The archaeological discovery at Sutton Hoo—a sensation depicted in the film ‘The Dig’—is perhaps the last gasp of a lavish English medieval funerary tradition, reports National Geographic.
A remarkable find
This extraordinary helmet was buried with its Anglo-Saxon owner, an elite warrior or possibly even a king, at Sutton Hoo in the early 600s A.D.
Archaeologists can be a careful bunch. They hedge their bets, question the data at every turn, and tend to spurn any hint of sensationalism. But bring up the ancient burial mounds of Sutton Hoo in southeast England, and even the most circumspect scholar will spout superlatives. Magnificent! Monumental! Unparalleled!
In 1939, archaeologists discovered a 1,400-year-old Anglo-Saxon burial at the site that included an entire ship, as well as a dizzyingly rich cache of grave goods. The spectacular find changed historians’ understanding of early medieval Britain, says Sue Brunning, the curator who cares for the now legendary artifacts at the British Museum. “It transformed everything in a stroke.”
Recent publicity
Eighty-two years later, the Sutton Hoo ship burial is back in the public eye thanks to The Dig, a new Netflix movie starring Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, and Lily James. But in the early seventh century A.D., when the last spade of dirt was tossed over the Anglo-Saxon warrior and his treasures, the practice of burying the dead with piles of bling was falling out of fashion. Within a century of Sutton Hoo, most English burials contained little more than decaying bodies. What caused the shift?
“Humans had been burying people in ships for centuries and millennia,” says Brunning. The same went for grave goods. In early medieval Europe, people were rarely buried without at least some of the things they held dear, from beads to coins, horse harnesses, and more.
A photo from the original Sutton Hoo excavation shows the remains of the wooden ship that was buried in the earth of southeast England some 1,400 years ago.
An unexpected find
When the Sutton Hoo artifacts were discovered, they instantly changed historians’ image of the era once called the Dark Ages. The grave goods were exquisitely crafted out of materials from around the world and suggested that the early medieval society portrayed in epic poems like Beowulf might be more reality than myth. “That sort of thing was previously thought to be largely fantasy,” Brunning says.
But the practice of furnishing graves had already started to die out by the time Sutton Hoo’s unnamed Anglo-Saxon elite breathed his last. Between the sixth and eighth centuries A.D., graves in England became simpler and sparser.
A dying tradition
In an attempt to understand how and why the practice died out, archaeologist Emma Brownlee, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Girton College who specialises in early medieval burial practices, dug into archaeological records that document more than 33,000 early medieval graves. Her analysis, recently published in the journal Antiquity, covered 237 cemeteries in northwestern Europe, the majority of them in England.
Using descriptions and drawings of tens of thousands of graves excavated over the past 60 years, Brownlee painstakingly calculated the average number of objects per grave, down to the last bead. She also gathered other important information, such as how long the cemeteries were in use, and what the most reliable dating techniques suggested about their age.
Then the number crunching began. Her map shows England abandoning grave goods as early as the mid-sixth century. By the time the Anglo-Saxon warrior was interred around 625, furnished burials were well on their way to abandonment.
“After the seventh century, nobody is being buried with things in their graves,” says Brownlee.
Since her data skews toward England, Brownlee cautions that English people didn’t necessarily lead the way. Nonetheless, her data shows that England finished its turn toward simpler burials by the 720s, while the rest of northwestern Europe took another half-century to follow suit.
The birth of England—and the death of furnished burial
The evolving burial practices coincided with a time of profound change in England. Once under Roman rule, England became independent around 410 and faced wave after wave of conquerors, including the Germanic Angles and Saxons.
Between 400 and 600, these pagan powers coalesced into kingdoms that converted to Christianity in the seventh century. The most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms survived the Viking invasion that began in the ninth century. They went on to unite as the Kingdom of England in 927 and form the basis of the modern British monarchy.
The warrior interred with the ship is thought to have been an Anglo-Saxon king, perhaps Rædwald of East Anglia, who ruled a kingdom that included Suffolk between about 599 and 624. Dates on coins buried at the site coincide with his reign, and the quality and value of the grave goods suggest a person of extreme influence.
So, too, does the existence of the grave itself. “The very act of dragging a ship up from the river downhill, digging a hole big enough to contain the ship, and building the burial chamber is almost like a piece of theatre,” says Brunning. “We can imagine it involved huge groups of people. The funeral itself would have been an enormous occasion, and the [barrow] was so enormous, it could probably be seen from the river below when people sailed by.”
The change in burial practices
The individual interred at Sutton Hoo was buried with his sword. Recent research by British Museum curator Sue Brunning suggests that the weapon’s Anglo-Saxon owner was left handed.
Archaeologists think Sutton Hoo was also a burying ground for the royal’s relatives, who were laid to rest in about 17 other mounds near the presumed king. Another, smaller ship was also found at the site.
Political power might be the key to the change in burial practices, says archaeologist Heinrich Härke, an early medieval burial specialist and a professor at HSE University in Moscow who was not involved in the research. As leaders across England began to consolidate power and form kingdoms during the sixth century, Härke says, it may have become less important for people to display their power and bury such ornate goods.
A theory of transition
Another early medieval archaeologist, Andrew Reynolds of University College London, has a theory of his own: The rise of kings impoverished everyone who wasn’t among the upper crust.
“English royal families’ increasing grip on resources and land dealt the first death blow to the freedoms previously enjoyed by small scale communities,” he says. “Wealth became polarised.”
Then there’s the rise of Christianity. As the new religion took hold across Europe, burial mounds went out of style and royal resting places migrated to churchyards or tombs inside churches and cathedrals. The number of grave goods declined, too. From the eighth century on, royals and non-elites alike were usually buried with nothing more than shrouds, personal items of jewellery, or Christian ornaments like crosses.
Reynolds sees the Sutton Hoo burial as part of that transition, especially since it seems to have been the burial place of just one Anglo-Saxon family, rather than part of a larger cemetery.
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Source: National Geographic
