Anglo-Saxon Graves and Grave Goods of the 6th and 7th Centuries AD

A Chronological Framework

Alex Bayliss, John Hines, Alex Bayliss

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367885885
• eBook ISBN: 9781351576451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Early Anglo-Saxon Period is characterized archaeologically by the regular deposition of artefacts in human graves in England. The scope for dating these objects and graves has long been studied, but it has typically proved easier to identify and enumerate the chronological problems of the material than to solve them. Prior to the work of the project reported on here, therefore, there was no comprehensive chronological framework for Early Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, and the level of detail and precision in dates that could be suggested was low. The evidence has now been studied afresh using a co-ordinated suite of dating techniques, both traditional and new: a review and revision of artefact-typology; seriation of grave-assemblages using correspondence analysis; high-precision radiocarbon dating of selected bone samples; and Bayesian modelling using the results of all of these. These were focussed primarily on the later part of the Early Anglo-Saxon Period, starting in the 6th century. This research has produced a new chronological framework, consisting of sequences of phases that are separate for male and female burials but nevertheless mutually consistent and coordinated. These will allow archaeologists to assign grave-assemblages and a wide range of individual artefact-types to defined phases that are associated with calendrical date-ranges whose limits are expressed to a specific degree of probability. Important unresolved issues include a precise adjustment for dietary effects on radiocarbon dates from human skeletal material. Nonetheless the results of this project suggest the cessation of regular burial with grave goods in Anglo-Saxon England two decades or even more before the end of the seventh century. That creates a limited but important discrepancy with the current numismatic chronology of early English sceattas. The wider implications of the results for key topics in Anglo-Saxon archaeology and social, economic and religious history are discussed to conclude the report.

1

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDY OF EARLY ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERIES

John Hines

1.1 GRAVES, GRAVE GOODS AND CHRONOLOGY

The archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Period has been dominated by the study of graves and cemeteries for practical and easily understood reasons. The Anglo-Saxon culture that superseded Late-Roman material life over most of eastern, Midland and southern England in the 5th to 7th centuries AD included a range of distinctive burial-rites which have left material in the ground that is not only conspicuous when it is disturbed but also often of an eye-catching and intrinsically interesting character.

We tend, quite reasonably, to think of the burial practices of the Early Anglo-Saxon Period primarily in terms of the deposition of artefacts as ‘grave goods’ in the grave. The salience of the archaeological remains of this period is the result of more factors than this alone, however. The raising of barrows over burials advertised sites that would subsequently attract grave-robbers as well as antiquarians and archaeologists, and which even within the Anglo-Saxon Period itself could be identified as sites of ‘heathen burials’ and deliberately selected for the location of places of juridicial execution and the interment of the victims (Reynolds 1999, 105–10; 2009). The 17th-century antiquary Sir Thomas Browne was inspired by the unearthing of Early Anglo-Saxon cremation urns to reflect upon the sense of cultural propriety of the past era that they represented — incorrectly identified, as it happened — and the vanity of human conventions: a philosophically and politically charged position in the morbid and ideologically-racked mid-17th century, the later years of the Commonwealth (Browne 1658; Schwyzer 2007, 175–204). Nonetheless it is the metal, glass or ceramic, sometimes wood, bone or antler, artefacts deposited within the inhumation graves that constitute the most widespread and numerous remains of the Early Anglo-Saxon Period. From collections of curiosities we know of such artefacts discovered as early as the 17th century. The systematic excavation and collection of Anglo-Saxon grave goods began in earnest in the second half of the 18th century, particularly with the campaigns of the Rev Bryan Faussett — not a very devoted servant of the Church — in Kent from 1757 to 1773 (Faussett [ed. Roach Smith] 1856; Hawkes 1990; Rhodes 1990).

Faussett’s account of his barrow excavations has the framework of a diary which reveals the combination of antiquarian and anatomical curiosity that inspired his efforts. It was consistent with the temper of intellectual life from the Enlightenment into the 19th century, and indeed with the dispersed, rural habitations of a leisured and educated class, that antiquarian scholars and natural historians developed a shared interest in these accessible and common archaeological finds principally because they were simply there: they were part of their natural and historical landscape, and they merited notice, which meant incorporation within a wider scheme of scientific understanding. Consequently, the material phenomena needed an identity: what phase of distant history did they represent? Faussett believed the remains he had excavated to have been Romano-British, a misconception concerning Early Anglo-Saxon finds that is still often found in the first half of the 19th century, alongside occasional misattributions to the Vikings, usually referred to as ‘Danes’ (Lucy 2000, 5–11; cf. Jarvis 1850). However the case for identifying this class of funerary deposits as Early Anglo-Saxon had been recognized by the Rev James Douglas in the 1790s (Douglas 1793). Douglas observed that in Kent clusters of small barrows were producing a consistent range of artefact-types, and that in three cases the grave assemblages also included coins issued in the 5th and 6th centuries, defining a date earlier than which the burials could not have been made (= a terminus post quem or t.p.q.: see further below, Section 1.3.3). Douglas’s Preface makes it clear that he saw the study of ‘Antiquity’ (= archaeology) as a specialism to be developed in the service of a broader ‘History’, and he relied fundamentally upon what he saw as reliable ancient texts to contextualize the finds (see further below, Section 1.3.2 & Section 10.5). At the same time, he used associations between the burial sites and ‘Saxon’ (= Old English) place-names to corroborate his deductions. His comparative material included the late 5th-century, historically identified and dated grave of King Childeric in Tournai, excavated in 1653 (Chifflet 1655; James 1988, 58–64).

The 1840s and 1850s were a major threshold in the establishment of Anglo-Saxon archaeology. A newly formed British Archaeological Association was led by men with an enthusiasm for the period, Thomas Wright and Charles Roach Smith, and its inaugural Canterbury Congress of 1844 brought together a body of scholars with a common archaeological interest to discuss the finds made by Faussett and for the excavation of further barrows at Breach Down (Kent), on the land of Lord Conyngham (Dunkin ed. 1845, esp. 91–7; cf. Conyngham & Akerman 1844). A series of personal, social and ideological differences amongst these scholars led rapidly to the establishment of an alternative Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (Journal of the British Archaeological Association 1 (1846), i–xiii; Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, at Winchester, September, MDCCCXLV, i–xxxviii, esp. xxviii–xxxi), but this in fact encouraged the emergence of new directions and standards in scholarly debate. John Kemble showed a particular interest in comparing the archeological evidence critically with the unsatisfactory historical evidence — in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (Bede, HE) and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles — for the Early Anglo-Saxon Period. Living and working in the state of Hannover at this crucial juncture, he emphasized the similarity of cremation urns that by then had been unearthed in large quantities in what is now Niedersachsen and in eastern England (1849; 1856; 1863; Akerman 1855, xiv–xv). Roach Smith observed equivalent distinctions of Kentish/Jutish, Anglian and Saxon metal artefacts in England and on the Continent (1850–68, Vol. 1, 88–9; see further below, Section 1.2.2).

If, however, there was one interest above all that drove the Anglo-Saxon archaeology of the Victorian Period, it was the abiding commitment of both individual scholars and societies to local archaeology: interests in the village communities apparently revealed in the excavations of their cemeteries, and in the archaeological features of the local landscape. It was in this period that the great majority of the county societies and journals of such vital importance in the recording of the archaeology of England were founded; often, indeed, combining natural history with archaeology as their remit. Cemeteries, many of them discovered in the course of railway or housebuilding, were carefully recorded and discussed by individual gentlemen (e.g. Wylie 1852; Roach Smith 1860; Brent 1863; 1866; 1868; Foster 1883; G. W. Thomas 1887). Some individuals undertook sustained and systematic work on the monuments of their local regions, as in the distinguished cases of Thomas Bateman and Llewelyn Jewitt in the Peak District (Bateman 1848; 1861; Jewitt 1870), and J. R. Mortimer, who published a comprehensive report of his Forty Years’ Researches in British and Saxon Burial Mounds of East Yorkshire in 1905. It is unfortunate, although understandable, that these volumes are now largely treated merely as the sources for original accounts of the excavation and layout of specific sites and finds. What may be missed, in such circumstances, is the authors’ endeavours to give a coherent and unified account of a landscape defined by consistency in burial practice, through the methodical exploration and comparison of the monuments of those areas.

A new wave of synthesis, which we may call a new national perspective upon Early Anglo-Saxon archaeology, was ushered in around the beginning of the 20th century. Significantly, the three figures principally responsible for this were experts based in museums with major, national collections: (Sir) Charles Hercules Read and Reginald A. Smith at the British Museum, and Edward Thurlow Leeds of the Ashmolean, Oxford. Of the three, Read and Smith have tended to be overshadowed by Leeds, and yet by regularly contributing detailed studies of Anglo-Saxon finds in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries in the former case, and chapters on ‘Anglo-Saxon Remains’ in the new Victoria County History series in the latter, they established consistent comparative approaches to the material. Smith produced a larger conspectus in his still much cited British Museum Guide to Anglo-Saxon Antiquities of 1923. Leeds first undertook a detailed study of the distribution of applied disc and saucer brooches across the area from East Anglia to the Upper Thames basin (1912), from which he postulated a pattern of Saxon penetration to the Wessex heartland following major rivers westwards from the Thames Estuary and the Wash. This was soon followed by his first monograph, The Archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon Settlements (1913), which attempted a fuller, comparative examination of Bede’s three ‘nations’ that settled in Britain to create England — the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes — on the same methodological basis. In the 1920s and 1930s, Leeds refined his model of the routes of Saxon settlement to attach increasing importance to the Icknield Way (Leeds 1926; 1933).

The most determinative new element in the archaeological approach developed in this wave of national synthesis was the central importance attached to the detailed classification and comparison of artefacts. These could yield mass data with broad geographical distributions, on the basis of which the many lacunae and uncertainties in the broad-brush historical representations of the period provided by Bede and the Chronicles could be addressed. Read, Smith and Leeds could here draw upon separate schools and traditions of artefact and art-historical study as bases for their discussions. The French scholar Baron Joseph de Baye had published a survey of Early Anglo-Saxon metalwork and other grave goods as The Industrial Arts of the Anglo-Saxons in 1893. This style of archaeology had developed particularly in Scandinavia in the second half of the 19th century, with the Swede, Oscar Montelius, publishing pictorial atlases of the artefact-types found in Sweden (e.g. 1869; 1873–5), followed by Oluf Rygh for Norway (1885) and Sophus Müller for Denmark (1888–95). Especially influential in England was the Norwegian Håkon Shetelig’s monograph The Cruciform Brooches of Norway (1906) — not only written in English, but dealing with an artefact-type that had manifestly close Anglo-Saxon parallels.

There followed a new confidence in exploring the chronological relationship between individual graves, be that within particular cemeteries or over larger areas. Another consequence, however, was to focus attention on artefact-types and their overall distribution, with their immediate burial contexts being considered of value for chronological purposes at the expense of the study and interpretation of individual cemeteries as whole entities. Again the pathway is particularly clear in Scandinavian archaeology. Where Montelius had identified periods, Bertil Almgren and Birger Nerman reviewed the copious finds from the island of Gotland to propose subdivisions of these periods into phases defined by consistent associations between specific artefact-types in grave assemblages (Almgren & Nerman 1923; Nerman 1935; see further below, Section 1.3.1). Meanwhile another Swede, Bernhard Salin, had codified a developmental sequence of Styles I, II and III of Germanic animal art, creating a supplementary chronological scheme for decorated artefacts of this period (Salin 1904; cf. Høilund Nielsen & Kristoffersen 2002). Between the 1920s and the mid-1950s, yet another Swedish scholar, Nils Åberg, wrote a series of monographs exploring major chronological transitions, mostly in Scandinavia, on the basis, first and foremost, of transformations in the inventory of artefacts and art, including his highly influential The Anglo-Saxons in England, During the Early Centuries after the Invasion (Åberg 1926; cf. also idem 1924; 1953; 1956, and below, Section 1.2.2).

In Britain, meanwhile, Gerard Baldwin Brown, Professor of Fine Art of the University of Edinburgh, published the first parts of his multi-volume The Arts in Early England in 1903. Volumes 3 and 4, on ‘Saxon Art and Industry of the Pagan Period’, appeared in 1915. Poignantly, for the wartime circumstances in which they were published, Baldwin Brown emphasized, in his ‘Prefatory Note’, his indebtedness to the study of comparative material on the Continent and to scholars in all parts of Europe. A key issue for Baldwin Brown was, indeed, to explore the essential characteristics of a common ‘Germanic’ art. After effectively getting coins out of the way, he had a long introductory chapter on the early, or ‘pagan’ Anglo-Saxon cemeteries — provided, of course, to contextualize the studies of various categories of grave goods (weaponry, dress-accessories, vessels etc) that follow, but at the same time citing Continental parallels to confirm the ‘Teutonic’ nature of the material phenomena. At the same time he paid special attention to instances of monument re-use, and to both continuity and disjunction in the location of sites for burial between the Roman Period and the Anglo-Saxon. These two volumes of 1915 conclude with five chapters on the archaeological evidence for the ‘migrations and settlements of the Anglo-Saxons’, discussing, as Leeds had done, the Saxons of Wessex and Sussex, Jutes of the South-East, and Angles of the Midlands and North separately.

At that date, however, no scholar could apply an absolute chronological scheme to the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries finer than a broad attribution of finds to particular centuries, or to what appeared to be the crossing points between those phases. It was understood that very few 5th-century burials had been found; there was a great deal of material assigned — not inaccurately — to the 6th century; meanwhile there was apparently a marked reduction in the frequency of burial in the 7th century. Since it was known that the Church gradually took control of burial practices and sites in western Europe, and the conversion of England was a process running from the end of the 6th century and continuing over at least two-thirds of the 7th century, it was entirely reasonable to associate the overall changes with the religious context — although from Douglas onwards it had equally been clear how inconsistent the transition could be (cf. Baldwin Brown 1903–37, Vol. 3, 19–21, 114–27 & 158–82). As the present volume will show, the religious character of Anglo-Saxon burial practices in fact remains as lively and as controversial an issue now as it has ever been (see Section 10.5).

Finer chronological distinctions than these could be suggested only in special cases, governed by the relative chronology of certain artefact-types. Leeds argued for the identification of earlier and later types of both applied and cast saucer brooches, although he had to ground this identification upon the distribution of examples in England and comparisons with Roman sources rather than upon copious detailed evidence yet available to him from northern Germany or the Netherlands (Leeds 1912, esp. 174–9; 1913, 46–9 & 58–62; cf. Inker 2006). A broad typological scheme for cruciform brooches was also recognized, to be regularized by Åberg in 1926 with his still widely used Types I–V (Åberg 1926, 28–56). Formal sequencing of this kind is the bedrock of the early typological chronologies, backed up in some cases by technical considerations, such as Leeds’s contention that the casting of a rim was a technical improvement to earlier disc brooches with both decorative plates and rims applied (Leeds 1912, 192–5; 1945, 72–7). Stylistic criteria were also applied, although the tenacious misdating of great square-headed brooches of what are now classified as Group XVI to a primary phase, preceding the introduction of Style I attributed to the start of the 6th century, demonstrates how misleading those could be (Åberg 1926, 62–3 & 70–2; Leeds 1949, 34–45 & 107–16; cf. Baldwin Brown 1903–37, Vol. 3, 334–7; Hines 1984, 110–98; 1997a, 18–33, 198–204 & 230–2).

Leeds’s collection, classification and analysis of artefact-types and their distribution to elucidate what was happening in the para-historical context of England in the 5th and 6th centuries culminated in his studies ‘The Distribution of the Angles and Saxons Archaeologically Considered’ published in 1945, and A Corpus of Early Anglo-Saxon Great Square-Headed Brooches of 1949. In these, the funerary context of the deposits discussed was far from the focus of attention. Much of the work for these studies had been done before the Second World War of 1939–45. In 1935 Leeds had given the Rhind Lectures of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, published as a monograph in 1936, Early Anglo-Saxon Art and Archaeology. While the title aptly reflects the ‘art and archaeology’ core of Leeds’s methodology, a chapter on ‘The invaders: life and death’ afforded an opportunity to compare the results of Leeds’s own groundbreaking excavation in an Early Anglo-Saxon settlement at Sutton Courtenay, in post-1974 Oxfordshire but then in Berkshire, with cemetery evidence considered as a general phenomenon. At the centre of the book are two chapters devoted to ‘the Kentish problem’ — the eponymous problem being the apparently inconsistent or unexpected cultural affinities of Kentish grave goods, above all the decorative styles and jewellery. Leeds’s answer to this problem was partly chronological: to distinguish three phases in Kentish proto-history — a ‘Jutish Phase’ (cAD 450–500), a ‘Frankish Phase’ in the 6th century, and a ‘Kentish Phase’ beginning in the late 6th century. Having discussed relationships with the Anglian Midlands and North of England, he then went on to discuss the ‘Final Phase’ of Anglo-Saxon furnished burial as a fourth phase, post-dating the Kentish Phase, and characterized by a new trend towards homogeneity in material types and burial practice across England. Without discussing the question of absolute chronology quite as explicitly as one would like, it is clear that Leeds saw this as a distinct ‘stage in the evolution of Anglo-Saxon culture’ (1936, 104) dating from about AD 630 onwards. Thus, for Kent at least, there was now a four-part phasing of the period of furnished burial, the Early Anglo-Saxon Period, from cAD 450–700. Saxon and Anglian England joined into a common scheme at the Final P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Summary
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Archaeological Study of Early Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries
• 2 Dating Methods and their Modelling
• 3 The Project
• 4 The Human Skeletons
• 5 Typology
• 6 Interpretative Chronologies for the Male Graves
• 7 Interpretative Chronologies for the Female Graves
• 8 Integrations and Comparisons
• 9 Numismatics and the Chronological models
• 10 The Results and their Implications
• Bibliography
• Index of Sites and Grave-assemblages