David Harpin kindly brought some Medieval copper alloy mounts and harness pendants to Claremont to show me just before Simon Tomson’s lecture about St Richard’s Priory in Pontefract on Saturday 11th January.
I photographed one of the pieces that particularly caught my eye (see above). It is decorated with a crowned leopard on a heater-shaped shield with a sun-burst top right and bottom. It is perforated at the corners for mounting. It measures 3.2 cm square and weighs about 12 grams. It looks as though it has hammered from the inside against a mould to create the design. These are the arms of the Trubeville or Turbeville family which originally came from Normandy. David said “The mount belongs to a family that had various name spellings at the time.Very broadly it is thirteenth century, say 1225-1325”.
This made me think of the scene in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (serialised in 1891) in which an antiquarian-minded vicar informs John Durbeyfield, a poor Wessex carrier, that he is descended from the Turbeville family and that he should by rights be addressed as ‘Sir John’. This goes to his head and out of the realization that the family is descended from a once powerful Norman landed family comes the fateful decision to send his daughter Tess to claim kinship with the apparently still affluent branch of the family at Kingsbere… from which stems much misery.
David showed me an extract from an article in The Antiquaries Journal (vol.29, Oct 1949, 204-6) which says a similar pendant was recovered from silt from the Salisbury street canals before they were filled-in in 1852.
Many thanks to David Harpin for allowing me to share this with members of the Medieval section.
Medieval Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society 