Episode 2487
Benty Grange hanging bowl
Sun, 2024-Feb-25 01:11 UTC
Length - 2:23
Direct Link
Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.
The featured article for Sunday, 25 February 2024 is Benty Grange hanging bowl.
The Benty Grange hanging bowl is a fragmentary Anglo-Saxon artefact from the seventh century AD. All that remains are parts of two escutcheons: bronze frames that are usually circular and elaborately decorated, and that sit along the outside of the rim or at the interior base of a hanging bowl. A third disintegrated soon after excavation, and no longer survives. The escutcheons were found in 1848 by the antiquary Thomas Bateman, while excavating a tumulus at the Benty Grange farm in western Derbyshire, and were presumably buried as part of an entire hanging bowl. The grave had probably been looted by the time of Bateman's excavation, but still contained high-status objects suggestive of a richly furnished burial, including the hanging bowl and the boar-crested Benty Grange helmet.
The surviving escutcheons are made of enamelled bronze and are 40 mm (1.6 in) in diameter. They show three dolphin-like creatures arranged in a circle, each biting the tail of the one ahead of it. Their bodies and the background are made of enamel, likely all yellow; the creatures' outlines and eyes are tinned or silvered, as are the borders of the escutcheons. Although three escutcheons from a hanging bowl at Faversham also contain dolphin-like creatures, the Benty Grange design is most closely paralleled by Insular manuscripts, particularly figures in the Durham Gospel Fragment and the Book of Durrow. Surviving illustrations of the third escutcheon show that it was of a different size and style, exhibiting a scroll-like pattern; it parallels the basal disc of a hanging bowl from Winchester, and may too have been originally placed at the bottom of the Benty Grange bowl.
What remains of one escutcheon belongs to Museums Sheffield and as of 2023 was in the collection of the Weston Park Museum. The other is held by the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford; as of 2023 it is not on display.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:11 UTC on Sunday, 25 February 2024.
For the full current version of the article, see Benty Grange hanging bowl on Wikipedia.
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Until next time, I'm Stephen Neural.
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