 As Peter Yn said, this comes out of conversations that we've had over the last couple of years. We've both been working independently and now together on horse equipment of the 11th century, hence the veritable sticker album of logos at the bottom. And we'd like to present to you our latest thinking in terms of placing this equipment, not just in geographical spaces, but also in social and cultural ones too. I would like to start with a person. Herod the Wake was famed for having led a rebellion against the new Norman rulers of England in 1071 from his final base on the island of Ely, but what's more of interest for the purposes of today's presentation is that he spent most of his adult life exiled in Flanders. In Herod the Wake we have an English mercenary fighting in Zeeland yn y cyfleidion ystafell bwlyndus, yn ei ddodbwysig o'r ysgol yn y rhan o'r gwrdd ac yn y bwysig o'r alwau yng Ngorffod Llywodraeth yn y meddwl 11 ym Mhysel. Rwy'n meddwl bod y pethau hynny yn ei ddweud rhoi sydd o meddwl gweithio mewn cwysteinismu yn yr 11 ym Mhysel o'r ddaeth yn y cyfleidion mewn gwir. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'r gweithfawr a wnaethau sy'n wahanol ar gyfer y cwestiwnol ac niferwyr o'r ffrifwyr i'r cyffredinol. Cymru i'r hunain o'r edrych i ddechrau'r llwyddiadau o'r cywestiwnol yn ei ysgrifetigau ar y cwestiwnol. Mae'n hoffio ar gweithio ar y cyfnod ymlaen gyffredinol i'r 11 ym mhwybwynt, chefnodd y cwestiwnol yn cael ei hunain o'r cyfrwyngfyniad a'r ffwyrdd yn gyfrwyngfyniad o'r gynhyrchu a'r ysgrifetig. Wrth gwrs, mae'n meddwl i'r cyfraith ohell a'r cyfraith o'r 11 yr Men, oherwydd o'r cyfraith ar y llaw'r cyfraith yng nghymru. Mae'n meddwl i'r hystod o'r gweithio'r materiol arall, efallai yn 30 years ydy'r cwrthys yn ystyried. Rydych yn teimlo'r materiol yn gweithfyrdd ychydig ar y ddechrau o'r 20 yr ysgol, oherwydd y ddechrau'r 1 ddechrau. Mae'r llei ymlaes yn ymladio a'i gwneud yn ymlaes pethau o'r llei ddeinidol a'r llei wedi'i cael meddwl mewn cynghlu mewn cyfron yma, i'r ysgol wedi'u tynnu mewn cyfrofiad mewn cyfrifiad mewn gwahanol, ac mae gyda'r mewn oedd ymlaen yn rhoi'r cas yn ystrath yn ymlaen. Ond yn hyn mae'r llei ystradd yma wedi i gyd-rhyw sydd gweithio'r leir ystraddd yma y tîm oedd yn cyfan i gyfweld y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth i'r llwyth llwy o'r ymdeg. Mae'r llwy o'r llwy o'r ymdeg wedi'i bach o'r cwmau. Mae y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth i'r llwy o'r llwy o'r llwy o'r llwy o'r llwyddon, yn meddwl i'r llwy o bobl yn cyfrifol i'r lleolau oherwydd y cyfrifol. Mae'r llwy o'r llwy o'r llwy o'r llywodraeth o'r llwyddon, ac yn ddafodd o'r ffordd byddai'n gwneud o'r ffordd o'r aceslau'r llaw yma i gael o'r strafflingau, sy'n ddweud hynny yn ddod i gael o'r llaw'r ffordd o'r Horsau. Felly o'r cyfrifio sydd cyfwyr o'r materiol byd James Graham Campbell, i ffwrdd ym mhwylwyr i siaradau strafflingau ym ddweud hefyd yn fwy o'r rai'r rai'r ni. It was the late David Williams in England who has advanced our knowledge of these fittings, in fact, this picture leads to David. He identified stirrup terminals in the 1990s and provided schemes of classification for the rest of the material by the early 2000s. In Denmark, Ann Pedersen applied some of these classifications to the Danish material in the late 1990s. Any subsequent work has been built on that by Williams in England and Pedersen in Denmark, but the most recent developments, which we're currently digesting, have come from other parts of Europe as schemes for the recording of metal-detected material have been developed. So in Denmark itself we have the DEMA database launched to the public quite recently, which will continue to expand the Danish Corpus of Fines. What we're considering particularly at the moment are the increased fines in the low countries, through Medea, in Flanders and the Portable Antiquities of the Netherlands. But while this North Sea zone is becoming far better documented through such schemes, there remains a dearth of publication from the interior of the continent with which to compare the corpus. So much of this earlier work was primarily focused on the identification of this material rather than by examining its spread. And although David Williams did publish continental material in his book on steric strap mounts in the late 90s, it wasn't his aim to chart the international spread of it, let alone assemble a complete European dataset. And subsequent writers, Ann Pedersen, Elsie Rosedal in Denmark, Norbert Gussler in Germany, they compared their national datasets with those from overseas, but nobody's tried to provide an overall distribution map. Well, until now we have. The map that we've generated for this presentation reflects both our current sense of the extent of use of mostly non-ferrous equestrian accoutrements. It also reflects the historiography of their study, a reflection itself on the extent to which method detected fines have been recorded historically. To what extent is this group of material homogenous? Now we don't have time to go into a highly detailed analysis of the similarities and differences, but we'd like to provide a couple of examples. So steric strap mounts, David Williams divided into three main types, two of which primarily the triangular class A at the top and the trapezoidal class B at the bottom are often the latter with openwork decoration and an angle on the flange where it was attached to the strap. At this very general level, we can see that although steric strap mounts of class B are spread throughout the whole of our study area, those of class A see to operate across an Anglo-Scandinavian axis and put rather crudely our absent on current evidence in the low countries. Delving slightly deeper, discrepancies can be noted within the types and subtypes of class B. I'm sorry I don't have a slide of this. If you start comparing those in the coast to those in the interior, those in the interior look rather different. They are of different form, pentagonal form rather than the trapezoidal form, and they have a lot more similarities with material from East Anglia, over in England, and to cite the cheek pieces briefly, there are distinctions there to be drawn between the distribution of Williams type I, which is another Anglo-Scandinavian distribution, and those of his type III which seem to follow the class B strap mounts being found both in England, eastern England, and the low countries. But approaching these questions of similarity and difference through typology can only take us so far, so I'd like to move on to art style. The dominant art style displayed on this equipment, art styles of the late Viking Age, art styles of Rhyngoreca on the left, and Uranus on the right. These dominate the corpus common to England and Scandinavia, as might be expected, and many have been argued to originate in England, as such as the English Uranus style strap mounts on the top. So the dominant style that we can apply to this equipment is Anglo-Scandinavian, but on the other hand we can't apply it to every single example. Now I'm not going to dwell on the Romanesque example on the left, Michael's already discussed those, and that suggests a relatively late date for them. Rather we'll return to this trend identified for variety in the distribution that we saw in the typological analysis. It seems apparent in the material emerging from the Netherlands, exemplified by examples on the right here, considered recently by Vessel Spelder, that even though cheap pieces might be characterised as being of William's type III, that the types in the Low Countries occupy a stylistic spectrum of animal art, one end of which can no longer be called Anglo-Scandinavian. So in the time remaining we'd like to have a look at the cultural implications of the commonality of 11th century question accessories in the North Sea world, but briefly to touch upon another question raised by this, the sheer quantity of the material that we're now documenting, what was the social status of the riders who were using it? So when Graham Campbell presented his synthesis of these 11th century objects in the early 1990s, he was discussing a corpus numbering in the 10s, and he was therefore talking in terms of the growth in use of horses by a military elite. But then when David Williams started gathering historic strap mounts, he amassed over 500 of them. We've had many more hundreds gathered through the PAS in the years since. We've been forced to reconsider the social status of those who possess and display such objects. Ann Pedersen has commented on the relatively low quality of manufacture of particular examples. Although they're well moulded, they're generally under-embellished, there's no nello, there's no gilding, perhaps there doesn't need to be, perhaps they'd be shiny anyway, but there's no gilding, or at least very little on these things. So that suggests that these relatively low-value cobraloaccessories were not necessarily used by the highest echelons of society. Moving from the nature of the objects to where they're found, we come up against the issue that most were lost in transit in the rural landscape and recovered by metal detecting rather than by excavation. My PhD data set of these has 95% decontextualised rural finds, leaving very few opportunities to explore contextual association. That said, looking at some of the detected finds in detail from a particular place, particular parish, we can make some suggestions. So one example is Romney and Kent. We know from the Doomsday survey, it's 1086 in England, that that was a large village with 14 freemen, and that has yielded eight of these stirrup strapmats. In coastal Flanders, this equipment is associated with larger detector-fined concentrations. Site conducts where we have them are rather mixed with examples of such material occurring in deserted medieval settlements and castles alike. In Monday Belgium, though, we have a stirrup strap mount as yet unpublished in the late 10th through early 11th century castle of Ename in East Flanders. This high status association in the continental interior might suggest that this material has slightly different social connotations across its geographical spread. Work in progress, these connotations need to be teased out as more material is recorded in those places where recording schemes for detector finds grows into maturity. But in the areas where we have a lot of material already, it seems clear now that these horse riders can no longer be thought to be the high elite. It may therefore be that such material was used by range encompassing the lower aristocracy and peasants who were free but who had military obligations. So, very briefly, we have a lot of this material now, we have a lot of it decorated in an Anglo-Scandinavian style. What are the cultural implications of this? Could it simply represent a fashion for a military look resulting from the Anglo-Danish military power in the early to mid 11th century? Remember that in the 9th century, we saw Carolingian sword belts permeating dress accessories to give that same sort of military appearance. We're obviously working in a similar geographic space. Are we seeing a similar social-cultural network operating around the North Sea in the 11th century? Does it provide evidence of interactions between a lower horse riding aristocracy given the spread of this material across Northwest Europe but also more particular patterning within the zone? Here we come back to Herod the Wake, an individual we know fought on both sides of the North Sea. We have argued that this material can be socially situated at and around this level, and in support of this, there was an apparent lack of high status prototypes for such adornments. Putting these together, is there something more culturally explicit in the adoption of a more or less distinctively Anglo-Scandinavian material culture? Can it be seen as a statement of political alignment with the Anglo-Danish Kingdom? Of course this is a particularly interesting question in the case of the Low Countries. There seemed to be a trend towards material found in the coastal zone of the Low Countries, mirroring that in Eastern England, as I mentioned, and by extension looking towards the Anglo-Danish Empire in parallel to political contact between the Court of Canute and the Count of Flanders. By contrast, stirrup strap mounts of the Atonian interior were of different designs and different forms, with very few parallels at all in England. However, as more material is coming to light through pan and medea, it seems that this patterning is not so clear cut with a greater spread of typologically similar cheek pieces in land. So what we're going to have to do before we come back to you again is potentially doing more details, stylistic analysis of each region to distinguish the material that might legitimately be described as Anglis, Scandinavian, or alluding to it at least, to define this zone of influence. To sum up, now we can place large quantities of non-ferrous equestrian adornments in the 11th century, which were barely known even 30 years ago, let alone their significance appreciated. Thanks primarily to those who have worked with metal detective material, first individuals, now regional and national schemes, we can now move beyond problems of identification to reconsider and place the social significance of such material and analyse and place its cultural implications within a truly international context. Thank you for your attention.