Buying shiny stuff

Finding fitting and jewellery for the 13th and early 14th century isn't as easy as if you're looking for later 14th, or 15th century stuff. There are two reasons for this: one is that there appear to be more finds from this period, or at least more that are dated to those periods. Also, dating tend to be just "14th century", which isn't much use if you're looking for the first 25 years of that century. The other reason is that since there are so many more re-enactors doing late 14t and 15th cnetury there is a much bigger market for it.

Frustratingly a lot of manufacturers also tend to just give the dating as "medieval", and even when they have dating it is usually not possible to do a search by century.

But then you have the web site of Armour&Castings in the Ukraine where you can search by century, and which has a lot of things from my period that I have never seen reproduced before.

Today, which was a seriously lousy day, a package from the arrived and made my day much better. It contained a buckle, some belt ornaments and this lovely brooch:

The funny thing is that I only found the original a month ago or so, here it is: Walter's Art Museum. It's from the 13th century and the letters form a prayer, namely  "AGLA: Atha Gebri Leilan Adonai" ("Thou art mighty forever, O Lord"), I am of course totally ignoring this and pretend that the A is for Aleydis, the name that I use in the Society for Creative Anachronism :)

Anyway, I found it (on Pinterest of course), and exclaimed on facebook: "I want this!" And, two weeks later I found Armour&Castings while trawling the internet, and they had it. I've never seen it anywhere else.

And today it came! So yay!

And when I have money again I am so getting this belt mount.  And lots of other stuff.