An Early Bronze Age Wristguard from Kent
With the recent find of an archer's wristguard or 'bracer' in Offham (fig 1) there are now at least five from Kent: a substantial increase in the county database. There may be others lurking in local museums or buried in excavation reports. Not only is this the first one in Kent, but also the first one in the country, to be reported under the Portable Antiquities Scheme.
A guard was used to protect the archer's forearm from the rebound of the bow. Their significance is their appearance in the 'classic' or 'primary' package of grave goods found in earlier Beaker graves, especially the earliest ones now dated to about 2500-2250 BC, like the Amesbury Archer's (drawing below).
The broken bracer from Offham was found in a ploughed field by someone with an eagle eye*. It may have been damaged by ploughing and moved some distance from where it was originally buried, or dropped. Three of the others from Kent were discovered in situ. The Cliffe (near Gravesend) one was found with a beaker pot and a barbed-and-tanged arrowhead but with no physical evidence of a burial. The guard from St Peter's, Broadstairs (fig 2), also came with a beaker, and accompanied a skeleton cut by a later barrow ditch. The earliest example from Sittingbourne, found in 1883 while digging for chalk, was with a probable flexed skeleton, a tanged copper dagger and a bone belt-ring, but no beaker. No details about the fifth, found only with a beaker pot in a Sturry gravel pit, seem to have been recorded.
If complete, the Offham guard would presumably have had six drilled holes, three at each end. The others only have one at each end. Unfortunately there's no national database of these relatively rare objects, other than an unpublished one compiled some 40 years ago. Judging by that, the 6 holers (and we're not talking mini-golf courses here), have been found in Aberdeenshire, Berkshire, Lincolnshire and Wiltshire – and could be later in date – while the Cliffe example was unusually far south, its nearest neighbour coming from Cambridge.
What may be striking about the Kent bracers is the type of stone used compared with others in Britain. The Offham one is described as slate or shale; the Cliffe one is shale; St Peter's is 'mudstone' and Sittingbourne is 'grey slate'. According to the British Museum the Cliffe guard was the only known shale one. Apart from a possible amber bracer they are usually of schist or slate and their specialist questioned the practicality of any wrist-guard fashioned from 'fragile' shale. It would be interesting to know whether the Offham one is slate or shale.
It is suggested that straps would have been threaded through the holes of the Offham guard to attach it to the wrist. That's possible, and there could well have been more than one way of attaching them. However there is evidence that some of them at least were attached to a leather backing by metal rivets – in two cases in Yorkshire and Scotland with gold caps. A 'bronze' buckle 'for fastening the entire guard', was also reported in the nineteenth century as being found with the Yorkshire one. And the Southard collection has one with 'traces of corroded copper' in its holes. Despite the published picture of how the Amesbury Archer may have looked, Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archaeology is now convinced that his guard would have been attached to a leather cuff. Hopefully their specialists are doing some serious homework on these artefacts. It is certainly needed.
John Smythe
* Found and recognised by Nigel Betts and John Darvill of the Mid-Kent Metal Detecting Club and subsequently donated to Maidstone Museum.