MEDIEVAL MOUNT

Tin book mount depicting a male head with striated hair stamped on top of a four-pointed cross, with parallel oblique rays in each angle, within a twelve-sided dodecagon shape. The mount may be a religious piece from the style and symbolism, and the head may depict a local saint, so that the associated book may have been a bible or some important medieval religious text. The mounts would have taken some effort to produce as there were three different procedures involved: snipping the shape, striking the main design and then stamping the central head. This central stamp has left the mount with a cupped profile.The metal has been troy tested and is not silver or a base white metal, and its weight, dark grey patina and brittle texture suggest that it is likely to be tin. Peter Clayton suggests that they might be late 14th to early 15th-century decorations for the front of book bindings, in heavy leather or leather-covered wooden boards. They would act as protective studs at the four corners of a front board, with perhaps another pair at mid-height, but decorations for a corner would be shaped to it, and the decorations he has in mind would be at the centre (Peter Clayton pers comm).