In total, discoveries in 2018 comprised more than 20,900 individual artifacts. The document cites 1,094 official “treasure” cases, 96 percent of which were reported by metal detectorists. The British Museum released information about the ornament as part of its annual Treasure Act report for 2018. One common theme was a monkey taking the place of a doctor, examining a flask of urine to diagnose an illness. I just don’t know,” Nenk tells the Guardian’s Mark Brown.Īs the curator points out, medieval people enjoyed visual jokes. “What it meant to the owner, or what went through the mind of the maker. These Iron Age tweezers, like the snail man, are detailed in the museum's latest annual Treasure Act report.
The meme-like remix of this theme in the metal ornament suggests some form of satire, albeit one that may be impossible for 21st-century observers to fully decode. Per the statement, medieval artists may have been painting the Lombards as “cowardly and malicious” by depicting them as slimy snails.Īlternative explanations for the knight versus snail motif describe it “as a representation of the struggles of the poor against an oppressive aristocracy, a straightforward statement of the snail’s troublesome reputation as a garden pest, a commentary on social climbers, or even as a … symbol of female sexuality,” according to the British Library. Another theory is that it’s a kind of visual insult directed at the Germanic Lombard people, who ruled a medieval kingdom in what is now Italy. Some scholars suspect that the image represents an allusion to the biblical resurrection. Snails appear frequently in medieval manuscripts, often engaging in combat against armed knights, as the British Library noted in a 2013 blog post. The museum suggests that the ornament “may have been a form of a medieval meme.” Like today’s internet memes, it appears to take a visual motif from one context and transform it for comic effect. It may have decorated a leather belt or strap or been worn as a badge. Per BBC News, the object, which measures less than an inch long, dates to sometime between 12. The London museum revealed the artifact this month in its latest Treasure Act Annual Report.Ī 14th-century depiction of a knight battling a snail, as illustrated in the margins of the Gorleston Psalter The snail man was one of more than 47,000 archaeological finds made in England and Wales last year. Nenk adds, “The mount may be a satirical reference to cowardly or non-chivalric behavior of opponents in battle, or as a parody of the upper or knightly classes.”
“ Snails are often depicted in the margins of medieval illuminated decorated manuscripts and are thought to symbolize cowardice, and this may be the intended meaning.”
“The image … implies an element of parody or satire,” says Beverley Nenk, curator of later medieval collections at the British Museum, in a statement. The tiny, carefully crafted silver-gilt mount shows a praying knight emerging from a snail shell, which is balanced on the back of a goat. That’s one interpretation, at least, of a small, medieval-era metal object discovered in West Yorkshire, England, last year, as Craig Simpson reports for the Telegraph. Discoveries of objects from hundreds of years ago can help reveal how people worked, played and worshipped-and, perhaps, what they found funny.
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