File:Early-Medieval bracteate pendant (FindID 513796).jpg

English: Gold bracteate pendant, buckled and distorted but complete. The pendant takes the form of a thin gold disc, with no framing wire surrounding the disc and no evidence for one ever being present. The central motif has been stamped with a matrix (the obverse is more sharply defined than the reverse). It is not symmetrical and not easy to decipher, partly due to creases being difficult to distinguish from deliberate decorative motifs. The following description is only an attempt to distinguish the different features:

Left of the loop (at 10 o'clock) a circular animal head is shown with a round eye, bent-down beak with median groove, backward-pointing curved line indicating an ear, and a long curved ridge making a neck ending in the middle of the pendant. To the right of the loop (at 1 o'clock) is a possible second animal head, with narrower curved neck, forward-pointing ear and a single curved line which may be a beak.

A diagonal line, perhaps resulting from a crease or fold, runs across the bracteate below these two necks and heads. It may coincide with the line of a third curved neck which runs from the centre at right angles to the first. Below the diagonal crease is a ridge bent at right angles, which also may result from a crease or fold. This could be interpreted as a leg emerging from the centre of the bracteate and bent at right angles. Whichever line is real, neck or leg, ends at 7 o'clock in a circular motif, either a foot with two long curved toes or a head with beak and forward-curving ear.

Another circular motif can be seen at 4 o'clock close to the edge of the foil. This may again be either a foot with a toe or two, or an animal head with ear and beak; again there is crumpling and cracking which makes the detail hard to see.

Four punched motifs of a ridged circle with a raised dot in the centre are placed in the border zone to surround the animal motifs in the centre. They are fairly regularly placed at 12 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock and 9 o'clock and are similar to the round motifs forming either animal heads or feet.

The gold foil is torn at two places along the edge. The suspension loop is simple, consisting of a short undecorated rectilinear gold strip soldered over the top of one of the circle-with-dot punches.

Whichever lines are considered part of the original design, it is impossible to reconstruct a completely symmetrical design. It would be satisfying to reconstruct this as an anti-clockwise whirligig of four animal heads, but although the animal heads at 10 o'clock and 4 o'clock both have backward-pointing ears and can be joined with a sinuous reversed-S ridge, and both these and the 7 o'clock head point anti-clockwise, the fourth head (at 1 o'clock) points the opposite way and has its narrow neck too upright to fit the pattern.

This bracteate may be an example of a D-bracteate, with 'free-floating' D-bracteate type features comparable to IK 398 (Sablonnière, France) IK 483 (Ozingell, Kent) or IK 617 (possibly Lincolnshire or Netherlands). The lack of a framing wire is unusual for European migration-period bracteates as a whole, but not untypical for Anglo-Saxon bracteates. The shape of the animal head in the upper left part could be Animal Style 1, which would date the bracteate broadly to the 6th century AD.