Here’s little old me at the British Museum looking at the case with the Salisbury Hoard.
On the left side you can see the miniature shields mounted and they are fantastic. One definitely thinks of badges and toys, talismans. But there is a most concrete sense that you are encountering a kind of ‘modeled reality’. This could be perhaps the definition of ‘toys’, good ones anyway. They enliven and enrich a child’s imagination by their ‘suggestion and modeling’.
I was surprised how small some of them were. Definitely badges!! I proposed a series of miniature shield making workshops to the BM so we will see what comes of this (for kids in half term holidays).
Anyway, just as interesting are the other objects. Are those axes miniaturized? And in the bottom right of the display is a miniature cauldron, with little handles.