The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial
Under a mound above the river Deben, an East Anglian king was buried in a ship with the richest set of grave goods ever found in England, at exactly the moment the kingdom was deciding what religion to be. The ship was some twenty-seven metres long, hauled up from the river and lowered into a trench, with a chamber amidships. The body has dissolved in the acid soil, leaving a man-shaped absence and a phosphate trace. Around it were a helmet of Swedish workmanship, a pattern-welded sword, a gold buckle of extraordinary complexity, shoulder-clasps with garnets cut to fit their cells, a lyre, a whetstone sceptre and a Byzantine silver dish stamped in Constantinople. The scale of it settled an argument. Before 1939 the seventh-century English kingdoms were assumed to be poor and isolated, and Beowulf's descriptions of treasure were read as literary invention. Sutton Hoo showed a court with Frankish coins, Mediterranean silver and Scandinavian armour, and the poem stopped being read as fantasy. The occupant is usually identified as Raedwald, who died about 625 and was the overking of the southern English. Bede says he was baptised in Kent and then set up a Christian altar and a pagan one in the same building, to his son's disgust. The burial fits that exactly. It is a wholly pagan rite - a ship, a hoard, a mound - and among the objects are two silver spoons inscribed with Greek names that are usually read as baptismal. Whatever else the grave is, it is the physical record of a king who had not chosen.
- Year: 620 CE
- Category: Cultural
