Kosher Food Lead Seal, Plumba, Image & Found by Plodite.
Found near Maidstone in Kent, 7.58g, 42mm in length.
Complete Kosher food seal with Hebrew letters on and holes in the rounded end.
See Geoff Egan, No.356 Fig.47, 'Lead cloth seals and related items in the B.M. (B.M. Occasional Paper 93)'
From Rufus:- It's a 'plumba', a Kosher seal clamped to meat or poultry deemed fit for consumption after passing certain stringent tests. The characters are Hebrew. I have a couple myself, found on a field that must have seen the ritualised slaughter of animals for the London Jewish meat market in the 18th century. Interesting find.
An excellent article entitled 'Those Jewish Plumbas: All is Revealed!' can be found on page 1 of the March/April issue, No.82 of Leaden Tokens Telegraph by David Powell.
"We have discussed these pieces briefly before, but I am grateful to Ira Rezak for the following explanation of the inscription, and for giving some clue as to their use. My thanks also to Howard Simmons, for putting me in touch with him.
“In Yiddish they're called plumbas (ie "leads") and they are definitely some sort of kosher seal. The way the pictures show the text, the right side has three Hebrew letters: aleph, bet, dalet (ABD) which stands for av bet din ("Chief of the (Rabbinical) Court"). the left hand side is less distinct but almost certainly says dalet, kuf, kuf (DKK) which stands for de kehillah kedosha ("of the Holy Community" = ie of the town). The city being referenced is not given, but presumably it was obvious to those local users who respected the validity of the kosher mark. It is probably from Amsterdam, or another Dutch export site, and likely dates to the late 18th or early 19th cent. The letters in the centre are different; I recognize at least three differing letters, and these no doubt represent different suppliers of whatever the merchandise was.”
Ira goes on to show an illustration of one such plumba in its original form, with the following further comment:
“….{the piece} was found in some eastern English coastal port, I forget which, but still shows the more complete butterfly shape that would have allowed this to be attached by compression, probably to a string around the product. What the product was is not clear to me, the likeliest candidates are wine, cheese or meat.”
There are also some other specimens on Stuart Elton’s excellent “Ourpasthistory” site, both with and without the joining spur; go to “http://ourpasthistory.com/Gallerya/main.php” [to be updated], then just put “Jewish” into the search parameter. A similar explanation of their use is given there, except that the use is assumed to be in connection with the London meat market, the Continent not being mentioned. Both sources agree on 18th cent as a likely date, although BNJ54 {1984} features two specimens in with its type S lead tokens, which are mid-17th cent.
Perhaps all three sources are right; that the continent exported Kosher meat to London, and that such trade was flourishing throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. That issue perhaps we are uncertain on, but at least we know to call them plumbas rather than plummas from now on!"
More seals in the British Museum, the first showing how this design of seal was attached to the product with a loop of metal.