head dress pin

Decorated head-dress pins with a flattened cross-section and rectangular slot-like eyes are often called ‘bodkins’. These thick needles were used for drawing tapes through hems and were common needlework items. The Aslacton pin encapsulates a social revolution that occurred between the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries in Norfolk. Such pins were used as head-dress ornaments in the Low Countries in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and their use is attested on a number of contemporary portraits from this date.