posted 10-15-2006 11:22 PM            

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Hunt on for vanished Saxon bowl
The Witham Bowl Archaeologists hunting an Anglo-Saxon bowl missing for nearly 140 years are calling on the public to check their attics for the silver treasure.

The Witham Bowl was fished out of a river in Lincolnshire, England in 1816, it is thought to be the most remarkable piece of pre-Conquest silver found in England. The Witham Bowl vanished after an exhibition in Leeds in 1868.

The 8th-Century bowl is about 18cm in diameter and richly decorated with wild animals. In the middle is the head of a mysterious creature - described as a dog or a "water monster" - which is believed to rise when the bowl is filled with water.

The ashtray-sized silver bowl, featuring an anxious looking little creature peering up from a tangle of rich Anglo-Saxon ornament, really was "the most remarkable piece of pre-Conquest plate ever found in England", as an expert described it over 150 years ago.

It is thought the hanging bowl would have originally contained water, but its specific purpose remains in doubt.

A wood-block print made from a Victorian watercolor - which itself was lost for a century - is the only evidence of what it looked like:

The Society of Antiquaries of London never owned the bowl, but commissioned the image in the 1860s, and then lost the image until it turned up in the 1960s in a drawer at its headquarters at Burlington House. The Society of Antiquaries has now put out an international missing water monster alert.

The society has lost other things: Cromwell's wart, once the pride of the museum, has not been seen since a long dead secretary took to wearing it as a watch fob.

The bowl was the most spectacular of several important Anglo-Saxon finds in the river Witham, including a shield now in the British Museum. The little beasts biting the rim form hanging loops but its exact function is a mystery.

The last recorded private owner, at the time of the Leeds exhibition, was the art historian John Heywood Hawkins.

One theory is the vessel was sold as part of a collection at that auction house Christie's in the 1920s, and may have gone to the US.

But research by academics has drawn a blank.

"It might have been sold and gone to the United States, but then again someone could be using it as an ashtray or keeping paper clips in it," the society's spokeswoman Jayne Phenton said.

Anyone who thinks they might know the whereabouts of the bowl can contact the Society of Antiquaries at jphenton@sal.org.uk or telephone 020 7479 7087.

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