Most metal belt fittings are associated with leather belts, if any trace of organic matter remains. The single Anglo-Saxon exception of which I am aware is the St. John's Cricket Field strap end, which was attached to a thickly-woven linen band. Linen is stiffer and less springy than wool. This will become important in a moment.
A weight at the end of a line creates a pendulum. In high school, you analyzed a pendulum with a massless length and a frictionless pivot. Well, this is a real-world pendulum. The belt end has a stiffness that damps out the pendulum motion. This is why your belt end does not swing back and forth forever. The stiffness of leather (and, I suspect, linen) is much greater than even a thickly-woven woolen band.
My wool belt has leapt forth to take swings at several people and Bruno (who is a harp). Some combination of the belt being too long and the wool being too soft means that it is not damped nearly enough. It flies out like a particularly ineffectual flail. I have so far been able to wrangle it, but I believe that I am seeing the reason why we don't have more belt hardware associated with textile belts. I've never been fully satisfied with "Because you don't have to have hardware to fasten a textile girdle," because there's a whole lot of fashion that exists but doesn't have to do anything. Especially in a high-status grave, why not mix luxury textile accessories with silver-gilt hardware?
Because it'll put your eye out, evidently.
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