Herefordshire Through Time
Herefordshire Through Time
HER no. 36610
During the summer of 1973, Herefordshire County Council began a bridge widening scheme at Lugg Mills, Lugwardine, near Hereford. After dredging the river, divers were called in to inspect the river bank. In the process of carrying out the dive one of the divers cut his hand on a piece of metal, which on further inspection turned out to be a Saxon spearhead.
The spearhead is 35.7cm in length and is made up of three distinct sections:
The colouration of the blade is grey-green towards the tip, with black patches around the damaged central portion of the blade, becoming black and red-brown on the shaft and socket. The wire-windings showed up black with a golden surface colouration in places.
The blade has a shoulder width of 5.3cm and maximum sectional thickness of 0.9cm, 16.8cm from its tip. Within the socket was a fragment of the wooden handle, with a length of 8.2cm.
Professor A.G. Smith, Head of the Department of Botany at University College Cardiff, inspected the shaft and his report concluded that the wood was ash (Fraxinus Excelsior). It appeared to have been cut from the 10-20th year of growth of the tree; the tree itself was slow growing and must have been living in marginal conditions.
The metal of the spearhead was examined by the technical department of Henry Wiggins & Co., who found that the carbon content varied from less than 0.05% to 0.6%. The spearhead had been built from four different pieces: the socket; the tang; and the blade, which itself consisted of two pieces. The four pieces were joined by "smith-welding", i.e. pressure welding in the solid state by hammering at high temperature, ideally at least 1,000 degrees centigrade. This temperature could be achieved in a bellows-blown charcoal fire.
The radiographs showed that the inner piece of the blade had been made by the so-called "pattern-welding" technique, a technique that was widely used in western Europe in the Anglo-Saxon and Viking periods for the production of spear- and sword-blades.
The spearhead is now held by Hereford County Museum.
[Original author: Miranda Greene, 2005, using information taken from Herefordshire Archaeological News, No. 30, 1975]