File:Anglo-Saxon lead plaque (FindID 503824).jpg

A diminutive lead tablet, probably complete, with maximum measurements of 57 mm in length, 41 mm in width and 10 mm in thickness. It is undecorated apart from the lettering and some small incised crosses.
One face of the tablet, taken as the front, contains the main text, text 1. The first part of this text is complete and is likely to be primary, that is, the tablet was probably always intended to contain it. This is less certain of the remaining letter and crosses. The letters are incised in insular script without framing lines and read horizontally. The letters are faint but largely legible.
The back of the tablet contains three incised lines, starting on the left side towards the top and finishing on the right side near the bottom. However the lines appear to be non-continuous in the middle. It is unclear whether or not these lines are original.
The lower edge of the tablet apparently contained some lettering, text 2. There are three possible letters, followed by a blank space, and then two possible crosses. The letters are too faint to be legible or for the script to be determined.
All other edges of the tablet now look to be plain, but it is just possible that they originally also contained lettering which is now lost.

Texts
The texts are transliterated in lines as on the tablet and using the following system:
A represents a legible letter A
A represents a damaged letter, probably to be read as A
[A] represents a possible letter A
[.] represents a lost letter

Text 1 reads:
+
C U D B U R
+
G
E
+
+
The four crosses are set adjacent to the left edge of the tablet and may or may not relate directly to the lettering. The first two lines of text contain the Old English personal name Cudburg. The meaning of the letter E is uncertain.

Text 2 reads:
[. I S] [+ +]
There appears to be nothing lost from the space between the two groups of letters.
The meaning of this text, if text it really is, remains obscure.

Discussion
Text 1
The script used is insular majuscule with neat seriffing on the ends of most letters. The text is competently incised and could well have been done by someone accustomed to writing on vellum. The fact that the name Cudburg is spread over two lines suggests both lack of planning in setting out the text and also, perhaps, that the inscriber wanted to be sure to include all of the final letter without squashing it. Cudburg is a well-attested Old English female name, occurring in texts from all Old English periods (Okasha 2011a, 28, 70).
The meaning of the letter E remains uncertain unless it was the start of another part of the text, the rest of which either was never inscribed or has now totally disappeared.
It is not clear whether the four crosses are directly related to the lettering or are simply decorating the face of the tablet. Many Anglo-Saxon texts begin with a cross (Okasha 2011b). However the crosses on the tablet are not set beside the letters but above and below them, as if they were incised first and the letters then incised around them. It might be that there were originally other incised crosses on the tablet that are not now clear enough to be seen. It is probably better to view the crosses as indicating the function of the tablet rather than being intimately related to the actual text.

Text 2
The letters of this text, if text it is, are too faint for their script or import to be certain. The two crosses are slightly clearer and may again relate to the function of the tablet rather than to the preceding lettering.

Function of the tablet
A number of inscribed lead crosses and lead plates dating from the Anglo-Saxon period are known. These are listed in Okasha 2004 (Okasha 2004, respectively 230 and 229). All of them, however, are very thin relative to their length and width and therefore not similar in this respect to this tablet. The two nearest parallels are the lead plates from Bawburgh, Norfolk (Okasha 2004, no. 212, pp 228-9 and figs) and from Kirkdale, North Yorkshire (Okasha 2004, no. 225, pp 238-9 and fig.). Although both are now of a similar size, both are incomplete and so the original dimensions are unknown. Their similarity to this tablet lies more in the fact that both contain several small crosses incised amongst the letters of their texts. Both these lead plates are presumed to be funerary objects on the basis of their texts; it is indeed possible that the Kirkdale plate was originally placed inside a coffin. It seems likely that the present tablet had a similar funerary function.

Date
As the present tablet was a metal-detector find, there is no archaeological dating context. The pins, coins and styli subsequently recovered from the site suggest an earlier date, perhaps seventh to ninth century. The evidence from the letter-forms is slight but what there is seems consistent with a date preceding the early tenth-century emergence of square minuscule as the manuscript hand (see Okasha 1968, 332 and Table 1b).

References

• Okasha 1968: E. Okasha, 'The Non-runic Scripts of Anglo-Saxon Inscriptions', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 4, part 5, (1968), 321-38
• Okasha 2011a: E. Okasha, Women's Names in Old English (Farnham 2011: Ashgate)
• Okasha 2011b: E. Okasha, 'Crosses in Inscriptions', Nottingham Medieval Studies 55 (2011), 1-22