The Secrets of the Witham Shield | HENI Talks

The Wytham Shield is one of the most beautiful pieces that we have preserved to us today of what we call Celtic art. We think that this object was probably produced over 2000 years ago and that's based on the style of the designs and the way that the shield's made. Quite often when we hear Celtic art we think of interlaced designs, things like the Lindisfarne Gospels and even Anglo-Saxon art. I'm not talking about those kinds of designs. I am talking about much, much earlier art when we first get the word Celtoi or Celts appearing in the classical texts. It's called the Wytham Shield and it has that name because it was actually dredged up from the River Wytham in Lincolnshire and it was probably found in around 1826 or 1827. This isn't just a decorative art. This is a powerful art. This is an art that's maybe connected to religious beliefs. This is an art that does something. The Wytham Shield is one of my favourite objects in the collection which I look after and I remember seeing it for the first time. When you first see it, it's not as dazzling as other objects like the Battersea Shields which have these really incredible in-your-face, all-over designs. But what I love about it is that it takes a little bit of time to appreciate. So when you come up close to it, being able to see the incredibly careful execution of all of these designs which really jump out at you as being faces and creatures, you start to realise that they have these little secrets that you can gradually get them to give up just by sitting with them, looking at them, being able to draw out those details. There are particular bits on the Wytham Shield that clearly depict animals and particularly those little balls which are at the top and bottom. But if you look at the Battersea Shield, it looks much more abstract. Look at the bottom of the central boss on the Battersea Shield. Underneath you see a very, very simple little design which in fact is almost identical in its outline to the cow's heads on the Wytham Shield. So we're seeing just the suggestion of this little kind of bovine face with his little horns or ears and we only really can see that and really know and understand that and that it really does depict a cow or a bull because we see those designs on Wytham. So it's not about there being one story which you know or which you don't, it's about teaching your eye to see these shapes and see these creatures and realising that there's a hidden depth to this art. Look closely about halfway up, you'll see a couple of little holes which you think could just be maybe damage. But if you start to follow that up with your eye, you'll see a couple more and a couple more and then you might start to realise that the colour of the metal around those holes is slightly different and what you're seeing is two long straight lines that come up to one side of that central boss and then arch over and then come down again on the other side and what these are is the outline of this kind of long-legged and very graceful boar. Today the boar is very hard to see but originally it would have been riveted onto that wooden facing in perhaps a different kind of metal, perhaps something organic like leather. You can see even his little tusks and his little face if you look at the right angle and it's very stylised. These could be sort of totem animals or symbolic animals that relate to that person, their family, their tribe. It's a rare and unusual object. If you saw that on the battlefield you would have known who was carrying that. The boar itself might have had some kind of association with battle. Boars are tremendously ferocious animals, one of the most dangerous animals that would have been out in the woods of Iron Age Britain. We do often see the boar on defensive objects. Sometimes we have helmets with a little boar on the crests and we also have boars on the heads of these tremendous kind of war trumpets called carnessies that would have been kind of, you know, two metres tall above people who were marching into war and when played would have made this incredible loud, troubling sound and those tend to have boar faces in them so maybe the boar symbolises something special. I think that the decoration was really inherent to these objects. It's a really essential part of what they are and what they did and quite often we'll find bits of shields or scabbards are decorated that would never actually really have been seen except by the owner of that object. So the handle for example of the Battersea Shield has this lovely design to it but it would only have been seen by the person holding it or the people you know responsible for cleaning and caring for that object. Even if you hang it up on the wall you don't see that part. So maybe the fact that there are these designs you have to be inducted into that hint at things without ever really quite saying them and which are so small and subtle that you really have to be invited up close and personal to interact with them. Maybe that tells us that there's a little bit of magic here that's not just about flamboyant display it's also about those objects having powers and properties which are known to their owners and perhaps known to people who tell stories about these objects but they have secrets. That might tell us something about this society about how they want to represent themselves and what is and is not acceptable in art. Sometimes suggestions of faces appear but it's possible there was some kind of a taboo even against depicting the human form. Animals and sort of plant-like designs seem to have been chosen more commonly particularly in Britain. I think there's an idea that this kind of early Celtic art you know flourishes before the Romans and then the Romans come along and ruin everything and everyone who makes this kind of beautiful incredible art is sort of hiding off in the mountains and when the Romans leave they can come back out again and that's when we get this big flourishing of early medieval Celtic art and these fabulous interlaced designs. For me that's not quite what happened and one of the places where we really see Celtic art actually taking off and transformations and new interpretations of these designs is on Roman objects. This kind of design became really important in Roman Britain actually. Early Iron Age art is very three-dimensional. These objects are sort of like you know coming out at you and made in repousse and that gets transformed to something much more two-dimensional and flat. We're looking at almost the compression of these complex three-dimensional shapes down into two dimensions interlocking shapes that are kind of you know contrasted in shade and light or in enamel and flat metal surfaces and we see that on things like dragonesque brooches these curious little s-shaped beasts and this becomes a distinctively Romano-British object. A lot of these earlier designs which used to be widespread across Europe feed into then that early medieval art so there is a chain through which we can kind of trace that artistic lineage I think coming through from these kind of early Iron Age styles through the Roman world and actually in some ways being promoted by the Roman world and then continuing to flourish after the fall of the Roman Empire as well. It's not just about the history of art and about decoration and about design. For me what matters is what this can tell us about the people who made these objects and for a lot of the time in the past there was no such thing as art in the sense that it's something that rich people hang on their wall and the rest of us don't understand. Looking at these incredible powerful decorated objects from the past can give us a sense of what people's lives were like but also what messages they wanted to encode into their objects what they thought were the most important things about their society and what really mattered to them.