Despite this, however, a certain amount of caution is needed because not all of these English pots were necessarily made by or for Saxons. They would have been first brought to England from the continent, but the local Britons may have found them attractive and started to make and use them. The case is similar to that of the deformed skulls of the Huns – a practice spread by the Huns and then taken up by other barbarians. In short, we can discern Saxon origins of pottery and Saxon influence on it, but it does not always mean that all the people who lived at the place where the pottery was found were necessarily exclusively Saxon.
To find traces of the earliest Anglo-Saxons in England, I visited some of the key archaeological sites that have shed light on the shadowy world of this migration. One of the more unusual sites in England lies in the midst of what is, for all intents and purposes, a small American town: RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. It has been a USAF base for more than half a century, yet has hardly become integrated into mainstream British culture. It is a home-from-home for the USAF, with its shopping malls and fast food restaurants where you can spend dollars or pounds.
A good place to live is a good place to live whatever the era, and the site of the air base was first settled in the Stone Age. Long before the first planes or even the invention of gunpowder, the site had military associations. In the Iron Age, Celtic warriors watered their horses at what is now the base's pond. Roman legionnaires were garrisoned nearby and evidence of a Roman villa has been found at what is now RAF Lakenheath High School. While F15s and other state-of-the-art fighter planes roar across the skies above Lakenheath, below the ground lie the remains of the cultures of the past.
The name Lakenheath is said to come from the Anglo-Saxon place name Lokenhyte, meaning 'the landing place of Laka's people'. The true nature of the Anglo-Saxon connection came to light in the late 1950s, when some new buildings were being built. Archaeologists discovered the remains of an ancient cemetery, excavating thirty-three burials that appeared to belong to the Early Anglo-Saxon period (which comes after the Roman period). Along with the human remains were rich deposits of grave goods: spears, shields, daggers, brooches and beads. With intermittent demolition and construction work taking place, new parts of the ancient site were revealed in the 1960s, 1997 and most recently 2001. Many more human remains and artefacts have come to light over the years, giving us shafts of light into the murk of the Dark Ages.
Until very recently, it was thought on the basis of the excavations that the Anglo-Saxons at this site were mercenaries who had been brought to Britain just after the Roman period, in the early to mid fifth century; they had stayed on and died here. Now more accurate dating techniques show the burials to belong to the late fifth or early sixth century, which would probably make them part of a later wave of Anglo-Saxon immigrants who came from the continent to actually settle permanently in Britain. It has not been possible to pinpoint the date of many of the finds, but the material found so far at Lakenheath spans the time from the fifth to the seventh centuries. The archaeologists reckon that most of the objects discovered at Lakenheath belong to the middle of the Early Anglo-Saxon period.
In 1997, while the base's Softball Field No. 1 was being dug up to make way for a new dormitory block, the local archaeologists who had been employed to oversee the project called a halt to the work when pieces of human bone came to the surface. These few fragments turned out to be the tip of the iceberg, and by the end of the archaeological investigation about 170 Anglo-Saxon graves had been excavated, making it one of the largest cemeteries known from this period. No evidence of Christian burials has been found, so this is assumed to be an entirely pagan cemetery.
One particularly dramatic find made in the 1997 season caused a minor media sensation – an Anglo-Saxon warrior buried with his horse and his weaponry. Examination of the man's skeleton showed that he was 5 feet 10 inches tall and in his early thirties. The horse seems to have been pole-axed, killed in order to accompany its master to the grave, a practice of many barbarian peoples including the Huns. His sword was a fine weapon embodying the skill of its maker. Nearly eighty metal strips had been used in the subtle alchemy of the swordsmith to forge a single blade. The warrior was obviously someone of high social standing, perhaps a member of a noble clan, and certainly belonged to the military elite.
To date, about a hundred iron spearheads have been found in male graves at Lakenheath. It would be hasty to conclude that this is clear proof of a warrior-based society; studies of the numerous human bones from the site has not corroborated this. Despite the greater hardships and risks of day-to-day existence then compared with now, there are surprisingly few instances of traumatic injuries or deaths. No clear and incontrovertible proof of fighting has been found. This has led archaeologists to conclude that the spear was more of a status symbol (revealing the social standing of its bearer) than a regularly used weapon.
Other kinds of weapons are scarce. A number of iron bosses are all that remain of the wooden shields used by the Anglo-Saxons. There are a couple of axes, some arrowheads and the odd high status sword. The scarcity of swords suggests that only the top men would have been buried with this kind of weapon. There seem to be three kinds of male burial: men who had swords, men who had spears, and men who had neither; this suggests that there may have been three social classes. But it is always dangerous to jump to conclusions and we cannot be sure of this. However, there were three distinct classes elsewhere in the Saxon world: the nobiles (nobles), the ingenui (freemen) and the liti (the dependent). There was a taboo forbidding the three social classes from intermarrying; transgression was punished by death.
There are also a few cases of small children being buried with spears, but most infant graves contain small pots, perhaps meant to hold food or milk for the afterlife. These pots are embellished with very distinctive Germanic stamped decoration. Pots containing food were also found in adult graves. Brooches are among the most popular grave goods found in the burials of women. They belong to a style that is also found on the continent and their discovery in Suffolk, Norfolk and up the north-east side of England marks them out as a type that is distinctly Anglo-Saxon.
So the weapons, everyday pots and the jewellery discovered at Lakenheath all reveal the recent continental origin of those people who made and used them. The pottery is probably the clearest indicator. The shape and decoration of their pottery link these people with continental Europe and it is completely different to the Romano-Celtic pots that precede it. For archaeologists from both England and Germany, the pots clearly bear the undeniable signatures of their Saxon origin.
Although they were recent immigrants, their behaviour reveals that they did not see themselves as unconnected with the past peoples of Britain. Among the most recent revelations made at Lakenheath, in the summer of 2001, was the reason for the Anglo-Saxons choosing this particular place to bury their dead. In the middle of their cemetery lie some Bronze Age burials. In Anglo-Saxon times this area would still have had the prehistoric burial mound pretty much intact and, by deciding to place their dead near those of the earlier people, they seem to have been making a conscious and concrete link with the past. They sensed that this had been a holy place in earlier times than their own. This was not the only Anglo-Saxon site that was selected because of its earlier, prehistoric occupation, as we shall see later in the case of West Heslerton in Yorkshire. Of course, in a later period, churches were routinely built on sites of pagan significance although in these cases the motive was rather different – to obliterate the memory and the power of the pagan deities.
Overall, the archaeological evidence definitely points to the strong influence of Germanic cultures, but whether the people of Lakenheath were themselves all continental or included Britons who were copying and using continental products we cannot be certain. There is no evidence from Lakenheath that indicates a violent and dramatic invasion by the newcomers, so the most likely explanation is that the migrants integrated fairly peacefully with the natives. Thi
s seems to contradict the violent storyline of Gildas's account.
Perhaps we have not only a Britain split in two – one half Celtic, Christian and 'civilised', and the other Germanic, pagan and 'barbarian' – but also two very different stories: one from the writings of Celts and Christians, and one from the material remains of the Anglo-Saxons of Lakenheath. Evidence from other early sites also shows a more peaceful world, one that existed in a sleepy village in Suffolk: West Stow.
Chapter Twelve
RECONSTRUCTING THE ANGLO-SAXONS
West Stow is a constant reminder of the debt we owe the past, particularly to those early Anglo-Saxon communities who laid the foundation of society today.
Stanley West, excavator of West Stow
The Anglo-Saxon site of West Stow is in the same county as Lakenheath – Suffolk. It is set on a small hill on the banks of the river Lark a few miles to the west of the town of Bury St Edmunds. After its excavation, it was decided that an attempt should be made to reconstruct, as authentically as possible, the old village. This was a large-scale and long-term project in experimental archaeology. The idea was to try to make things (buildings in this instance) in the way that they would originally have been made. The durability of buildings naturally needs to be monitored over a number of years, and the reconstruction of the material culture of the Anglo-Saxons of West Stow has been on-going since the early 1970s. It is the realisation of this project that greets the visitor today.
West Stow is open to the public, who can get a flavour of what life in a typical Anglo-Saxon village might have been like. Some days it is populated by members of Angelcynn (Old English meaning 'the English people'), a re-enactment society who not only dress the part but seek to recreate the cuisine, the crafts and many other aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. As they are part-time dwellers at West Stow, actually using the village as their living space, the Angelcynn also have some interesting ideas about how the village might have been used. They understand it in a way that perhaps the archaeologists and other visitors are unable to do. One of the members told me that it was almost as if each building worked rather like one room of a large dwelling. The largest of the reconstructed buildings at West Stow acts as a lounge-cum-kitchen-cum-dining room. It is the 'room' where the main socialising goes on. The weaving house on the site is like a workshop off to one side, while other buildings would have played the role of bedrooms.
Rebuilding the Anglo-Saxon Past
The story of the excavation of West Stow begins in the middle of the Second World War, when the archaeologist Basil Brown (who had made his name as the excavator of Sutton Hoo, about which more in later chapters) discovered a couple of pottery kilns from the Romano-British period. Stanley West joined Brown in the study of these remains and it was soon realised that there were shards of Early Anglo-Saxon pottery strewn across the site. After a number of years digging elsewhere, West returned to dedicate himself long-term to the study of West Stow.
The site of West Stow was first used by Stone Age hunters and fishermen, who left their flint tools behind them. Somewhat later, in the Neolithic period (New Stone Age), a number of people were cremated at the site, and one burial with a solitary stone bead was found. These modest finds from remote times were not the only signs of human activity before the Romano-British evidence. In the Iron Age there were a number of loosely connected farmsteads with enclosures and ditches. By AD 60 the Iron Age occupation was over, and replaced by a cluster of kilns used in the manufacture of a wide variety of quality ceramics during the first and second centuries.
In 1849, only 400 metres from the West Stow site, an Anglo-Saxon cemetery was discovered; about a hundred graves were excavated, along with some 150 miscellaneous objects. These were variously dated from the fifth to the early seventh century, and the village itself dates from the same period. (After it was abandoned in the seventh century, the site was not used again for another 600 years.) This was one of the earliest villages of the Anglo-Saxon settlers, and the remains from West Stow allow the archaeologists to see three distinct phases of the settlement over this time. The initial phase is basically the fifth century; the second phase is sixth century; and the third covers the late sixth and early seventh century. With the present state of knowledge, it is not possible to be less vague than that.
The excavations revealed that there were seven 'halls' (buildings constructed with rectangular settings of post holes) and seventy 'houses', which the archaeologists prefer to call 'sunken-feature buildings' (SFBs for short), as this is a more neutral term that does not commit one to saying what their use might have been. SFBs of similar type have been discovered in England and on the continent, and used to be called 'pit-houses', 'sunken houses' or Grubenhauser (the German for 'pit-houses'). The SFBs may be divided into various types, but for our purposes we need only treat some of the key features of interest. All of them have a roughly rectangular pit over which they were built – hence the name 'pit-house' that was given to them.
Five of the seven halls were built along the central part of the hill, and all the indications are that this is a sign that the community was well organised. The other two halls break with the original plan of the village: one is off to the north and the other to the south. More is known about two of the halls (Hall 1 and Hall 2) than the others. Calculating from the centre of the post holes, Hall 1 would have been 7.9 metres (26 feet) long and 4.1 metres (13 feet 6 inches) wide. There appear to have been two doors, one in the east wall and one in the south. The eastern doorway (if, indeed, that is what it was) was about a metre (just over 3 feet) wide; the southern doorway a little narrower.
Hall 2 is not only one of the largest of all the West Stow buildings but it also commanded a position at the very hub of the village. It was 9.75 metres (32 feet) long and 4.27 metres (14 feet) wide. It was also the only hall to have an internal partition, which gave it a separate room at the east end measuring 2.44 by 4.27 metres (8 by 14 feet). Hall 2 appears to have had a doorway 1.8 metres (6 feet) wide. Both halls had large hearths in the centre of the building. The largest of all the buildings is Hall 7, which once stood on the northern slope of the hill. It was approximately half as big again as Hall 2.
A certain amount of detective work is needed to understand how the settlement developed and how it functioned. Stanley West believes that there are three plausible scenarios. The first is that each SFB was a family house, and that there was only one hall in the village at any given time. In this case, a single hall would have been the focal point of the whole community; it would have functioned pretty much as a village hall does today. In this respect, it would seem to echo the use of a similar building on the Feddersen Wierde site. The experimental building of a hall showed that a life-span for the building before it subsided or totally collapsed could easily have been more than a quarter of a century. The seven halls would then have succeeded each other over a period of roughly 200 years, which approximates to the life of the Anglo-Saxon village.
So far, so good – but there are weaknesses inherent in this reconstruction of the organisation of the village. Firstly, it means that we have to accept that the hall is constantly moving its location in the village; secondly, that some of the SFBs that are contemporary with each other seem to have been used regularly and intensively for specific activities. This suggests that one family probably used more than one building.
The second scenario holds that there were three (extended) family units in the village, each with its own group of SFBs and a central building in the form of a hall. There are a number of problems with this concept too, not the least of which is that it means some of the individual halls would have had to remain in use for the best part of a century – a lot to ask from a timber building of this type, based on the experience gleaned from trying to build one. The third possibility is that there were two rather than three early centres. In this case two groups of SFBs would have clustered around each of the co-existing halls.
There are pros and cons with all these scenario
s, and we cannot really be sure which is the most likely. It is also difficult to be sure how many people lived in the village at any one time. We can estimate that a single hall along with eight to ten SFBs could accommodate an extended family of around thirty.
The previous designation of SFBs as 'pit-houses' reflected an idea that had been present among both continental and British archaeologists since the nineteenth century – that the 'primitive' Anglo-Saxons would have been quite at home in what was thought to be their chosen way of making a house. It was thought to be little more than a pit that had been dug in the ground and covered with a bivouac type of thatched roof. It was believed to have no planked floor, and the refuse found in the pits was used as confirmation that these people wallowed in their own filth. Barbarians were supposed to have lived in this fashion through their ignorance of anything more comfortable or technically accomplished. Today, this view of Saxon housing sounds completely ridiculous.
Stanley West admits that something along these lines was what he had in mind when he began excavating West Stow in 1965. Apart from a few sporadic instances of pit-houses discovered in England, almost all the work had been done in Germany. It was Germany's own archaeologists to whom this prejudicial view of the Germanic peoples' technical capacities can ultimately be traced. The work of West and others at the village site has done much to destroy this erroneous notion.
Barbarians- Secrets of the Dark Ages Page 14