Barbarians- Secrets of the Dark Ages

by Richard Rudgley

  What evidence is there to support Chadwick's emphatic selection of Raedwald as the focus of the Sutton Hoo ship burial? Martin Carver has summarised the key arguments in favour of this identification. Firstly, the contents of the burial chamber are the richest treasure to be found from this period, and so it is fitting to link them with a royal grave. Sutton Hoo is in East Anglia, therefore a king of East Anglia would be the most obvious candidate. The artefacts from the mound were indisputably seventh century in date, and so a seventh-century king would obviously fit the bill. The burial was in Mound 1, the largest of the mounds at the site and so likely to be the resting-place of the most powerful king of the time. Raedwald as controller of much of England again seems the most logical. The artefacts seemingly displayed both Christian and pagan symbolism – both of which, as we have already noted, appealed to him.

  Concerning the dating of the burial, there was still some fine tuning to be done. Various exotic items in the treasure would help to establish it more accurately. An impressive silver dish was marked with a stamp of a Byzantine emperor named Anastasius I, who reigned from 491 to 518. This meant that the burial could not be earlier than 491. Radiocarbon dating of a piece of wood and a lump of wax gave, with its usual margin of error, dates that were not precise enough to pin the date down accurately enough.

  A number of Merovingian coins that had been minted in France seemed like a better bet. At first there was some confusion and they were dated to somewhere between 650 and 660. This was accepted for some time and seemed to put Raedwald completely out of the picture. But in 1960 a French coin expert corrected this by stating that the latest date that could be put on the coins was around 625 – the date of Raedwald's death. It is because of the very convincing nature of these numerous arguments in favour of Raedwald being the man who was buried in Mound 1 that this identification has been generally accepted. We cannot be 100 per cent sure, but the odds are very strongly in its favour.

  Mound 1, the biggest of the mounds and the location of the great ship burial, dominates Sutton Hoo but there are another seventeen mounds of various sizes at the site. It is believed that they were raised in order to bury other prominent members of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. They are a far cry from the more modest burials of most cemeteries of the time. Most of those buried at Sutton Hoo were men, but at least one wealthy woman and a few children were also laid to rest there. Mound 17 contained the remains of the burial of a young man laid to rest with his horse. A young person who was buried in Mound 5 had suffered a violent death, the skull cut by repeated blows from a sword. There was even another ship burial inside Mound 2, although on a smaller scale – the vessel was about 20 metres (65 feet) long. A number of the mounds remain deliberately unexcavated, the archaeologists having chosen to leave this task to future generations who will have many new kinds of scientific techniques unknown and unsuspected by their counterparts today.

  It is quite probable that the other mound burials once contained the bodies of other members of the lineage of Raedwald and his close associates. It has been suggested that leaders both before and after the time of Raedwald may have been buried at Sutton Hoo. From the middle of the sixth century the East Angles had been ruled by the Wuffinga dynasty. The first ruler of East Anglia in this line was Wehha, whose son Wuffa gave his name to the dynastic house. Descent from the god Woden was also claimed by these pagan kings. It has been surmised that Mound 5 contained the mortal remains of Wehha, Mound 6 Wuffa (died 578), and Mound 7 Wuffa's son Tyttla (died 599).

  Certainly there was no shortage of sudden and often violent deaths during and after the reign of Raedwald. The clashes between kingdoms were often bloody. Aethelfrith, the king of Northumbria, ejected a troublesome prince of a rival royal house named Edwin from his kingdom. After wandering through other kingdoms, Edwin found his way to the court of Raedwald in East Anglia. Aethelfrith regretted letting Edwin go and was now anxious to put an end to his potential rival for the Northumbrian throne. He tried to both bribe Raedwald with silver and gold and coerce him with intimations of war in order to have Edwin handed over.

  Raedwald decided that the best course of action was simply to attack Aethelfrith – and to do so rapidly. Caught by surprise, Aethelfrith was killed and his forces defeated, and Edwin was installed as the new king of Northumbria. But this change of power was not gained without Raedwald paying a heavy price, as one of his sons died in the conflict. After Raedwald's own death another of his sons came to power, only to be murdered soon after. Raedwald's son (or perhaps stepson) and nephew were both killed while fighting the forces of Penda, the king of Mercia.

  There would have been little problem in filling the cemetery at Sutton Hoo, but it seems that the time around 650 marked the shift away from pagan burial, and subsequent kings of the dynasty were buried in churches or Christian graveyards.

  The Death Throes of a Pagan World

  The sheer size of the ship and the wealth exhibited by the treasure from Mound 1 makes Sutton Hoo one of the most remarkable finds to have been unearthed in Britain. But what does it all mean? Why had the king been buried in a boat and why had so many things been deposited in the ground? Martin Carver has suggested that in a society that was not literate, such as the one that buried its dead at Sutton Hoo, this was one of the ways they could make statements that a literate people would have written down. The various mounds and their contents are statements that would have been read as easily as later peoples would read a book. The language of the mounds and the material culture they contained would have been well understood at the time. Today we cannot read it so easily, but it is not entirely unintelligible.

  The single most obvious feature of the Mound 1 burial is the presence of the ship. Boat burial, as we have seen, was also practised at Fallward but the centre of such a tradition is further to the north. As far back as the Bronze Age, the people of Scandinavia would bury their dead inside a group of upright stones in the shape of a ship. Long after Sutton Hoo the Vikings would continue the ancient traditions of boat burial. The Britons before the Anglo-Saxon era do not seem to have done so, and we can see Raedwald's burial as a statement aligning him with Scandinavia.

  Carver also makes analogies between the time of Sutton Hoo and our own era. Britain still finds itself in two minds concerning greater integration with the rest of Europe. It is surely no accident when the British sometimes refer to continental Europe as simply Europe, almost as if we are outside it. The desire for autonomy and the maintaining of long-established tradition vies with the advantages of new trading possibilities in a changing political landscape. For Raedwald and other leaders of the time Christianity offered the chance to forge new alliances with continental leaders and all that went with that. Paganism offered the sense of security that the familiar provides. His vacillations on this issue eventually cost him and his ilk dear. As Carver put it:

  Whether or not the occupants of East Anglia were Scandinavians in body, they were Scandinavians in soul, members of a North Sea culture for which Christianity meant ideological conquest by France and a political wrong turn. Politically the people of East Anglia were North Sea, people, adherents to free enterprise and small trading settlements as opposed to the urban network and the state. This was and still is an area of profound political controversy in northern Europe. Archaeology is beginning to suggest some of the pagan mental strife which has gone unrecorded by documents largely composed for Christians by Christians.

  The actual funeral must have been a great drama in itself. The preparation of the mound, the inviting of guests from near and far to pay their respects – some of the foreign items found in the burial chamber may have been brought to Sutton Hoo by foreign allies and envoys. To the archaeologist, the Sutton Hoo ship burial is as important a testimony to the richness of Anglo-Saxon life as is Beowulf. The poem spoke of the sumptuous trappings of a king buried with his treasure under a mound visible from the sea. Before Sutton Hoo was excavated, it was still believed that the Anglo-Saxon world that follow
ed that of the Romans in Britain was a squalid, primitive period that deserved to be dubbed the Dark Ages. Sutton Hoo showed that there was much factual as well as poetic truth in Beowulf. Treasures described in the poem, which had so long been put down to poetic licence, were not just the product of a rich imagination – they were buried in the mounds of Sutton Hoo. The Scandinavian links are there both in the poem and the site. Not just the tradition of ship burial itself, but many of the objects from the chamber, bear the unmistakable hallmark of Swedish influence.

  Bold, spectacular and even ostentatious, the great theatrical statement of Sutton Hoo was a final fling, the death throes of a pagan dynasty. For about a hundred years this royal and aristocratic cemetery was a centre of power and a focus for the glamour of the regime that came to be buried in it. Paganism was on the wane and it would soon be consigned to history.

  Chapter Fifteen

  TREASURES OF A WARRIOR KING

  Many archaeologists maintained the belief that after the Romans left northern Europe the material culture of the barbarians plummeted… the discovery of a royal grave at Sutton Hoo, packed with a magnificent range of possessions, had a startling effect on the interpretation of Anglo-Saxon culture.

  Angela Evans, curator of the Sutton Hoo treasure

  At Sutton Hoo, each of the items in the incomparable trove of heathen treasure was a testament to the complex nature of the period. The regional and international connections that Raedwald maintained are recorded by their very presence in his burial chamber. Each has its own story to tell concerning the technical abilities, the artistic power and the aspirations of late Anglo-Saxon paganism on the verge of extinction. Besides the ship itself and the magnificent sword – such important symbols that they are merit the following chapter to themselves – a host of other objects that make up the finds from the burial chamber highlight the numerous roles that this Dark Ages king would have played: the warrior-king, the bountiful host in his great hall, the civic and ceremonial leader of his subjects and, more sobering, as simply a man.

  A Man of Many Parts

  Many of the objects from Sutton Hoo are on display in the British Museum. Angela Evans is the curator in charge of the artefacts and, as such, she has inevitably given much thought to what this remarkable collection of Anglo-Saxon objects might have meant in its own time. She believes that while we may view it as an inventory of all the things it was believed that the king might need in the afterlife, it also had a very worldly statement to make. It was an expression of disposable wealth: the means by which the Wuffinga dynasty to which he belonged could very publicly demonstrate their power and their continuing potency: 'The king is dead – long live the king'. It was a material sacrifice that they patently believed they could afford. It was worth its political weight in gold.

  The most important object that manifests the king's status as commander of his armed forces and a warrior in his own right is, of course, the sword. Other weapons were placed in the burial: six spears, three barbed throwing spears known as angons, and an unusual iron instrument that combined the attributes of an axe and a hammer. His defensive equipment consisted of a coat of mail, a shield and a magnificent helmet. The mail was strong but flexible. It was made of links a mere 8 mm (a third of an inch) thick and strengthened with copper. The lime wood shield, badly damaged, is thought to have had a diameter of a little less than a metre (3 feet). In style and manufacture, it has been linked to Swedish workmanship. It was fitted with ornate trapping, suggesting that it was more for show than use.

  The helmet has become perhaps the best known of all the objects from the burial chamber. When it was excavated, it was in a very poor state of repair and it is only through the great skill and ingenuity of its restorers that its full glory has been brought back to the light of day. The cap was made from a single piece of iron, to which were attached two iron side flaps and a neck guard at the back. On top of this iron core there was a layer of a mixture of tin and bronze, which gave it a silvery colour. The restorers believe the inside of the helmet was probably lined with leather for comfort. A steel replica was made by the Armouries of the Tower of London. Angela Evans told me of a rather unexpected aspect of the helmet. At a conference in the 1970s, Rupert Bruce-Mitford wore the replica helmet and, despite his having a very soft voice, a booming and stentorian sound emanated from it. It must have been a very dramatic sound in Anglo-Saxon times.

  The helmet was divided into a number of panels that were decorated with four different designs. One of these is known as 'the fallen warrior scene'. It depicts a warrior on horseback with his spear and shield trampling on an enemy clad in mail who is stabbing the horse with his sword. This scene is by no means unique to this helmet, but is a traditional northern European motif that dates back to an earlier period. This motif, along with some of the technical features of its making, have led to the helmet being linked to Scandinavian and, more specifically and in line with the shield, Swedish influences.

  One of the most complex and beautifully crafted examples of the Anglo-Saxon love for the ambiguous image is to be found on the front part of the helmet. The iron crest is in the form of a snake inlaid with silver, and is finished with animal heads in gilt bronze, the eyes of garnet. The eyebrows also terminate in gilt-bronze heads, this time being those of boars. These features in conjunction with the cast bronze nose and moustache make up another co-existent image – that of a bird in flight. The tail is the moustache, its body the nose, its wings the eyebrows, and its beak confronts the mouth of the serpent descending from the top of the helmet. Today we can only admire the workmanship and artistic power of this composite image. In its own time it surely had many meanings that we will never be able to grasp.

  Other artefacts from the burial show the importance of feasts and hospitality in the Anglo-Saxon world – the king certainly entertained in style. Three cauldrons were found in the burial chamber; the largest, made from a single piece of bronze, had a diameter of 70 cm (28 inches) and held about 100 litres. It hung from a wonderfully wrought chain nearly 3.5 metres (11 feet 6 inches) long, which was replicated in the 1970s by H. C. Landon, a master blacksmith who, with the help of his brother, completed a complex and demanding task few in his trade could have managed. This was no plain and simple chain: it had different elements, each with its own intricate and distinct patterning. The length of the chain gives us an idea of the height of Raedwald's hall. The chain would have been attached to a cross-beam that must have been at least 5 metres (about 16 feet) from the ground.

  More ostentatious than these robust cauldrons and chain was the sixteen-piece set of silver that came from the workshops of the eastern Mediterranean. Angela Evans has surmised that they may have been a diplomatic gift. The largest piece, the silver dish with the stamp of emperor Anastasius I, has a diameter of just over 72 cm (28 inches). It is possible that a meal might have been placed on this dish as part of the funeral ceremony. Two silver spoons found among the king's effects have been seen as evidence of his dabbling with Christianity. Both have crosses on them and Greek inscriptions reading respectively Saulos and Paulos. It is believed by some that this is a reference to the conversion of St Paul on the road to Damascus.

  Beside these imported wares were two drinking horns, objects that epitomise the age-old traditions of the Germanic peoples. Yet these were not simply a pair of rustic vessels but elegant objects decorated with silver-gilt depictions of animals, birds and human faces. A set of bottles of maple wood were found alongside the horns; these were also adorned with finely decorated silver gilt. What their contents were is unknown. Part of a finely made maple-wood lyre also survived, along with a few hairs identified as the remains of a beaver skin bag that once contained it. This six-stringed instrument may once have played music that accompanied recitals of poems and tales such as Beowulf.

  Along with the sword, the sceptre is perhaps the most enigmatic and fascinating object of them all. It was a symbol of royal power, but much of the subtle symbolism eludes the modern
observer who cannot read it in the way it would have been in Raedwald's day. There are four heads at each end; some are bearded, while others are not. It seems clear that these are meant to be the faces of individuals rather than simply uniform heads. They may be representations of earlier members of the Wuffinga lineage. If this is so, then the sceptre has a totemic quality and openly expresses the king's right to rule – his dynastic origins and the tacit endorsement of his ancestors. Between the two sets of heads is a whetstone with four sides. It bears no sign of ever having been used, which strongly hints that it was purely symbolic. Sword-sharpening was a symbol of the king as warrior and his ability to summon his men to arms. At the top of the sceptre there is a bronze stag with antlers. The sceptre as a whole is a unique item and may represent a fusion of diverse styles of barbarian art. It owes nothing to Roman influence. Whetstones with carved heads at the end are known in the Celtic art of Britain, but the other features of the Sutton Hoo sceptre make any direct comparisons impossible.

  There are yet other wondrous objects: a matching pair of shoulder-clasps that would have been used to fasten a front and a back leather plate together; a so-called 'purse-lid'; and a large gold belt buckle (weighing over 400 grams/14 ounces). All were part of a set and made to match, wrought as they were from gold, the first two also adorned with garnets. These objects can truly be said to be the work of master craftsmen producing unique and especially commissioned pieces for a very wealthy and powerful client. They are part of the collection on display in the British Museum, and visitors can appreciate for themselves the technical perfection of the craftsmen and the excellent taste displayed by their designs.