I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
Guilden Morden boar
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Found beside a skeleton in the 1860s, this simple boar figure is among the few physical traces of a protective emblem that once filled Anglo-Saxon verse and battle lines.
At a glance
- Date
- Sixth or seventh century
- Material
- Copper-based alloy
- Findspot
- Guilden Morden, Cambridgeshire
- Inventory
- 1904,1010.1
- Collection
- British Museum
Look closer
A mane that does the work
The figure is simply designed. What marks it as a boar is chiefly the mane rising along the back; the rest of the animal is reduced almost to outline. Eyes, eyebrows, nostrils and tusks are present, but only faintly. The maker trusted one strong feature to carry the identity of the animal rather than modelling every detail in the round.
Legs that are a fixture
The front and hind legs form a pin and socket. That arrangement is not decorative. It is a mounting system, and it is the main reason scholars read the figure as a crest once fixed to another object — most plausibly a helmet. Without the legs, the boar would be a free-standing charm; with them, it becomes part of worn equipment.
A type known from abroad
Boar crests of this kind are not unique to England. The Torslunda plates from Sweden, roughly contemporary, show warriors whose helmets carry boars mounted in a similar way. The Guilden Morden figure sits inside that wider Germanic visual language, not as an isolated English oddity.
The story
The Guilden Morden boar is a small Anglo-Saxon figure in copper-based alloy, made in the sixth or seventh century. It represents a boar in simplified form: a clear mane, a compact body, and facial features — eyes, eyebrows, nostrils, tusks — that are only lightly indicated. What makes the object more than a free-standing charm is the underside. The front and hind legs are shaped as a pin and socket, a join that implies the animal was once fixed to something larger. The usual reading is that it served as the crest of a helmet.
It was found around 1864 or 1865 in a grave at Guilden Morden, a village in Cambridgeshire. There it accompanied a skeleton together with other objects, including a small earthenware bead with an incised pattern. Of that group only the boar is known to survive. The original finder was the father of Herbert George Fordham; Fordham presented the figure to the British Museum in 1904. It remains there under the inventory number 1904,1010.1 and has been shown both in Britain and abroad.
Boar-crested helmets are a recurring motif in Anglo-Saxon imagery and form part of a broader Germanic tradition in which the boar was associated with divine protection. Physical survival is rare. Alongside the crests on the helmets from Benty Grange and Wollaston, the Guilden Morden boar is one of only three such figures known from Anglo-Saxon England. Contemporary Swedish dies from Torslunda depict warriors wearing helmets topped with comparable boars, which strengthens the case that the Cambridgeshire figure belonged to the same class of equipment.
The type is also familiar from poetry. In Beowulf, boar-adorned helmets are mentioned five times. Hrothgar recalls a moment when “our boar-crests had to take a battering in the line of action.” The poem does not describe this particular object, and no one can claim that the Guilden Morden grave once held a hero from the epic. What the figure does offer is a scarce material counterpart to an image that literature treats as ordinary. A crest that may once have been common is now known from a handful of survivals, of which this is one.
Why it mattered then
In its own time the boar was not a random animal choice. Within a Germanic warrior culture it was a protective emblem, believed to call on the favour of the gods. Fixing a boar to a helmet placed that emblem where it would be seen in the shield wall and, if the belief held, where it might guard the wearer. The pin-and-socket legs on the Guilden Morden figure suggest the animal was meant to sit upright on equipment rather than hang as a pendant or lie as a grave token alone. Whether every fighter who wore such a crest shared the same theology is unknowable; what the archaeology and the poetry together imply is that the image was conventional enough to need no explanation. A sixth- or seventh-century audience would have recognised it at once.
Why it matters now
The figure still matters because almost nothing of its class remains. Literature remembers boar-crested helmets as standard kit; the ground has yielded only three Anglo-Saxon examples, and this is one of them. It therefore anchors a poetic commonplace in metal and findspot. It also shows how much of an Anglo-Saxon burial can vanish: a skeleton, a patterned earthenware bead and other objects were recorded with the boar, yet only the crest is known to survive. The object is modest, simply made, and incomplete as a helmet. Its value lies in that scarcity and in the link it offers between grave, workshop practice and the protective imagery that once ran through both war gear and verse.
The surprising detail
Of the grave group found at Guilden Morden — skeleton, boar, patterned earthenware bead and other objects — only the boar is known to remain. Everything else from that burial has been lost to the record, so a crest that was probably secondary to a helmet has become the sole surviving witness to the whole assemblage.
What is disputed
The helmet-crest reading is strong but not proven. No helmet was recovered with the figure; the pin-and-socket legs and parallels such as the Torslunda plates make a crest the most plausible function, yet other mounted uses cannot be ruled out entirely. The find date is also approximate — around 1864 or 1865 — and rests on later family recollection rather than a contemporary excavation record. Dating to the sixth or seventh century follows the usual range for the type.
How it got here
The boar was found at Guilden Morden by the father of Herbert George Fordham. Fordham donated it to the British Museum in 1904, where it is registered as 1904,1010.1. As of 2018 it was on view in room 41. No contested-ownership claim is recorded in the sources used here.
Remember this
A simple copper-alloy boar with pin-and-socket legs: one of three known Anglo-Saxon helmet crests, and the only survivor from its Cambridgeshire grave.
Test yourself
The Guilden Morden figure is only faintly detailed as a boar, yet scholars treat the pin-and-socket legs as decisive evidence that it was a helmet crest. Why do the legs carry more weight than the animal’s modelling?
Because the legs are a mechanical feature, not a stylistic one. A free-standing charm or grave token does not need a pin and socket; a crest fixed to a helmet does. The simplified mane and faint tusks identify the animal, but the mounting system is what places it on equipment. Contemporary images, such as the Torslunda plates, show boars used in just that way, so the join and the iconography support each other. Form tells us what it is; the fixture tells us how it was used.
Go deeper
Image: The Land, CC BY-SA 4.0. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source.