tour 8 of 11
Our Top Ten British Treasures
The Sutton Hoo ship-burial
In 1938, archaeologist Basil Brown was asked to
investigate eighteen low mounds by a local land owner, Mrs Edith
Pretty. He began by opening Mound 3, quickly followed by Mounds 2
and 4. All had been robbed in antiquity, although a few fragments
hinted at high status Anglo-Saxon burials. In the spring and summer
of 1939 Basil Brown excavated the largest mound (Mound
1).
Buried deep beneath the
mound lay the ghost of a thirty-metre long oak ship. At its centre
was a ruined burial chamber the size of a small room. In it lay
weapons, armour, gold coins, gold and garnet fittings, silver
vessels and silver-mounted drinking horns and cups, and clothes,
piled in heaps, ranging from fine linen overshirts to shaggy
woollen cloaks and caps trimmed with fur. The burial also contained
a leather purse with a jewelled lid in which had been placed
thirty-seven gold Merovingian coins (tremisses), three coin-sized
blanks and two billets
(ingots).
No trace of a
body was found, however analyses of samples for residual phosphate
(left behind even when a body has completely decayed away), taken
in 1967 support the idea that a body was originally placed there,
but had totally
decayed.
The coins in the
purse were struck between AD 575 and 620, suggesting that (if the
burial took place not long after 620) the body belonged to one of
four East Anglian kings: Raedwald, Eorpwald and co-regents Sigebert
and Ecric. Of these, opinion is divided between Raedwald, a convert
to Christianity who abandoned his faith, and Sigebert, a devout
Christian.
The objects in
the burial were carefully chosen to reflect the king's high
rank and equip him for the Afterlife. Many of them, even to the
modern eye, are extraordinary and they allow us a glimpse into a
life that was barbaric yet sumptuous and sophisticated - a
lifestyle that is described in the poem
Beowulf, which although
written down a couple of centuries after the burial, vividly brings
to life this earlier heroic
period.
Since 1939 the
cemetery has been excavated twice: 1965-71 by the British Museum
and 1983-92 by the British Museum and the Society of Antiquaries of
London.