In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  Unfortunately neither fieldwalking nor air photography has yet disclosed any sign of such structures at Rendlesham. Painstaking local research has, however, narrowed down the location of the first Anglo-Saxon church referred to by Bede. The site of the present Church of St Gregory is a possibility, but more likely still is an isolated two-acre strip of glebe land half a mile north-east of the church. Here a sizeable Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery was discovered in 1837, and is possibly the burial place of the staff of the royal village. If we are right in supposing that this is close to the early religious centre at Rendlesham, then the pagan temple and the wooden church which succeeded it could both lie nearby. The early Christian missionaries concentrated their attention on royal courts; kings were their first converts, and the first churches were built for the use of kings. So we would expect the Wuffinga palace to be close to the early church, and the pagan shrine. This relationship existed also at Old Uppsala in Sweden, and as we shall see there may be a family connection between Uppsala and the Wuffingas of Rendlesham and Sutton Hoo. Taken all in all, these factors suggest that the south-eastern part of Suffolk, the valleys of the Deben and the Alde, was the heartland of the East-Anglian royal dynasty.

  ‘SERVING BOTH CHRIST AND THE PAGAN GODS’

  Stand on the cliffs by Old Felixstowe, a mile or two south of the Deben estuary, and look out into the sea. You are looking over the ruins of the Roman Saxon Shore fort of Walton Castle. By 1800 the cliff on which the fort stood had been eroded by the sea and now only fragments of masonry can be seen during exceptionally low tides. All we have to show us what the place was like is a series of sketches made in the seventeenth century showing a rectangular fort with drum towers at the corners. Here in the 630s the first East-Anglian bishopric was founded with the support of the Wuffinga kings. Like other Saxon Shore forts which were taken over by the Church, such as Burgh Castle, Bradwell, Portchester, and Reculver, it evidently passed into the hands of Anglo-Saxon royal leaders early on in the migration period. When the kings adopted Christianity it could be given to the Church as a secure place to build a bishopric. The proximity of Walton to the sites in the Deben valley again points to the importance of this small area to the East-Anglian dynasty.

  But if the royal family had become Christian by the 630s, would a king have been commemorated in unconsecrated ground in a pagan barrow field? When did the family start burying their kings in Christian churches? Does the Sutton Hoo boat grave in fact have any specifically pagan or Christian features about it?

  The barrow field is not a Christian graveyard. Nor is ship burial a Christian mode of interment. There is nothing ritually pagan or Christian about it, indeed nothing formally religious at all. The two silver spoons have been interpreted as christening spoons carrying the names Saulos and Paulos in Greek letters, and could thus refer to Saint Paul’s conversion and subsequent change of name; but unfortunately it is not certain that they do not both read Paulos in which case the theory collapses. In any case it would be difficult to be sure that such items were there because of their Christian significance and not because of their value as exotic silver bullion. This possibility is made more likely by the presence of the rich Byzantine bowls in the grave. Some bear cross motifs, but we cannot therefore assume that their owner was Christian: the bowls are just the sort of treasure we might expect a barbarian chief to gain through gift, exchange, trade or pillage. The fact that the artefacts do not conclusively prove that the grave is a Christian one may be significant. Could the Sutton Hoo Man have been buried before Christianity was thoroughly accepted by the East-Anglian royal house? Bede gives a description of the reign of King Raedwald (599–624) which supports this idea, as it was a period where adherence to Christianity was superficial and wavering.

  Raedwald had been converted in Kent but his attitude was ambivalent and opportunist. On his return to East Anglia he apostatised and eventually seemed to be serving both Christ and the gods whom he had previously served; in the same temple he had one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another smaller altar on which to offer victims to devils. Raedwald was not alone. King Eorpwald was killed by and succeeded by a pagan, King Ricberht (ruled 627–628). Another successor, Ecgric, who does not appear in the genealogies, is not known to have been Christian, and was killed in a battle (636 or 637). A pagan burial which had been influenced by Christianity is not inconceivable in this atmosphere. But it seems unlikely that there are any overt Christian signs at Sutton Hoo. The grave certainly seems pagan, or at least resolutely old-fashioned in a way that draws on the pagan roots of Anglo-Saxon England.

  COMMERCE: KINGS AND MERCHANTS

  The grave might be pagan but other items in it indicate that the people who lived in these pagan times travelled far more extensively than we imagined. Byzantine plate, Merovingian coins, an Egyptian Coptic bowl, imported glass: all these hint at a lively mercantile life. The extraordinary range of rich pieces in the grave can now be seen to have been foreshadowed by earlier isolated finds of Anglo-Saxon antiquities in the Deben valley area: imported blue glass vessels, a gold cloisonné disc brooch, a Coptic bronze bowl of Egyptian origin found at Wickham Market which is a little north of Rendlesham. It would seem, then, that the Deben valley in the sixth and seventh centuries was an area open to trade imports and foreign culture coming into Suffolk from the southeast. Archaeologists are following up those clues and looking at the origins of Ipswich and wondering whether the unexpected number of early settlement finds there might indicate that the town owes its origin as a port to the patronage of the Wuffinga kings of the seventh century.

  In the later seventh and eighth centuries the Dutch coast opposite East Anglia was the centre of a thriving trade, with towns such as Dorestad on the Rhine being particularly large entrepôts between Britain and Europe. We know that foreign merchants were already in England in the seventh century, because Bede mentions a Dutchman (or Frisian) in London in 679. Bede also says that in 731, when he was writing, London was ‘a market for many people who come by land and sea’. The merits of special trading places which are easily accessible by boat are obvious, but archaeologists now suspect that many of these places owe their origin to royal patronage; the kings wished to control wealth coming in. (Charters dating from the early eighth century prove that royal tolls controlled coastal markets, and they may have existed earlier.) There is increasing evidence that there were a number of coastal riverside trading posts in Anglo-Saxon England, some laid out at royal command, all with a merchant class who, though insignificant by royal standards, dealt in luxury goods and used them themselves. Many of these trading stations were called wics, and this name may indicate how old some of our towns are. London appears as Lundenwic in a seventh-century law code; the predecessor of Southampton was Hamwih; York’s name was Eoforwic. Others are still wics today: Fordwich on the Sarre in Kent, with its impressive early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, and Ipswich itself. (The word wic was borrowed by the Germans from the Latin vicus, and obviously here means a trading emporium. As a ‘wic reeve’ looked after royal tolls in London in the seventh century, it may have acquired this meaning early on, and we may presume other wics were also under royal control.)

  The archaeological excavations at Ipswich have not had the publicity of other Anglo-Saxon town digs, but we now know that this was an impressive urban site with a large number of early burials on a 30-acre site showing imported glass, pottery and amphorae, and the extensive production of the Middle-Anglian pottery known as Ipswich Ware (c.650–850). Less than five miles away from Sutton Hoo, does Ipswich have the same relation to the royal sites in the Deben valley as mercantile Southampton is known to have had to the royal and ecclesiastical centre of the West Saxons at Winchester? If so, then as early as the seventh century the town may have been set up by the Wuffingas as a port for traders to sell their wares in the East-Anglian kingdom under royal supervision. In other words, Ipswich may have been one of the chief sources of the Sutton Hoo Man’s income.

  THE SWEDISH CONNECT
ION

  There is one foreign connection which takes us further. Almost as soon as the details of the Sutton Hoo excavation were known and a reconstruction of the helmet published, Swedish archaeologists announced that the helmet, sword and shield had been made in Sweden. (The helmet, with its remarkable tinned plates illustrated with scenes from legend, may be considerably older than the burial.) As we have seen, the Sutton Hoo finds indicate a royal or aristocratic boat burial and this type of burial was common in Sweden during the Anglo-Saxon period. We know from documents and poems that expensive decorated swords and armour were sometimes kept for generations as heirlooms. (The Avar sword owned by King Offa was a treasured possession in the West-Saxon royal house over two hundred years later.) Could these artefacts be Swedish family heirlooms, revered as ancient possessions of the royal house? By the time of the burial (c.620–640), the Wuffinga dynasty had been established for four generations in East Anglia and one of their leaders had risen to become bretwalda, a status which may have made them all the more conscious of their ancient Swedish origin. Close parallels between war gear from Uppland, Sweden, and the Sutton Hoo helmet and shield (the latter are now thought to be from English Anglo-Saxon workshops), the similarity of the Sutton Hoo gravefield and the royal mounds at Old Uppsala, have suggested to many that if the Wuffingas came to England from Sweden, they were an offshoot of the royal house of Uppsala, the Scylfings.

  WHO WAS HE?

  It is tempting to agree with the British Museum team’s conclusion that the man commemorated here was Bretwalda Raedwald, and he does remain perhaps the strongest candidate even though we must probably discount the idea that the grave goods are a bretwalda’s regalia. The arguments for the ‘sceptre’ and ‘standard’ are far from conclusive. What we can say is that the burial is most likely a kind of memorial to a dead king. If it is a cenotaph and not strictly a burial, it may be a memorial to a king who had resigned his power, or a memorial to a king killed in battle or possibly a pagan king buried in a church. But most likely there was a body, and we can presume that he was East Anglian and a Wuffinga, and that he was commemorated in the old Swedish way by burying him in a ship with his war gear and other costly objects associated with him. There is nothing formally religious about it, pagan or Christian. It is a barbaric manifestation of Anglo-Saxon wealth and power from a time before Christianity had been fully assimilated. But in a ‘political’ sense it is conservative: even in those days the ceremony would perhaps have been considered magnificently old-fashioned.

  SUTTON HOO

  There are at least seventeen mounds at Sutton Hoo and many have not been examined. Several are likely to have been ship burials: the telltale signs are clearly visible – an indentation along the length of the mounds in the centre which marks the collapse of the wooden chamber over the centre of the ship. Indeed this collapsed appearance may be the salvation of future archaeologists, for it gives the mounds the appearance of having been robbed, and maybe discouraged Henry VIII’s men, John Dee and other tomb robbers. It seems unlikely that the burial field was used by the East-Anglian royal family after the mid seventh century, although later inhumations have been found there including a severed head which gave a carbon dating in the mid eighth century. If, as seems likely, Rendlesham continued to be a royal residence up until the time that the last of the East-Anglian kings was killed by the Vikings and the royal line ceased, it is probable that the family church was somewhere near the site of the present Church of St Gregory. The pagan grave field at Sutton was left with its ghosts until the sixteenth century when they were disturbed by the excavations of Henry VIII and John Dee. They were then left until 1939, when Basil Brown re-examined them.

  But there is one curious legend which we might add to the Sutton Hoo story. According to an eleventh-century historian of Bury St Edmunds, who based his information on Suffolk tradition, in the dark days of the Viking invasions when the old kingdom of the East Angles finally collapsed, the martyred King Edmund, last of the line of the Wuffingas, was first buried near his royal residence, at Sutton, before he was moved to his final resting place at Bury St Edmunds in the 930s. Is it really conceivable that the East Angles would have temporarily interred their king in the church closest to their ancestral graves? It is tempting to believe this, but I personally think it unlikely. Certainly though, we will only know the answers to the origin of the dynasty when the palace and church at Rendlesham are located, and when all the mounds at Sutton are excavated. Until then the truth behind the enigma of the Sutton Hoo Man will elude us.

  FOUR

  OFFA

  In modern times in Mercia there ruled a mighty king called Offa, who struck all the kings and regions around him with terror. He it was who ordered the great dyke to be constructed between Wales and Mercia, stretching from sea to sea.

  Bishop Asser On the Deeds of King Alfred

  ONE SPRING DAY around the year 787, Welshmen riding the cattle-rustling trails into Anglo-Saxon England came back with astonishing stories. Thousands of Anglo-Saxon levies had moved into the border country with horses and carts carrying rations, tents, rope, nails and weapons. But this time, unlike the mounted expeditions of so many of the previous years, they had not come to burn crops, seize goods and wield weapons of war: this year they had come to use tools – spades, axes, adzes and hammers. For they had been ordered to create a huge bank and ditch along the whole frontier – 25 feet deep, 60 feet across – from the Irish Sea to the Bristol Channel. Like modern motorway constructors they were to cut a swathe through the green countryside.

  In some places Anglo-Saxon villages were being left on the Welsh side, the powerful local magnates helpless before the overlord who had willed the deed. The first work gangs burned off brushwood and grass, cutting down trees and clearing obstacles. Great beacons were lit on the hills to align the longer sections and massive wooden posts hammered in for the shorter ones. Oxen commandeered from local farms dragged heavy ploughs across the blackened earth to make a line for the marker ditches. Then the main gangs set up their camps, most of them farmers doing their military service.

  Doubtless like infantrymen of all times they grumbled and cursed and sang songs while they sweated. A Welshman who knew some Anglo-Saxon might have found out from them that this particular length was the job of his English neighbours, the people known as the Magonsaetan who lived in what is now Shropshire. The men doing other sections might have come from far away and would have had quite different dialects: East Angles, Kentishmen, Peak dwellers from what is now Derbyshire. There would have been specialists too: smiths from Gloucester, quarrymen and masons from Northamptonshire. At one sector our Welsh observer might have seen a mounted party ride up past the lines of diggers and the dumps and stakes and stones, up to a vantage point to watch progress. Among them was the man who had set all this in motion and who supervised each stage with an expert eye; a man to whom all showed deference or fear; an old man but still in full powers: Offa, ‘King of the Mercians and of the whole fatherland of the English’.

  The foregoing scene is imaginary, but much of its detail comes from recent archaeological examinations of Offa’s Dyke itself. Curiously, there is no proof that Offa built the dyke from Offa’s contemporaries: we have to wait till Bishop Asser, writing a hundred years later, tells us that ‘it was Offa who ordered the great dyke to be constructed between Wales and Mercia, stretching from sea to sea’. The dyke still divides the two nations – it is still something of a disgrace for a true Welshman to live on the wrong side – and no one who has walked the Offa’s Dyke Path could fail to be impressed by a structure which still runs along a large part of the 150-mile Welsh frontier and still stands twenty feet high in places.

  To follow it over Edenhope Hill or through the heights of the Clun Forest cannot but invite questions. What was it for? How was it built? Who was the king that, in the so-called Dark Ages, had the power and vision to make it? One historian has compared the labour involved to the building of the Great Pyramid, and Britain’s
leading motorway contractors threw up their hands in despair when asked to cost it today. Strangely enough, there has never been agreement among historians about what the dyke was for, what it looked like when it was first built, or even about its exact course. Offa too remains something of an enigma. He is held to be a key figure in the story of the unification of England. Yet there is no modern biography of him, and none from the eighth century either. The sources for his reign are diffuse, fragmentary, and heavily dependent on later traditions which the historian often considers unreliable. In the last few years, however, some fascinating archaeological discoveries have begun to throw new light on his story.

  MERCIAN ORIGINS

  Until the Viking invasions of the 860s and 870s, England was divided into several kingdoms, of which Offa’s Mercia was one. These kingdoms crystallised gradually out of the various settlements of the Anglo-Saxon races in Britain after the fall of Rome. Racially diverse though these kingdoms were, there was a tradition from early on of rule by an overlord, a ‘bretwalda’ (a word originally meaning ‘wide-ruler’ but which came by Offa’s time to mean ‘Britain-ruler’). The bretwalda was a king to whom other kings were subject; they paid him tribute, attended his court, obtained his permission for their grants of land in their own territory, and fought under his leadership in war. This overlordship was held by kings of Sussex, Wessex, Kent and East Anglia for short periods between the late fifth and the early seventh century, and as we have seen in the previous chapter, it has been argued that the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon archaeological discoveries, the Sutton Hoo ship treasure, is the burial of the East-Anglian bretwalda, Raedwald.