Buttons & Fasteners 500BC - AD1840

Paperback, 114 pages, Illustrated Colour, 19cm x 25cm.

Containing over 1,000 colour photographs, this book will help in identifying and dating metal buttons through many periods of history. The book also mentions Iron Age toggles, Saxon-Tudor hook fasteners and ring brooches. Buttons and Fasteners comes from the author of the Detector Finds series, Gordon Bailey. Buttons are now part of our daily lives, but few people realise they have a history stretching back over 2,500 years, with buttons used in the late Bronze Age and the Celts using bronze cloak toggles even before the Roman Invasion of Britain in AD 43. Produced in a myriad of diverse forms and designs - and made from various materials - buttons are popular with collectors worldwide, not least in that they give a glimpse of the clothing fashions adopted and worn by our ancestors. Containing over 1,000 high-quality colour photographs, this book allows the identification and dating of metal buttons through many periods of history. Many of the buttons covered are excavated examples, and many are rare and previously unrecorded varieties. This book will find a place on the bookshelves of archaeologists, museum curators, historians, and - of course - the many people already involved in this exciting collecting field. While most of the book centres on buttons, it also contains special illustrated supplements covering Iron Age toggles, Saxon-Tudor hook fasteners, and ring brooches. The author, Gordon Bailey, is a detectorist and amateur historian with over 30 years of experience and has five previously published popular books to his credit in the Detector Finds series.

Contents: 

• Introduction – Excavated Metal Buttons
• Section 1 – Buttons Bronze Age
• Iron Age
• Roman Saxon & Viking
• Medieval (11th &12th Centuries)
• Medieval (13th -15th Centuries)
• Late 15th -16th Centuries
• 17th Century
• 18th - Early 19th Century
• Section 2 – Toggles
• Bronze & Iron Age Toggles
• Section 3 – Fasteners
• Saxon & Viking Hook Fasteners
• Tudor Hook Fasteners
• Section 4 – Ring Brooches
• Ring Brooches.