Issue 112

May / Jun 2010

news

Rare prehistoric finds at major Carlisle dig

Hammerwich hoard "saved" – but who for?

Mary Rose studies query science of tracing migration

Surprising age of new-found stone row on Dartmoor

in brief & phase 2

features

University archaeology

THE BIG DIG: Discovering Bosworth

The Buried Gods of Gogmagog

Three Men and a (Leaky) Boat

on the web

Caroline Wickham-Jones investigates the archaeological value of encyclopaedic websites and Stuart Jeffrey describes the Grey Lierature Library

science

A child's gift to science, the human remains debate

letters

Your views and responses

CBA Correspondent

Mike Heyworth explores the great rewards and challenges of undersea archaeology

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

Three Men and a (Leaky) Boat

Who was buried in the great ship at Sutton Hoo? The answer is usually given as Raedwald. But 17 years ago, a radically different interpretation was proposed. Helen Geake reviews the evidence.

The story goes that it was the Anglo-Saxon literary scholar HM Chadwick, visiting Sutton Hoo in 1939 while the treasures were still in the ground, who proclaimed their owner to have been the East Anglian king Rædwald, who died in AD624 or 625. Several alternatives have been suggested, but Rædwald has always remained the favoured contender, not least after Martin Carver's recent wide-ranging analysis.

A curious suggestion was made in 1993 that the Sutton Hoo king was not Anglian at all, but from Essex. The idea, proposed by Mike ParkerPearson, Robert van der Noort and Alex Woolf, was published in an academic journal and went almost unnoticed at the time, but has slowly spread as an alternative theory. In February it received new publicity in a BBC Radio 4 programme, in a series called The Voices Who Dug up the Past (presented by this magazine's editor). So what was the theory, and how does it look now?

Parker Pearson and his colleagues suggested that it was dangerous to identify a place as having a particular political identity (such as being part of the kingdom of East Anglia) just because the people living there wore clothes – as seen in artefacts such as brooches – which suggested such a thing. This might especially be the case for a place like Sutton Hoo, which in the iron age, at least, was in a tribal border zone (between the Iceni and Trinovantes).

While nothing in the ship could specifically be said to represent an East Angle, argued Parker Pearson, there are items that look East Saxon or Kentish, with links to the Franks across the channel. They postulated that the south-eastern part of Suffolk was just as likely to be under East Saxon political control at the time of the ship burials. So perhaps the king was the East Saxon Sæberht, baptised in 604 and died in 617 or 618?

Sæberht was jointly succeeded by his three pagan sons; the mix of pagan and Christian aspects in the burial would then be explained by the fact of pagans burying their Christian father, and objects occurring in threes (such as three buckets, three cauldrons or nine spears) would be filial gifts. The regal whetstone in Mound 1 could be a symbol of family ancestry, punning on the name Seaxneat, the ancestral god of the Essex kings – which contains the element seax, the Anglo-Saxon word for knife.

Parker Pearson was criticised by some as a prehistorian venturing beyond his area of expertise, but outsiders do of course have a necessary role in challenging received wisdom. He was entirely wrong, however, in his assertion that there is nothing East Anglian and much that is Essex, Kentish and Frankish at Sutton Hoo. What he saw as a geographical difference is in fact chronological:

• There are separate Anglian and Saxon archaeological "culture provinces" in sixth-century England, but these are visible almost entirely through female dress accessories.

• In the seventh century the archaeological differences between Anglian and Saxon completely disappear – strangely, just at the point at which they emerge historically into focus, with different kingdoms claiming different "ethnic" descents from continental Anglian or Saxon backgrounds (the source for which is Bede writing in the early eighth century).

• Gold and garnet jewellery dating to the seventh century was first found not in East Anglia but in Kent, in antiquarian excavations in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was probably because the Kentish graves tended to be under little individual barrows, so were very obvious and attractive to the excavators. Similar barrows were excavated in Derbyshire, but not as many, so the items simply got labelled "Kentish" rather than "Peak District". During the 20th century similar objects were found in East Anglia (at Sutton Hoo, and elsewhere through the Portable Antiquities Scheme's recording of metal detectorists' finds) but by then the "Kentish" label had stuck. Very recently a subtle difference has been discerned between the real Kentish and the East Anglian material. Possibly now we will have a Mercian style too, with the Staffordshire hoard.

So Parker Pearson could not see an Anglian tendency in Sutton Hoo, because the ship burial did not contain a woman and was not sixth century – not because it was not the grave of an East Anglian person! Nobody, least of all a man, could possibly have looked "Anglian" in the first half of the seventh century; there was just no way to do it. Frankish material is clearly completely different, and much less well made (as is obvious to anyone visiting a French museum).

As for the Seaxneat theory, ironically the whetstone is one of the few objects that one can use to show links to the wider "Anglian" region. There are very few large, perhaps ceremonial, whetstones known, but those we do have come from Lincolnshire and east Yorkshire – classic "Anglian" areas.

The situation in Essex is still rather mysterious, with relatively few finds. The "princely" grave at Prittlewell (see feature, May 2004) is not at all like Sutton Hoo (some Anglo-Saxon archaeologists who were unimpressed by Parker Pearson's argument were quick to suggest that Sæberht was much more likely to have been buried at Prittlewell, but whether or not this was a royal grave is undecided). There is slightly more room for debate here as the Essex material is not well known – much of it may be in the form of unreported metal detector finds, as the PAS was not set up there until 2003.

History is seductive and powerful stuff, perhaps particularly to a prehistorian, but it cannot be used to explain archaeological evidence – the two are different sides of a coin. Ultimately, the answer to who is buried in Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo (and, of course, the similar, contemporary but much less well preserved Mound 2) has to combine the evidence from both disciplines – but with a good deal of critical interpretation too.

See "Three men & a boat: Sutton Hoo & the East Saxon kingdom", by M Parker Pearson, R van de Noort & A Woolf, in M Lapidge, M Godden & S Keynes (eds), Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press 1993), 27–50; Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings, by M Carver (British Museum 1998). Helen Geake is finds adviser (early-medieval artefacts) to the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

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