Ancient Meols No 6.

Hair-pins And Piercers

Needle-shaped pins

The same word ACUS served among the ancients to denote a needle, a pin, and a piercer or bodkin; it also indicated the tongue of a buckle. The various objects were therefore associated in name. They wer also associated in use; as the needle, the breast-pin, and the hair-pin, approximated so closely in construction that they were sometimes undistinguishable.. Among antiquities they are often mistaken for each other, so that this subject naturally holds an intermediate place between the needle and the pin proper.The implement which was related to all the three was a skewer, with a perforation at the end remote from the point, and its chief use appears to have been as a hair-pin, the hole being adorned with a fluttering ribbon and must have been equally beautiful to observe when worn. It is sad that these are never again to be used, they were, of course, there to attract as much as beautify. Besides the use of the needle-pin for the hair in Germany one of silver, large and beatiful, was exhibited in the London International Exhibition of 1882. It formed part of a local collection of the Ionian Islands, and was worn by the women there.

Pins With Loops And Rings

In 1857 mountings of a hair-pin was exhibited by a Mr Ackerman, probably an archaeologist, the hair-pin was found among Saxon remains at Broughton Poggs, Oxfordshire, with a ring through the top. He also advanced evidence to show that the hair-pin was a distinction of a housewife, while the unmarried permitted the hair to flow "in capillo".
The mounting of a hair-pin, in which the stem had disintegrated, was also found with some Anglo-Saxon remains. The material was of bronze.

In which had been engraved, from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Brighthampton, Oxfordshire, the use of the ring inserted at the top is apparent. In the grave of a girl, a taper bronze hair-pin, six inches long, was found, and the ring at the top had suspended a tassel of thin bronze, with seventeen circles punched on each side. In some remarkable objects I have seen illustrated from Italy a number of small human figures were attached to a miniature chariot. All the female figures had their ears pierced, and remains of ear-rings; and at the back of the head of each is a loop of ring, showing that something ornamental had been suspended there.

Pins Generally

The Roman hair-pins that have been found at various places, and on variuos occasions, are usually of bone or bronze. The former are more crude,the latter very elegant. The bronze ones were more slender in their structure, as a mass of material was not necessary to give them strength.

I was at one time during the 1940s, in the employ of a canning factory doing my bit for the troops, so to speak, when I found myself in a position to manufacture the very article I am writing of. The boxes that had to contain large cans of potato's had to be securely wired to stop the boxes from coming apart in transit. This wire made ideal hair-pins for the ladies and because of the scarcity of hair-pins,this commodity was a good earner at 1d (2p) per dozen. My career was brought to an end by the overseers wife complaining that one penny per dozen a little too much to pay. Several of those found at Uriconium are thick in the middle, as if to prevent them from the possiblility of their getting lost, and some of them apparently still retained, when they were found, traces of the oil with which they had been smeared when in use.

Some of the hair-pins in a dig in Denmark sometime before 1850 were double, the two parts being united by a chain or long link, like a cravat pin, it was known as the "union pin". There is an example from Beech Downs, in the Londsborough collection. A bronze pin, found in Ireland, about three and a half inches long , was thick in the middle, and had a cup-shaped head,like the cuspid ornaments common in that country.

Numerous other curious pins, so large as to be have probably been used for the hair, but possibly used for the dress, have been seen in archaeological volumes. In the grave of a woman was found a small brass hair-pin, with head thin and flat, and with cross-marks, like a minutely divided inch measure. A long and graceful hair-pin was found near Bicester, several feet below the surface, while digging for the railway.

It has a small bead of white glass at the top held by claws. It's wherabouts is unknown to me but may have been donated to a museum. In the collection of what was the Royal Irish Academy, and from Shannon: is a decorated bone pin. At the head it is  perforated with five holes, and was an interesting example of what is called the circular domino ornament, common to bone objects. It was seven and a half inches in length and very elegantly decorated.

Pins

Material-- Though this object is so small, and commercially so valueless, it had become practically a necessary of  civilisation. It is now manufactured in quantities so large as to be scarcely credible, and the numbers used, thrown aside, or lost, are equally great; yet when pins where manufactured singly, like nails, each one was an object of great importance and highly prized.

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