Artefact in Focus: The Thumb’s Up Linchpin

I moved from York to North Lincolnshire in 2016 so my other half and I could set up a wee little house together. As I still spend a lot of time working in York I haven’t really engaged in any great amount with the local heritage of my new county. There is the wonderful Hull and East Riding Museum on the other side of the Humber with its reconstructed Roman street complete with graffiti (“Romani Ite Domum”) and the Winterton villa a few miles west of here but without standing remains. Thus I was particularly entertained when, during the course of data gathering that I discovered in the North Lincolnshire Museum a rather wonderful thing pertinent to my investigation into the material culture of magic in Roman Britain from the small village of Wootton (NGR: TA 087 160). As I’m currently sat in Wootton this came as something of a pleasant surprise.

The item in question was discovered in typically Lincolnshire-ian form – in a potato field by a farm worker, in 1987. The object is a linch pin; a tapering iron shank used to keep a moving wheel attached to its axle. Rather unlike the vast majority of linch pins from Roman Britain, which are iron bars with spatulate or curving heads without decoration or embellishment, this fine example includes a large copper alloy casing in a curving, lunate form capped by a realistic, cast depiction of a human thumb, shown in full 3D. Moulded scalloping radiating from the centre to the edges, gives the cover depth in its decoration. A suspension loop hidden behind the thumb places it squarely into the existing typology of such things developed by Manning (1985, 74) for the diverse collection in the British Museum. It is thus of Manning type 1c: a linch pin with crescentic head with a peg-loop inserted into the head.

Figure 1: The iron linch pin with decorative, copper alloy mouldings from Wootton, North Lincolnshire.Terrible Images by the Author. 

The discovery of this pin has not gone without notice. The correspondence surrounding the discovery between Kevin Leahy at the museum as various other specialists in the 1980s is extensive and recorded in the linch pin’s object history file at the museum. Leahy showcased the pin at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries of London and subsequently published the find with Martin Henig in the Society’s journal (Leahy and Henig 1988). It is now part of the permanent Roman galleries in the North Lincs museum.

Helpful though their article is, there remains an opportunity to discuss the embodied meaning of this figural symbol and its relationship to magical practice. The ritual associations with thumbs are really quite strong in the Roman world. The speaker of a spell in the in the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM 36.161-77) was instructed to hold their thumbs whilst a magical spell was spoken seven times – ultimately aiming to restrain anger and promote successes. Conversely, the effort of intertwining fingers or legs in specific situations was believed, as least as far as Pliny was concerned (NH, 28.17) to represent a form of ‘dark’ magic (for an extensive discussion on the binding of human bodies see McKie 2018).

Artefactually, whole hands were depicted on an unusual group of objects, most often hairpins, depicting a hand holding a spherical object between forefinger and thumb (Eckardt 2014, 158-167) though the explicit meaning of this image was certainly nuanced. The thumb was crossed beneath the forefinger in the manus fica (‘fig sign’) good luck symbol and often depicted making this gesture on objects which also depict phalli as one half of a super-strength apotropaic image. The thumb was raised with finger as part of oath-taking, and in this form is depicted surrounded by cult images/religious and ritual symbol on so-called Hands of Sabazios throughout the Roman Empire (Eckardt 2014, 166).

Suffice to say that there are numerous avenues we could wander down in search of functional comparanda. We are, however, somewhat limited by the uniqueness of the Wootton linch pin. It remains the only one of its type known to archaeology and, within that broader category of ‘depictions of human hands on objects’ it is within the relatively rare subcategory of ‘single thumbs’. As a decorative theme on objects, thumbs are rare things. The nearest form-based comparable I could find for this brief overview is a bone rod (or very large hair pin…) from Gloucestershire and now in the British Museum. More prosaically, a set of four ornate linch pins from Sandy, Bedfordshire, also in the BM is helpful is demonstrating the existence of such decorative things in Roman Britain to us non-ferrous specialists.

For me, the main point of interest in this object, other than its proximity to my house, is the original spatial significance of this image. The thumb has been clearly selected for use in a very specific environment and it points towards the axle and the road, not the wheel or the vehicle. Furthermore, did it spin with the wheel or axle or remain static? I simply don’t know enough about Roman transport engineering to quickly find the answer to this question. Assuming (and this is a big assumption at this point) an apotropaic function for the thumb, it may have been designed to add supernatural protection to the physical protection of the iron pin in keeping the wheel on place and aligned true. It seems plausible, at least to this student of Roman magical objects, that the thumb was taking up the mantle of ‘lightning conductor’ for bad luck to protect the wheel and, by extension, the vehicle, and any cargo or persons upon it.

Wheeled carts came in numerous forms and the literary differences between the different shapes and functions of these vehicles is a quagmire. Two-wheeled vehicles include: carpentum (covered), birota (two-horsed, for hire), plasutrum (the principal wagon). Four wheeled vehicles include: pilentum (state carriage with four wheels used in religious processions), currus triumphalis (triumphal chariot), carruca (travelling carriage, which may include beds), reda (gallic, 2 or 4 horses). Perhaps there is one or another of these vehicle types which was more appropriate or inappropriate to house a thumb-shaped linch pin? Perhaps the copper alloy exterior was a symbol of higher status – adding that extra bright, brassy, bling to a wheel that didn’t need it to function?

In all cases there is a clear presumption that the linch pin would be matched with an identical fellow on its opposite number. After all thumbs, in their normal anatomical places on people, come in pairs – one left and one right. Without comparisons it is impossible to argue, but spearing as a pair seems a relatively logical thing to do when disembodying a body part. In the vast majority of phallic or vulvate images (refs available on request…), themselves often serving an apotropaic function, these are as individuals and appear to do be depicted as in was fairly true to the originals.

Like most thing that I blog about, I certainly haven’t got any answers for this one (none of the big stuff of how, when, or why) but at least some of the questions might be interesting rabbit-holes to disappear off into in the future. If nothing else, do take note of the unusual and interesting Roman thing from Wootton, North Lincs as there doesn’t seem to be much else.

The pin is accessioned to the North Lincolnshire Museum, Scunthorpe, as SCUNM: 1988.001.001 (WOTAA1). Access to the object was kindly provided by Rose Nicholson, Collections Manager, in November 2017.

Bibliography

Eckardt, H. 2014. Objects and Identities: Roman Britain and North-Western Provinces. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Leahy, K. and Henig, M. ‘Exhibitions at Ballots. 2: A Romano-British linch pin from Wootton, South Humberside’, Antiquaries Journal 319-321

Manning, W. H. 1985. Catalogue of the Romano-British Iron Tools, Fittings, and Weapons in the British Museum. London, British Museum.

McKie, S. 2018. ‘The Legs, Hands, Head and Arms Race: The Human Body as a Magical Weapon in the Roman World’, in Parker, A. and McKie, S. (eds) Material Approaches to Roman Magic: Occult Objects and Supernatural Substances (Themes in Theoretical Roman Archaeology 2). Oxford, Oxbow.