File:Early-medieval buckle (FindID 18835).jpg

English: Buckle plate with a cast and a sheet element. The cast element is sub-triangular, with slightly outcurved sides, and openwork. There is a border all around, a quarter-circle in section, with the curved outer face decorated with groups of oblique grooves. At the basal corners are two large copper-alloy rivets, and a bar curves in a semi-circle between the two corners. From the middle of this bar springs another which runs up to the apex. These two internal bars are slimmer and undecorated. There is a third large copper-alloy rivet at the apex, and then beyond this is an animal head with a long snout and diagonal grooves forming the eyes. The rivets hold the cast element onto the sheet part. This consists of a sub-triangular sheet, folded under at the base of the triangle leaving a gap for the buckle frame, and with frame recesses and a pin slot forming two hinge loops. Both of the loops are now broken. There is a short underplate, ending a little way beyond the two basal rivets; at the apex, the rivet has a small separate sheet rove.

This is an unusual buckle plate; if the cast element alone had been found, it would have been very hard to identify as a buckle. A parallel has been excavated from a late 13th-century context at Canterbury (Blockley et al. 1995, 1063-5, no. F655).