The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 184 • Catherine Hills
but the later fourth century saw the appearance in Britain and northern Gaul of inhumations
accompanied by weapons and belt fittings. Although these have often been interpreted as the
burials of Germanic mercenary soldiers, there is not really any reason to see them purely in
ethnic terms, although it does seem to have been a fashion prevalent amongst a military elite,
which included men of Germanic origin. These burials may have contributed to the development
of the rite seen throughout western Europe and southern Britain between the fifth and seventh
centuries. This was inhumation burial, often in large cemeteries arranged in rows, some bodies in
coffins or stone sarcophagi. Men were buried with weapons, women with brooches and necklaces.
In England these are attributed to Anglo-Saxons, in Gaul to the Franks, further south the Alemanni;
but not all of those buried in this manner need have belonged to these ethnic groups.
Regional variation in England
According to Bede, the settlers came from three of the strongest tribes of Germany: the Angles,
Saxons and Jutes. To some extent, regional patterning, in the distribution especially of dress
fasteners, seems to reflect this tripartite division, which is also detectable in regional names (Hills
1979). In East Anglia, the East Midlands and Yorkshire, women wore cruciform and annular
brooches, and fastened their sleeves with metal clasps. In southern England, in Sussex, Wessex
and Essex, they preferred round brooches and did not use clasps. Most of the ornaments in these
regions are made of copper alloy. Some of them are decorated with a distinctive form of animal
ornament (Style I), where animals and humans are represented by disjointed limbs and heads. In
Kent, allegedly settled by Jutes from Denmark, there was a greater use of gold and silver and
some very elaborate ornaments, such as the Kingston brooch, decorated with cloisonné garnets,
glass and gold filigree (Figure 10.4). In Kent, the animal ornament used was often Style II, where
the beasts had sinuous bodies like snakes or ribbons, tied in knots around each other. This style is
also found in East Anglia, on some of the objects from Sutton Hoo (below). Some of the jewellery
buried in Kentish graves had been imported from the continent.
There is a tripartite regional division, but its explanation may not be straightforward. The northeast/south,
‘Angle/Saxon’ divide appears already in the fifth century in the distinction between
those areas practising cremation and those favouring inhumation. This difference seems to reflect
the situation at the end of the Roman period, when eastern England seems to have been overrun
sooner and more completely than the south, which preserved more of its Romano-British culture.
It may have been accentuated by Scandinavian contacts in the sixth century, and again by the division
between Danelaw and Saxon England of the ninth and tenth centuries (see Chapter 11). The
distinctive Kentish culture belongs to the sixth and seventh centuries, not to the initial migration
period, and owes far more to contacts with Frankish culture than Danish. Bede was rationalizing
distinctions that existed in his own time but which may have had complex origins.
Social analysis
Social analysis of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries has often focused on a few very elaborate, high-status
burials. Most remarkable amongst these are those found at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge on the
coast of Suffolk (Carver 1992), where the burial mounds have attracted successive generations
of investigators (Figure 10.5). Many were dug into and looted without record in the nineteenth
century, three were opened in 1938 and 1939, and a systematic exploration of the site as a whole
was carried out in the 1980s. The most spectacular deposit was that from mound I, excavated in
1939. This contained the remains of a ship and a lavish deposit of grave goods including a
helmet, sword, shield, gold buckle, gold and garnet fittings, bronze and silver bowls, and a purse
containing Merovingian coins. Because most of these coins do not carry the names of kings, it
has not been easy to date them. The most recent analysis suggests a date for the assemblage of the