December's find of the month is a modest choice, modest in the sense that it is a humble fragment of something much larger.
A significant part of the skill of the identifier of these fragmentary objects is being able to recognise them as pieces of the parent object which they used to be part of. It is rather like being handed a single piece of a large jigsaw and needing to recognise it as part of the bigger scene from a recollection of the box lid.
Challenge met then, the small fragment pictured above, turns out to be the animal-headed curving foot of a post-medieval chafing dish support. It’s location in-situ can be seen in the picture below of an example in the Curtius Museum in Belgium.
Chafing dishes were used to hold burning charcoal or other combustible material, whose purpose was to cook food or keep it hot at the table. Examples of this type of dish date to circa 1575-1650 AD.
The object was found on farmland close to Wymondham in Norfolk. The full record can be seen at www.finds.org.uk using the reference NMS-AB93AB.