In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  However, there were probably many different types of kings among the first English leaders, and it is not impossible that some powerful and important warrior came across from Europe with his followers and carved himself a kingdom, a man who already belonged to some ancient royal line. Like Wehha and Wuffa he may have been a late immigrant too, in the mid 500s, for the Byzantine writer Procopius records such movements from northern Europe into Britain at precisely this time. The reader must keep that possibility in mind, for we shall see signs at Sutton Hoo linking that burial with Sweden, where the Wuffingas may have originated, a connection which is not explicable if the Wuffingas were merely common soldiers.

  THE BRETWALDAS

  If, as the Anglo-Saxon invasions progressed, such men did indeed come over with fairly large tribal units, then this might be a clue to the origins of the overlordship among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Writing in 731 the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede says that prior to the eighth century several Anglo-Saxon kings held a supremacy over all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The Latin word he uses to express this is imperium, which is often used to mean rule over more than one realm. Bede lists the kings who held this hegemony: Aelle of Sussex (c. 490), Ceawlin of the West Saxons (c. 590), Aethelberht of Kent (c. 600), and Raedwald of the East Angles (617–c. 624), followed by the Northumbrians Edwin, Oswald and Oswy. Around the year 890 a West-Saxon writer repeats this list and gives an English name for the kings who had this supremacy: bretwalda or brytenwealda. The second form of this word was probably the earlier, but there are problems in interpreting it since, like many other Germanic words brought from the continent by our Anglo-Saxon forebears, it changed meaning during the 500 years of Anglo-Saxon England. By the tenth century, and perhaps even by Bede’s time, it had come to mean ‘Britain-ruler’, but in origin it was probably a term for an over-king, a king who rules other kings: ‘wide-ruler’. As the term also existed in Anglo-Saxon’s sister language, Old High German, during the Dark Ages as an expression of empire, it seems that the word signifies an ancient Germanic notion of kingship which the English brought over with them. As we shall see it was in Britain that the Anglo-Saxons adopted Roman ceremonial to dignify their concepts of kingship.

  The bretwaldaship had particular relevance to Sutton Hoo for it is now generally believed that the man buried or commemorated in the ship was none other than the East-Anglian bretwalda, Raedwald, and that among the treasures are the actual regalia of the bretwaldaship. If so, the burial would have even more sensational implications for the study of our early history. But let us not anticipate the story.

  ‘A PRINCELY TREASURE’

  Sutton Hoo is a dramatic place. In this windswept backwater of Suffolk local traditions about the East-Anglian kings have been particularly tenacious. It was said that Henry VIII’s agents had dug there for treasure, and that John Dee, Elizabeth I’s magician, had opened a mound there in a journey along the Suffolk coast. Archaeologists have found remains of the Elizabethan diggers’ snacks and one of their tools. Near there, around the year 1690, it was said that a gold crown had been dug up weighing 60 ounces, only to be sold and melted down.

  But on 23 August 1939 when a group of archaeologists concluded their dig they had uncovered things which had only hitherto existed in the world of myth and stories of Beowulf and the sagas. The achievements of eighth-century Anglo-Saxon civilisation were well known, but here suddenly was a window on a world before that, the barbaric splendour of the era before Christianity and a Latin culture had taken root in England.

  The finds were, briefly: an impression of the ship itself, long and elegant, which could be rowed or sailed, its wood disintegrated but all the rows of rivets still in place. In its centre where there had been a wooden chamber were a helmet, a sword with gold and garnet fittings, a whetstone, a stand, a rod, spears, a battle-axe, a shield with bird and dragon figures, drinking horns mounted in silver, a set of ten shallow silver bowls with cross patterns, a large fluted classical bowl, three bronze hanging bowls, a pair of silver spoons, a lyre which had been taken to pieces before burial, a great silver bowl bearing the stamp of the Emperor Anastasius, nineteen pieces of beautiful jewellery set with garnets including a gold buckle weighing nearly one pound and a huge purse in which there were forty Merovingian coins from the continent.

  One problem was immediately apparent: there were no obvious signs of a body. Others intruded only later: for instance parts of the helmet were well preserved, but parts seemed not to be there at all. Had the helmet been smashed before it was committed to the barrow? Had the man been killed in battle?

  Of course the first question asked by the archaeologists was: is this a king’s burial? It seemed impossible to doubt that Sutton Hoo was royal in the sense that it reflected a royal court, the top layer of Anglo-Saxon society. If the treasures were not actually personal to a king, they could at least be legitimately regarded as ‘tribal treasures’ kept by the king, cyning, ‘guardian of the kin’. More than that, most scholars have found it difficult to believe that such a large and valuable treasure can have belonged to anyone but a king in the seventh century. But it should be remembered that though the desire to credit the Sutton Hoo Man with kingship is a natural one, the implication of the term ‘king’ is not fully understood when used in the context of this early period. We are not yet sure who could be a king, or how many one kingdom might have. The West Saxons, for instance, had five or six ‘kings’ reigning together at this very period; kings could co-rule; sons could be called kings, raised to the kingship in their father’s lifetime; in short we do not know how kingship or succession was viewed in early seventh-century East Anglia.

  The coins give us an approximate date for the burial: the latest were minted not earlier than c. 620 and not later than c. 640. If we are right in thinking that the Sutton Hoo Man is an East Anglian king the candidates for the burial would be Bretwalda Raedwald (died c. 624), King Eorpwald (died 627), Kings Sigebert and Ecgric (died 636 or 637). But there are other possibilities, such as Ricberht, the pagan who killed King Eorpwald and reigned after him; or Bretwalda Raedwald’s son Raegenhere who was killed in battle in 617.

  Another possibility is that the burial might have been for the father of a king. Eni, younger brother of Raedwald and father of four East-Anglian kings, may well have died within the limits fixed by the coins, for he would have been born in the later sixth century and been an old man by c. 630. It cannot be denied that the father of kings whose life spanned the greatest period of East-Anglian history might have received conspicuous honours from his surviving royal sons. Simply listing the possibilities shows us how difficult it is to pinpoint one man when no personal marks survive.

  WAS THERE A BODY?

  In order to establish whether or not there was a body in the ship, scientific analysis of the soil in the region of the burial deposit has been conducted by the British Museum laboratories over many years with the thoroughness of a murder inquiry. The evidence is based on chemical traces which cannot be interpreted with absolute certainty. The conclusion that the Museum team came to in 1975 was that a body had indeed lain in the region of the boat where the sword and jewellery were found.

  However, this has been disputed. First, as the excavators knew, the position of the artefacts found in the grave did not indicate that there had been a body lying there. Second, and more serious, top forensic experts from Guy’s Hospital, London, who have since examined the evidence impartially found no trace of human remains, either cremated or inhumed, in the boat. In addition the absence of personal objects, such as finger rings, pendants, pins, fragments of cloth, buckles or gold thread, such as might have survived from shoes or clothing, coupled with the lack of a convincing arrangement of the objects that were found, suggested that no body was ever in the grave.

  It is agreed that the acid sand in which the ship lay could have eliminated all traces of a body, including teeth, and the extensive chemical tests carried out did reveal a high phosphate content in the ground near the sword i
n particular, though this last is probably attributable to the remains of ivory items including a chess set.

  Top medical opinion is that the cenotaph – a sepulchral monument made for a person who has been buried elsewhere – is the likeliest solution of the Sutton Hoo mystery because of (1) the absence of any trace of a body, (2) the absence of personal items from dress or intimate objects or decoration such as would be likely on the person, (3) the disposition of the grave goods. The forensic report concludes: ‘After careful perusal of all the available papers relating to the burial it is our joint view that there is no evidence to support the contention that a human body was ever buried in this ship.’

  However in 1979 a re-examination of the excavators’ notes for the dig revealed that a complete set of iron coffin fittings were discovered in 1939 only to be missed out of all subsequent discussions of the Sutton Hoo problem. The position of these pieces of metal clearly formed the rectangular outline of a wooden coffin into which the grave goods surrounding the ‘body’ area neatly fit. This dramatic discovery suggests that we have here after all a normal type of burial for a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon noble. The purist may still argue that the presence of a coffin is no guarantee of a body, but as we know a skeleton can disappear without trace, it is best to accept that there was indeed a body in the Sutton Hoo ship, and we shall assume this from now on.

  WHOSE BODY WAS IT?

  The question of whose body it was, and whether it was a king’s, depends then more than anything on the interpretation of two objects found in the grave: a long iron stand with a spike at the bottom, and a giant whetstone or stone bar. These have been identified as a standard and a sceptre, and thus as symbols not merely of rank but of office. Indeed the British Museum’s publication goes so far as to suggest that the whetstone is nothing less than the sceptre of the Bretwalda Raedwald himself. We must now examine them.

  The ‘sceptre’ is two feet long minus its bronze fitting. It is believed that it was originally designed to be held seated on the knee, and was topped by a small bronze stag; if this last detail is correct it is significant because stags may have been associated with royalty: in the poem Beowulf, Hrothgar’s hall is called Heorot, ‘hart’ (perhaps because stags’ heads were displayed over the door?). Essentially the ‘sceptre’ is a whetstone, such as have been found in a number of Swedish graves of this period, but this one is bigger, more elaborate and unused. A giant whetstone seems a natural enough symbol for the power of kings, many of whose poetic by-names centre on war, swords and whetting, and in that context one eminent archaeologist called it ‘monstrous … a unique savage thing; and inexplicable except perhaps as a symbol proper to the king himself, of the divinity and mystery which surrounded the smith and his tools in the northern world’.

  However, whether the whetstone really is specifically royal, or formally symbolic of anything, has yet to be proved. Its nearest links seem to be with the cults of Thor and, above all, of Woden. One of the early Norse myths tells of how Woden (Odin) disguised himself as a craftsman with a wonderful whetstone. In this case it seems we should abandon any idea of the whetstone being the bretwalda’s sceptre.

  But could it have been a dynastic heirloom? One ingenious theory suggests that the eight faces on the sceptre are the ancestors of the Wuffingas, and we may add that the genealogies show eight mythical ancestors before the historical figures of Wehha and Wuffa who ruled in Britain. A dynastic symbol of the Wuffingas? If so, another find in the grave falls into place. Near the whetstone traces of a rod were found, a thin gold strip with a garnet and filigree decoration topped by a ring and a gold cutout of an animal, probably a wolf. Now, the gold purse too depicts wolves. Do we have here a conscious pun on the dynastic name on the part of the craftsman, Wulf = Wuffingas, ‘sons of the Wolf’? And could the rod have been a royal talisman? At least here we can show a parallel: in 1656 a rod was discovered in an indubitably royal tomb of the seventh century at St Germain-des-Prés and from later pictures it is certain that rods were part of Anglo-Saxon royal regalia.

  The second of the significant objects found in the grave, the iron stand, is about five feet tall with a horizontal openwork grid at the top. It has been seen as everything from a sort of portable torch or flambeau, its head wrapped with burning tow, to a rack on which to hang enemy scalps. But historians have been most attracted to the idea that it was a standard. They point to a fascinating passage in Bede’s History which describes the Northumbrian king, Edwin, who at a later date, followed Raedwald as bretwalda, using standards as a demonstration of his power:

  So great was his majesty in his realm that not only were banners carried before him in battle but even in time of peace as he rode about among his cities, estates and kingdoms with his thegns, he always used to be preceded by a standard bearer. Further when he walked anywhere along the roads there used to be carried before him the type of standard which the Romans call tufa and the English call a thuf.

  In general this famous passage shows a conscious respect for the Roman tradition on the part of the Anglo-Saxon kings and a desire to emulate them, to confer legitimacy or prestige on their rule by imitating Roman imperial styles. (We shall see this tendency as it develops through the later English kings.) In this connection it is pertinent to remember that the East-Anglian royal clan, the Wuffingas, may have shared in this conscious claim to inherit something of the authority of Rome in Britain since their pedigree incorporated the name Caesar after Woden. A more succinct expression of the divergent pulls in the Anglo-Saxon tradition could scarcely be found. Unfortunately the Sutton Hoo ‘standard’ with its iron grille and metal cage does not really look like a vexillum, a signum, or a tufa (the Latin words Bede uses to distinguish the Roman standards), nor is it perhaps tall enough to be such. In any case Bede does not connect these specifically with the office of bretwalda, and we must conclude that as yet we have no evidence to link either the ‘standard’ or the ‘sceptre’ with the office of bretwalda.

  THE KINGDOM OF THE EAST ANGLES

  So far in our search for the Sutton Hoo Man we have found evidence of great artistic skill, ambiguous regalia, but no clear evidence for a king, though some for royalty. What proof have we to connect the grave with the East-Anglian royal family at all?

  The grave does not exist in isolation, even at the site itself where there are at least sixteen other mounds, some as yet unopened. Let us now consider what we know about the social background of the kingdom in which the burial took place.

  As soon as the burial was discovered, attention focused on the small neighbouring parish of Rendlesham, four miles further up the Deben from Sutton. The reason was that Rendlesham had long been known to have associations with the East-Anglian kings. Bede mentions that Swithelm, king of the East Saxons, was baptised by Bishop Cedd of East Anglia ‘in the royal village called Rendlesham, that is, the residence of Rendil. King Aethelwald of East Anglia, the brother of King Anna the previous king of the East Angles was his sponsor’. This passage shows us that in Aethelwald’s reign (655–664) the place was a royal residence of the East-Anglian kings, that there was probably a church there, and that it had some importance since the reception of a foreign king and the solemnisation of his baptism took place here. This clue leads us to others.

  Over the river from Rendlesham is Ufford, a name which derives from the Anglo-Saxon name Uffa or Wuffa. Is it a coincidence that the name of the founder of the dynasty is so close to the royal residence? Similarly the name of another village close to Sutton, Kingston, is one of many in England which indicates an Anglo-Saxon royal estate, and in this case we can prove its antiquity, for a charter survives recording the gift of Kingston and Melton (two miles downstream from Rendlesham) to Ely Abbey by the West-Saxon King Edgar in the tenth century. It is a fair supposition that these estates were ancient East-Anglian royal lands which passed into the hands of the West-Saxon kings of England after the Viking wars.

  Most remarkable of all (and here perhaps we enter the world of folk myth) th
ere is a note about Rendlesham in the 1722 edition of Camden’s Britannia:

  It is said that in digging here about thirty years since there was found an ancient crown weighing about sixty ounces, which was thought to have belonged to Redwald, or some other king of the East Angles. But it was sold and melted down.

  The story has inspired much spurious antiquarianism (and an M. R. James ghost story), and has generally been rejected on the grounds that crowns were not worn in Anglo-Saxon England in the seventh century, but this may not be true. When the tomb of the Merovingian Childeric II (who died in 675) was found at St Germain-des-Prés in 1656, those present saw ‘a great gold trapping in the form of a crown round the head of the king’. It was clearly some sort of diadem and similar to those worn by the Romans. This would conform with our understanding of the admiration the Anglo-Saxons had for Rome. That said, until we find out much more about the exact location of the dig, we have to reject this intriguing story as any help in piecing together the Sutton Hoo story, though it certainly adds to its mysterious aura.

  RAEDWALD’S ROYAL HALL?

  The royal hall of the Wuffingas at Rendlesham, the existence of which is implied in Bede’s History, would have been like the contemporary hall of Edwin at Yeavering in Northumberland which has been excavated with great success. The hall at Yeavering was around ninety feet long, and built in timber like some of the later medieval tithe barns which survive today. Its interior may have been decorated like Heorot in the poem Beowulf, with tapestries depicting scenes of the ancient heroes of Scandinavia. There would also have been ancillary buildings including, perhaps, a wooden temple converted to Christian use. At Yeavering there was in addition a remarkable timber structure like a segment of an amphitheatre with a hole for a totem at the centre, clearly a moot where gatherings could be addressed, and a large fort or corral for livestock adapted from its Celtic predecessor on the same site.