File:Anglo-Scandinavian strap fitting (FindID 147227).jpg

English: Copper-alloy strap fitting. The fragment is from the tip of a specific form of late Early Medieval strap fitting, of which only handful are known to date. The fitting would have had a hook at one end, with three narrow arms gently fanning out to an open circular terminal. The fragment is now a domed oval panel and has four triangular facets to it. A small portion of one of the arms runs slightly beneath the panel. The surface is decorated with a hatched cross, however the hatching does not cover the central portion.

Similar detached fittings are known from perhaps a dozen finds in England, most of which have broken loops looking very like hooks. Interestinly another was discovered in the same parish, recorded on this database as LIN-3AD358. Their function has hitherto been mysterious, and so they have been known as 'socketed hooks'. It is difficult to see how a conventional strap would have been attached to the fittings, as there are no rivets, and no bar around which leather can be sewn. They are perhaps more likely to have held a rope or cord, perhaps plaited around the openwork of the socket.

Examples of the fittings are known from south-west Wiltshire (Read, 2001, p. 8, no. 39), Cambridgeshire, recorded on this database as ESS-A983B8, High Wycombe, and Norfolk. Norfolk has produced by far the most from any English county, with finds of fittings from Attlebridge (SMR 34326), Cawston (SMR 32896), Roudham (SMR 25921) and East Walton (SMR 25856), and discs from Barwick (SMR 28705) and Fring (SMR 1659). It seems likely that this is due to the expertise of the late Sue Margeson at Norwich Castle Museum, who recognised them as Anglo-Scandinavian from their style of decoration, and began recording them in 1990. She suggested that the decoration was in Ringerike style, and that the objects should be dated to the eleventh century. Better awareness of the object type will no doubt result in more examples being recorded.

An example from Lincolnshire retaining the circular central distributor is recorded on the PAS database as LIN-F29FC4.

Circular strap-distributors with three perforations for strapends are well known from Scandinavia from the ninth century onwards, and occasionally turn up in English contexts (e.g. at Brighthampton in Oxfordshire and at New Fresh Wharf in London). In Scandinavia they adorn belts, and often only two of the perforations have strap ends attached. The development into ‘socketed hooks’, however, seems to be a distinctively English innovation.