Heads from hair or dress pins are made from two convex halves soldered together may be medieval or early post-med. 

Photograph by Brian Irwin.

Medieval pins

Medieval dress or hair pins are not particularly easy to distinguish from pins of other dates, especially when they have solid heads. Separate heads are common in medieval pins; wound-wire heads and heads made from two convex halves soldered together may be medieval or early post-med. Pins with acorn heads are known from the 15th century, and there are some animal headed pins on the PAS database which may be medieval. Shafts, where they survive complete, tend to be long.

Larger pins have been summarised in Egan and Pritchard 1991, and there is also useful information in Biddle 1990 and Ottaway and Rogers 2002.

Tiny sewing pins are commonly found in medieval contexts on excavations, but they are not generally found by detectorists – perhaps they are too small and fragile to survive. If you record one, add ‘sewing’ to the classification field for sewing pins.

References

Biddle 1990

Egan and Pritchard 1991

Ottaway and Rogers 2002 can be downloaded free here: http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/yat_2011/downloads.cfm

Examples