by conservators, it shows little of its original shape and decoration. However, the X-radiograph does show what the original object looked like (Figure 1). Harness pendants first appear in the early 12th century and are rare until the 13th century. This example has an unusual rounded kite shaped shield form, (inverted tear shape) similar… Continue reading Gerald’s horse harness pendant?
Author: Chris Caple
Making Sense of the Fragments
A talk given in July 2023 at the Trewern Arms, Nevern, by Chris Caple, chief archaeologist at Nevern Castle.
Nevern’s Apotropaic Slates
Apotropaic symbols scratched into the building’s stones, designed to ward off evil spirits, are rare glimpses of images made by the common people of the time.
A decorated key
An object that has come up recently in the research on Nevern is the shaft of a key, a slide key for a padlock, with inlaid spiral decoration. Keys like this only turn up on 12th century sites such as York, Winchester, Castle Acre. Unnecessarily decorated and expensive, they were probably mainly owned by aristocratic ladies safeguarding things which they wanted to keep safe: perhaps documents, jewellery, clothes or shoes. This one comes from the 1195 destruction levels of the castle—so possibly it belonged to Angharad FitzMartin. It’s so very rare to find something which has the possibility of being related to a specific individual from the past. But that is the value of Nevern Castle: prominent enough in the 12th century to have recorded history, but without later 13th and 14th century contamination, so that a decade of archaeology allows us to see the physical evidence—the reality of a 12th century past. Dr Chris Caple
