The Chiddingly badge has traces of a fixing on the back, which has been suggested as showing it had been pinned to a hat, but this is improbable in battle, unless the wearer was thrown into action unexpectedly before they could have donned their helmet. The fixing is also missing from the Bosworth badge, so it also uncertain how it may have been attached, but there is a mark on the back, where the badge has broken away from its fixing – perhaps the reason the object was originally lost (Figure 6.2). This double square may indicate a vertically orientated loop. If so, then it is possible that the badge was hung as a pendant from a collar, like the Yorkist sun and rose collar on the effigy of Ralph Fitzherbert at Norbury, Derbyshire (Figure 6.3). While such collars do not seem practical to wear in action, this does seem to accord best with the description from Flodden. However, other alternatives are possible, if we do not take Hall’s words literally. The badges might perhaps have been pinned to coat-armour, the silk covering worn over armour depicting the wearer’s coat of arms. Alternatively it could be a brigandine which, exceptionally, might be covered with velvet and gilt rivets so making it suitable for a high ranking individual, or the armour itself might have been covered with textile in a similar manner.²⁹

Given how many badges of base metal were issued, and the fact that two-thirds of the boar badges on the PAS database are of copper alloy not silver-gilt, it is surprising that badges in base metal are not present in larger number than those of precious metal. The implication here is that these were not typically worn in battle. At Bosworth we have just two possible medieval badges of base metal (Figure 6.8).

The other exceptional artefact from the heart of the battlefield, in a group of finds further to the west, is a fragment of a gilded copper alloy cross-guard with roped decoration (Figure 6.4a&b). This comes from a late fifteenth-century sword. Copper alloy hilts are not unusual in medieval swords, so there is no reason to believe that this was not a weapon of fighting standard. However, the gilding implies the sword was a showpiece of ‘conspicuous consumption’ which will have been carried by a soldier of the very highest status.³⁰