English: Silver-gilt buckle with a triangular plate, recently broken in two pieces. The oval loop, of D shaped section, is cast in one with the plate. It has a false shield-on-tongue composed of two stepped, crescentic panels, each decorated with a band of interlace now obscured by corrosion. The base of the tongue is an elongated oval, the tip is now missing. At the junction of the loop and plate, on each side of the narrow flange bordering the latter, is a garnet-inlaid collared boss with a beaded rim. One of the garnets is a cabochon, the other is flat-cut and was presumably a replacement in antiquity. These bosses are purely decorative, unlike those found at the end of the transverse pin which secures the loop to the plate on other surviving examples where the loop is actually hinged. The plate originally had three domed rivets. The lateral pair nearest the loop are now missing; the large basal rivet has a beaded wire collar. There is a narrow band of Style II zoomorphic interlace along each side of the plate flanking a central panel containing incised ornament obscured by corrosion. All that is currently visible is a V-shaped element immediately above the basal rivet. This may be the tail of a fish.
The plate is hollow, and part of the flanged edge is broken away. On the back, immediately below the loop is a rectangular panel, also gilt, now cracked and damaged, engraved with a Style II animal. The remains of two rivet shanks are visible; the third is now missing. These would have secured a separate sheet metal back-plate, now lost.

Length of plate: 91mm; width of loop: 28 mm; weight: 49.08g; metal analysis: 94 per cent silver.

This piece belongs to a well documented group of early Anglo-Saxon triangular buckles found in high status male graves of the first half of the 7th century (G Speake, Anglo-Saxon Animal Art (Oxford, 1980), pp. 54-8, pls 5-7; V Evison, An Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Alton, Hampshire (Hampshire Field Club monograph no. 4, (1988), pp. 18-20 and 51). The finest example, of gold, is from Taplow in Buckinghamshire, but the remainder are silver-gilt, often inlaid with garnets and inset with foil plates capped by zoomorphic Style II filigree. The majority are from the richly furnished cemeteries of East Kent such as Faversham, Sarre and Gilton. The Littlebourne example, which is decorated with incised ornament, is essentially a slightly cheaper version of one of these buckles, and similar copper-alloy imitations are known from other Kentish cemeteries such as Faversham (G Speake op. cit., pl. 8). Stylistically it is closest to the example from Crundale (J Backhouse and L Webster (eds), The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600-900 (London, 1991), pp. 24-5) which also has a stepped shield-on-tongue, narrow bands of interlace and a rectangular panel on the back with the scratched rendering of a backward-gazing, body-biting animal. It shares the same hollow construction, which has led some writers to describe the Crundale buckle as a reliquary buckle. The Crundale buckle also has a fish on the plate, an early symbol of Christianity and on both these buckles we see the replacement of pagan images by new iconography following the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons during the 7th century.