This designation has been adopted for the want of a more suitable one. Many of the brooches are circular in form, and made of iron; they have large pins or tongues, as if intended for leather; and they are almost undistinguishable from the buckle proper. Yet they were obviously intended to be used in connection with cloth, as both the form and the material, were unsuited for leather.
The distinction, however, between brooches and buckles is not marked by any definate line. So also do two other objects-- the brooch and the fermail. This latter word, which was adopted from the French,
indicates a smaller and more elegant brooch, with a finer pin. The "fermail" was also applied to denote the clasps of a book, or hooks in general; so that, like brooch, it indicates a genus rather than a speciesand at its extremes was related to objects of various kinds.

The Romans included both brooches and buckles under the term "fibulae", and of course this intermediate class was also comprehended. Those which resembled the modern buckle, or which presented a ring with a pin across it, were generally decorated in a much more costly way than a fibulae proper.

In the pages, I wrote about what artifacts had been found on the coast of Cheshire by the local inhabitants in general, what in the metal detecting fraternity call "eyes only". This expression segregated what was found by electronic means and just discovered by observation.

                                    This time I would like to describe a particular meaning of FIBULAE.

A brooch, consisting of a pin or Acus, and of a curved portion furnished with a hook. The curved portion was sometimes a circular ring or disc, the pin passing across the centre, and sometimes an arc, the pin being as the cord of the arc". Some of the Anglo-Saxon forms resemble the Roman ones, that it would be difficult to say exactly from which period it derived, apart from the context in which it was found.

                                                                       The Cheshire Fibulae

A large convex Anglo-Saxon fibular, now in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester was found in a field near the city in in 1840. It is of bronze, countersunk in sections, which are inlaid with red, white and green paste: the pin has gone probably of perishable metal.

I would like to dwell a little on the fibulae that have been found on the Cheshire coast which are referred to in Ancient Meols. These amount to forty eight in all, eight of which are of the rarer type. All are made of brass and are all different forms, two of them are the only ones that show a cross bar or hammer head and are showing traces of beautiful workmanship which shows the skill of the designer and the manufacturer. Six of them have loops, apparently to accomodate a cord for fastening to the clothing as a safety device.

Traces of blue can be seen in in four of them while the remains of a yellow setting are seen on four others.Though we use the term Anglo-Saxon, it really includes several distinct sets of people. The impliments and ornaments which these used,though resembling, were not identical; and their distinctive characteristics can be traced through various parts of East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire) in Leicestershire and further north the form of the fibular is still preserved, but among the settlers of Kent, and towards the area of Wessex the circular form which we call the "brooch" is much more general.

The fibulae from Suffolk is large and cruciform with what appears to be crude human heads at the top and bottom. It is six inches in length and nearly four and a half inches broad. The second is smaller being about four inches long; the upper part being decorated with heart shaped objects, and the lower by curled lines. The fibular from Cambridge, instead of cross-bars, presents us with a rectangular plate at the top, and greater width and decoration along the stem or bow. This is
five and a quarter inches long, and the plate at the top and projections below are about half that laterally.

Two fibulae designs from Kent occur very commonly on the continent of Europe and occasionally in this country. The best way to describe these are-- from the cicumference of the semicircle there are five knobs, like fingers project outward, and is the sort of form found in Frankish graves and is known as
the "hasp with offsets".

                                                                          Circular Brooches

It is difficult to distinguish between brooches and breast pins on the one hand and hair pins on the other. In a great majority of cases they were of the same size and form; and it is not unlikely that the same pin that fastened the robe served to decorate a lady's hair. It seemed to be a jack of all trades that could be put to use wherever needed.

It is evident that the pin brooch or ring pin became tranformed into the cicular brooch by the gradual shortening of the pin and the enlargement of the ring. The ring which became conspicuous, became the important part, and the pin which was concealed in the drapery became subordinate. It was obvious that brooches of this kind were only used with clothing and connection with hair would have been impossible.
Some attempt has been made in modern times to copy certain forms of circular brooches of Celtic character, several of which can be seen in resorts in Wales crafted by local modern "cottage" industries. It was difficult to determine the type of metal they were fashioned, probably of spelter or pewter.