The early to middle Anglo-Saxon period saw a number of shifts in fashion - often radical and sudden. Examples include the adoption of animal interlaces, or the adoption of filigree and lapidary work over earlier carved-and-cast decoration on items like brooches and buckles, in the late 6th century.
Due to the decline of furnished burials the fashions of the late 7th to 8th centuries were previously largely unknown to us, but a growing number of finds reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme has allowed a previously unknown brooch type to be categorized. These were bizarre - fragile, and of a radically different design than earlier types, but were of a very specific, highly conserved shape, and appear to have become the main high-status dress item of the period.  Why were they designed in this way? What, if anything, did they signify?   

Our team began discussing this strange fashion in 2020. Little did we know where the trail of the lozenge brooch would lead.... 

Once dismissed as frivolous and merely decorative, Anglo-Saxon artwork is increasingly recognised to be loaded with hidden meaning, but we have barely begun to decode this visual language. Doing so offers the potential to transform our understanding of this historical cultural network of the so-called “Dark Ages” as a significant world civilization.

New research by Thegns of Mercia member James D. Wenn, focused on a seemingly unrelated subject area, and a series of chance discoveries, have led to transformative new learning perspectives with wide-ranging implications. A book due to be published soon by Canalside Press will lay out many of these discoveries, with key concepts discussed in an upcoming public lecture in April 2023, but neither can fully document the application of these new perspectives on the corpus of Anglo-Saxon art. In the coming weeks we will, therefore, be publishing a special series of articles, here, which will explore the decoding of Anglo-Saxon art made possible by these perspectives.

One of the most curious coins in the British Museum’s Anglo-Saxon collection is a small (20mm diameter) gold coin found in Rome in the 19th century, weighing 4.3g, and which carries the inscription OFFA REX on one side. In all other respects it is clearly a copy of a dinar minted by the Abbasid caliph. 
It is also clear that the Mercian die-cutter did not recognise the patterns on the coin he was copying to be a form of writing, much less understand it, perhaps thinking it was merely decorative, as the coin bears the inscription “ There is no God but Allah alone without equal, and Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah ” albeit with a number of mistakes. It also features the date of issue of the coin being copied -ah 157 or 773-4 CE - in the very middle of Offa’s reign, suggesting the parent coin itself was surprisingly new when it was plagiarised.

​This coin is often speculatively connected to the a ‘Peter’s Pence’ levy of 365 gold coins which Offa collected and paid annually to the Pope, from 796 CE (Williams, 2008). This levy was known as the ‘Rome-scot’ - the latter part deriving from the Old English name for a different coin (the small thick early Anglo-Saxon silver ‘sceat’). It’s tempting to imagine the bewilderment of the pontiff receiving 365 such coins from a Christian king each bearing ‘the shahada’ (the Islamic Declaration of Faith), but in fact, the dinar on which they were based would have been very familiar in Rome, where all manner of high-value solid gold coins collided....