If you were to make a list of iconic archaealogical
artefacts from the marketing perspective of Brand Recognition, the Helmet from
the Sutton Hoo burial would be a strong contender for the top 10. Often used as
a shorthand image for History and available on all sorts of items, including drinks
coasters, it is instantly recognisable. But many of us know little about the
society from which it comes. So, as a primer of sorts, to accompany the Netflix
film ‘The Dig’, I offer this brief excursion into 7th Century
England before casting an eye over 1930’s Suffolk.
To set the scene, let us start a little further back. 55
B.C. to be precise, the year Julius Caesar paid us a visit. The Romans had
recently pacified much of Celtic Gaul; their attention was drawn to Britain not
only because some of their opponents had escaped there but because it was the
reputed centre of the Druid cult, whose adherents were notorious as stirrers up
of resistance to Roman Rule.
Caesar didn’t stay long. He skirmished with the Catevellauni
north of the Thames, declared a victory and left. To the East of the region he
visited was the great bulge we today call East Anglia. Norfolk and north
Suffolk was the heartland of the Iceni; Essex was controlled by the Trinovantes.
When the Romans returned in 43 A.D. they received the
submission of both tribes, but greed on the part of Roman officials sparked a
great revolt, led by Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni. The Romans loved to extol
their enemies (once they had safely defeated them) and they were fascinated by
Boudicca. The description by their historians of the warrior queen with the
mass of red hair still resonates today. Xena the Warrior Princess, the Black
Widow and Wonder Woman are all modern avatars of the Iceni queen. She burned the new Roman settlements of
Colchester, St Albans and London before going down to defeat. Thereafter,
Eastern England was a bit of a backwater. The big Roman towns in the East were
further North, at Lincoln and York, or to the south like Colchester and St
Albans, although there were places like Caistor that were significant Roman
settlements. Roman rule lasted around four hundred years and Suffolk was home
to Romano-British estates, though not to large conurbations, linked by the
ubiquitous Roman roads In 410 A.D. Rome itself was sacked by the Goths under
Alaric. The Roman legions in Britain returned to the continent, leaving the
Romano-British to fend for themselves.
But the seeds of change had already been sown. Raiders from
North Germany had begun to be a problem by the middle of the fourth century.
The Romans fortified the coast; there was a fort at Felixstowe which is now
under the sea, and another at Burgh on the Suffolk coast. This was something
that would be repeated under the threat of invasion by Napoleon and then
Hitler, but the troops defending the forts were often from Northern Europe
themselves. As soldiers do, they settled with local women and became part of
the population. Archaeology tells us they were present long before 410; after
the legions left the East rapidly ceased to be part of the Post-Roman society
that survived in the south and west for much longer. A British writer, Gildas,
suggests that a British Leader, Vortigern (whom Gildas describes as a tyrant)
invited Anglo-Saxon mercenaries over to fight the Scots and Picts, letting them
settle in East Anglia.
Waves of settlers soon augmented those already in the
country and eventually some struck out West. We call those who came to Norfolk
and Suffolk Anglian, as opposed to the Saxons who landed further south. At some
point there were enough Anglian settlers further west for those nearer the
coast to be called East Angles, a name that survives as a geographical and to
some extent an ethnic description.
So a genuinely Germanic society developed here as early as
the fifth century. At this point, the question has to be posed, through assimilation
or extermination? Of course, the bards entertaining the Royal courts when they
arose in the following century, would tend to emphasise the heroic element of
the settlement, framing the dynastic founders as brave conquerors. Undoubtedly,
some of the inhabitants would have fled west, especially those with something
to lose. But many would have stayed and come to terms with the newcomers. There
is place name evidence to suggest this happened. Walton, on the outskirts of
Felixstowe, for instance is Wealh Tun, the hamlet where the Welshmen lived.
Other evidence in favour of continuity as opposed to a clean break comes from
the survival of place names associated with coppicing and charcoal burning (there
are thirty-one place names ending in field, denoting an open space within a
forest, many of which are near Roman roads, or Roman potteries, which needed a
constant fuel supply), which suggests survival of these activities without a
break from Roman times. In the 1970’s Oliver Rackham suggested that without
continuity of use the Roman roads would not have survived, nor would the
coppices, which would revert to woodland within a generation. Names beginning
with Ix, Ik and Ick (such as Ixworth, Iken and Ickworth) may also relate to the
Iceni, being places where people who still identified themselves as such still
lived.
What happened next is more difficult to discern. At some
point an aristocracy developed, or was imported. The finds at Sutton Hoo
suggest a close affinity with South Sweden, where similar burials have been unearthed
at Uppsala. One possibility is that aristocratic Swedes came to East Anglia and
took over leadership. Another suggests that East Anglian people visited Sweden
and gained ideas directly through cultural copying. Either possibility has in
its favour the seafaring bent of this society. The heartland of the kingdom
that arose lies on a river estuary close to the coast. Culturally, these people
seem to have looked outward across the sea even more than they looked inland. As
such, they shared ideas, beliefs and an economy with Frisia (what is now
Holland and Belgium), North Germany, Denmark and Sweden.
To them, the sea was a road, and as such, more reliable than
travelling overland. A trader based in Ipswich, the commercial outlet of the
kingdom, could get to York by sea quicker than by land, by sailing up the coast
and down the Humber. For that matter they could get to Dorestad or Quentovic,
the great trading ports on the continent, more quickly than they could get to
York, as Michael Pye points out in his book about the North Sea cultures, The
Edge of The World.
This East Anglian kingdom thus developed and matured whilst
other Anglo-Saxons were still fighting the Britons. The idea of kingship seemed
to come to fruition at the same time in the various Kingdoms. Once a particular
family reached a dominant position in their territory it was in their interests
to foster a sense of belonging, encouraging everyone to identify as East
Anglians, in this case, regardless of their ethnicity. As the seventh century dawned the Kings of
East Anglia were well placed to take a leading role in the politics of the day.
The kings of Kent, Sussex and Wessex had briefly had status as Over-Kings. The
next to do so was the East Anglian Raedwald. Bede calls him Bretwalda, a king who
had the allegiance of other kings. His family called themselves the Wuffingas,
after the founder Wuffa. The name survives in the village name of Ufford, a few
miles from Sutton Hoo. Raedwald influenced the politics of Northumbria,
sheltering the exiled Prince Edwin, and was clearly a man of substance. His
court in the early decades of the century was the epicentre of influence.
This then, was the family who were burying their leaders
above the Deben at Sutton Hoo. But, like a Football team who has a brief moment
of league and cup success before sinking into obscurity, they couldn’t sustain
their pre-eminence. Raedwald’s successors were eclipsed by the Northumbrians
and, even more unluckily, came up against a man who could pick a fight in an
empty room and usually win it; Penda of Mercia. Penda was a man who lived for
war and who seemed to really have it in for the East Anglian kings and whose
successors demanded and received homage from them. Geography was also against
East Anglia remaining the centre of attention, they were too much on the edge
of things in terms of purely English politics.
But although their moment of glory came and went, the East
Anglian Kings may have done their people a favour through their acquiescence. After
Aethelhere died in 655 fighting on the same side as Penda at the battle of
Winwaed in 655, an acknowledgment of Penda’s dominance of the East Anglians, they
stayed out of much of the warfare that characterised the rest of the century. Very few of the battles and carnage occurred
on East Anglian soil and the people probably appreciated the peace and quiet.
It is notable that when the run of Mercian Overlordship came to an end the East
Anglian rulers seemed to have supplied the forces that defeated them; the
kingdom still remained economically and militarily significant despite their
submission up to that point. But thanks
to the obscurity, the mounds at Sutton Hoo were allowed to fade into history;
until the twentieth century.
The finds in the mound seem to signify both tradition and
something new. The style of the burial is pagan, perhaps ostentatiously so,
proclaiming the old ways. At the same time the richness of the finds hints at
the need for the dynasty to proclaim their importance, to advertise themselves
as more than just local leaders. This could denote an insecurity or simply be
an example of one-upmanship. The Wuffingas at this point seem to be sitting on
the fence between the new religion of Christianity, which offered to
consolidate their power (as earthly representatives of the Heavenly King) and
the old pagan ways, still embraced by their contacts in the North. Penda’s
animosity may be explained by the fact that he remained pagan whilst Raedwald’s
successors converted to Christianity.
East Anglia saw a fresh influx of newcomers; the Danes of
the Great army that came in 865 and stayed. Then, having been re-absorbed into
the Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence by the kings of Wessex, it came under the
domination of the Norman Conquerors. In the future, everything between the departure
of the Romans and the arrival of the Normans in 1066 became lumped together as ‘The
Dark Ages’. Written records were thin on the ground but life then was felt to
be primitive. The rationalists of the Enlightenment were inclined to doubt much
of what records survived. For instance, they saw the stories and characters in
the Bible as mere stories with probably no historical basis behind them. It was
only in the nineteenth century when places like Ur, Nineveh and Babylon were
excavated that we began to realise the accuracy of the biblical narrative.
Similarly, even in the twentieth century, historians were
pretty sure they knew that the early English were little better than savages,
especially when contrasted with the achievements of the Romans. Imperial
Britain of course modelled itself on the Roman Empire rather than make too much
of the obscure kings of Anglo-Saxon England.
It is interesting that Suffolk in the 1930’s was, like Roman
Suffolk, something of a backwater. Its last period of economic importance lay
five hundred years back, when wool towns like Lavenham had flourished; its most
famous son was Cardinal Wolsey, from the time of Henry the Eighth. Country Estates
dominated the rural hinterland. At this point, there were still homes in
Suffolk villages with no gas or electricity. Few people owned cars and there
were only two main rail routes; Norwich to London and Ipswich to Cambridge.
The excavation at Sutton Hoo was commenced on the
instructions of the landowner, Edith Pretty. The Estate associated with her
house extended over 526 acres adjacent to the River Deben and included the
burial mound field. She invited Basil Brown, a self-taught local excavator, to
explore the mounds. This was not popular with either Ipswich Museum or later,
when the finds became public knowledge, the British Museum. Although the theme
of the local man of integrity being responsible for the discoveries makes for a
great story, which is at the heart of the film, The Dig, it nonetheless shows
us the essentially feudal nature of the society at that time, which allowed the
landowner with money to overrule the professional archaeologists. This rural
Suffolk was lovingly documented by Ronald Blyth in his book Akenfield, it
arguably survived into the late twentieth Century.
As it happens, Mrs Pretty showed herself to be a good judge
of character, as well as demonstrating an admirable ability to not be
influenced by social niceties, in choosing and championing Basil Brown. But it
could have turned out otherwise. Under the direction of a less capable man much
could have been lost. Luckily for us, he was the right man for the job. The excavation took place in the summer
before the outbreak of World War Two. So there was a certain irony in that it
was opening a window on a connection between Britain and Germany at the very
point the two countries were about to go to war.
Some of the objects, such as the Byzantine Bowl, could be interpreted
as plunder or gift giving between rulers. But the quality of the jewellery and
embellished items such as the gold buckle left no doubt that the society responsible
was a cultured and sophisticated one and forced revision of the view of the
early seventh century. As stated at the beginning, the artefacts have world
significance; the helmet, the gold buckle, the jewellery, are up there with the
death mask of Agamemnon, the items from Egyptian tombs and objects from early medieval
China. Because they were unearthed from beside an English river, it is
sometimes hard to appreciate them clearly. The helmet is especially interesting.
It so matches the description in the poem Beowulf of such a helmet that it is
tempting to wonder if the poet had seen it with his own eyes. Other people have
written about them with more knowledge than I so I won’t go into details here. A link at the end of this article will take you where you need to go.
At this point I must, as they say, declare an interest; I
grew up in Ipswich and was a frequent visitor to the museum where records of
the dig, and replicas of some of the pieces, are housed. To me they are old
friends. Indeed, when, as an adult, I saw them in the British Museum, it was a
bit like hearing of a school friend who had become some-one important; pride by
association mingled with a certain regret they couldn’t have stayed in Suffolk.
The older I get, the more I appreciate that I cannot ever understand the full symbolism
of the zoomorphic animals or the significance of the whetstone, the world they
come from, whilst still Suffolk, is a place beyond my comprehension. Despite
that, we can feel an affinity for it too. They valued family and social
connections, they appreciated beauty and they were connected to a wider world
in a way that too many of their descendants never were.
See also my Review of the film:
https://curiousmiscellanies.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-dig-film-review.html
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