JEWELRY AND PERSONAL ORNAMENT
took place in Irish metalwork at the beginning of the
seventh century. This large brooch is made of tinned
bronze and instead of fine line-engraved ornament, its
terminals are filled with enamel in which are floated
platelets of millefiori glass. The ring bears fine-cast
lines, like simulated wire binding, and the entire dec-
orative scheme is uncannily like that on a large hanging
bowl of Celtic style found in the great Anglo-Saxon
ship burial of Sutton Hoo. Not alone does this help to
place the brooch chronologically in the earlier sev-
enth century, but it also shows clearly how widely-
separated workshops could influence one another. The
seventh century saw extensive contacts between Ireland,
Pictland, Anglo-Saxon England and the kingdom of
the Franks and Italy. All of these played a part in the
development of the complex and beautiful polychrome
style of early medieval Ireland that had emerged by
the century’s end.
An experimental piece of gold filigree from Lagore
Crannog, County Meath, shows at some point in the
seventh century an Irish craftsman attempting to approx-
imate elaborate filigree effects common on Anglo-
Saxon work. Towards the end of the seventh century a
change in Irish personal ornament takes place with the
appearance of a kind of brooch that is often referred
to as pseudo-penannular or more simply as the “Tara”
type. The fashion is best represented by the two finest
and probably earliest of the series—the so-called Tara
Brooch (from Bettystown, Co. Meath) and the Hunterston
Brooch found in Ayrshire in Scotland. These brooches
have closed terminals but their ornament is laid out
in panels that clearly reflect the penannular tradition.
By closing the terminals, a large semicircular plate
is created for the display of ornament. The pin head
is an elaborate construction which mimics the orna-
ment and form of the terminals. With the pin unable
to pass through the terminals, the brooch cannot func-
tion any longer as an effective dress fastener and so
a supplementary pin or a thong must have been
employed to prevent the brooch from falling out. The
majority of the brooches of this class are made of
silver and are now recognized as being insignia of
status which have their remote origins in the Roman
and Byzantine practice of demonstrating rank by
wearing large fibulae.
The ornamental possibilities were seized upon
by the best craftsmen who had at their disposal not
only a new range of techniques but also a new
hybrid art style that combined animal ornament of
Germanic origin with scrollwork in the Ultimate La
Tène tradition, with plain interlace from the Med-
iterranean world—probably Italy—and Christian
iconographical themes although these are very sub-
tle. The Tara and Hunterston Brooch stand very
close to the style of the Lindisfarne Gospels and
are probably to be dated to the late seventh or very
early eighth century.
The pseudo-penannular brooch remained fashion-
able in Ireland for the following two centuries—a
corresponding tradition of penannular brooches but
with similar elaborate ornament emerged in Pictland.
The Pictish brooches are further distinguished from
their Irish analogues by having simple loop-pinheads.
Most examples are less accomplished than the mas-
terpieces of Tara and Hunterston. In the ninth century,
simplified animal patterns, often in openwork, along
the margins and a generally plainer style (repre-
sented by two brooches in the Ardagh Hoard and such
single finds as the examples from Loughmore, and
Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, and Killamery, Co. Kilkenny)
prefigure developments in brooch design which
gained ground when Viking trade had made silver
more abundant.
The penannular form may have remained in use
throughout the period but there is no clear evidence of
this. However, in the ninth century a new type of silver
penannular developed in Ireland—the “bossed penan-
nular brooch,” so-called because its terminals are often
embellished with silver bosses, sometimes connected
by incised bands. These are often large brooches and
fragments of them have been found as hacksilver in
Viking hoards of the early tenth century. Their origins
have been contested—their decoration was originally
thought to have been derived from Scandinavian oval
brooches worn in pairs by women. These have bosses
connected by lines, and like some rare Irish examples
have inset openwork ornament. The evidence suggests,
however, that these penannular brooches are of local
origin with some influence from silver Anglo-Saxon
disc brooches of the ninth century.
Another form of silver penannular that arose in
Ireland about that time is the “ball brooch” and its
variant the
“
thistle brooch.” These are brooches that
have simple terminals and pin heads reduced to a large
sphere in the case of the ball brooch, and to a sphere
with a flaring projection rather like a partly-opened
thistle flower on the thistle brooch. The thistle brooch
is more widely distributed in the Viking lands, but its
origin in the Irish brooch tradition is clear. The balls
of many of the brooches are “brambled”—that is,
grooved to give an appearance not unlike the surface
of a blackberry fruit. The appearance of brambling on
ninth century pseudo-penannulars and the Irish trait of
making the pin head reflect the terminals locate the
origin of these brooches neatly. Hoard evidence again
shows the emergence of the type in the later ninth
century. One of the four brooches found in the Ardagh
Hoard was a ball brooch. One splendid Irish ninth-
century penannular brooch from Loughan, County
Derry (once known as the Dál Riada Brooch) is made