Anglo-Saxon colonization

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Ancient Dna ◽  
Immigrant Population ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Wooden Floor ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
Grave Goods

Two strands of evidence can be used to map where Anglo-Saxon immigrants made their home in Britain: the distributions of Grubenhäuser and burials furnished with a distinctive suite of Germanic grave goods (which are referred to here as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ burials). Exactly who is buried within ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cemeteries is not altogether clear, as they may include both the immigrant population with their direct descendants and some native Britons (e.g. Arnold 1988; Hodges 1989; Härke 1990; 2002; Higham 1992; Scull 1995; Lucy 2000; Hamerow 2002; Hills 2003; 2007; 2009; 2011), and without major advances in scientific analysis we will never know whether some of those buried were ‘really just disguised Britons’ (Hills 1993, 15). Recent work on ancient DNA at Oakington, in Cambridgeshire, has established that both immigrants and natives were buried in this ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cemetery (Pitts 2016), but in order to determine how far Anglo-Saxon colonization extended across the landscape of eastern England we must rely upon more traditional archaeology. Of particular importance is the distribution of Grubenhäuser, as these distinctive structures had no precedent in late Roman Britain, suggesting that they were constructed and used by immigrant communities. Grubenhäuser are represented in the archaeological record as shallow(c.0.3–0.5m deep), sub-rectangular (c.3 by 4 m), steep-sided, and flat-bottomed pits above which was probably constructed a suspended wooden floor (e.g. Fig. 8.1; Tipper 2004). These distinctive structures have variously been called ‘huts’, ‘sunken huts’, ‘sunken featured buildings’, and ‘SFBs’, although all of these terms are problematic. The term ‘hut’ in particular led to an interpretation that they were crude hovels, whereas, now that examples have been reconstructed, we can see that they were substantial and impressive buildings (Fig. 8.2). The German term Grubenhäuser is used here specifically because it indicates that they were an alien formof architecture: although a number of Romano-British buildingswith sunken floors have been excavated, Tipper (2004, 7–11) has demonstrated that they represent an entirely different building tradition of cellars with revetted sides, entrance stairways, and floors associated with hearths and sunken storage jars (e.g. King Harry Lane in Verulamium: Stead and Rigby 1989).

The native British

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
Farming Communities ◽  
Southern Scandinavia ◽  
New Settlements

By the fourth century AD, the landscape of Roman Britain was densely settled and archaeological surveys and excavations have consistently shown that most lowland areas supported farming communities, including on the heavier claylands (Smith et al. 2016). Thereafter the character of the archaeological record changes dramatically with the appearance of settlements, cemeteries, and material culture whose ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural affinities lay in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia (Chapters 8–9). All too often, however, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England is discussed in a way that implies that settlements characterized by Grubenhäuser and cemeteries furnished with Germanic grave goods were characteristic of the whole of eastern England (e.g. Welch 1992; Lucy 2000; Tipper 2004; Hamerow 2012), whereas detailed local studies have suggested that this was not the case. In areas such as Sussex (Welch 1983) and Lincolnshire (Green 2012) evidence for Anglo-Saxon colonization has only been found in certain parts of the landscape, and the potential reasons for ‘blank’ spots in the distribution of Anglo-Saxon settlement are complex: they may in part simply reflect areas where there has been less archaeological investigation, or that these areas were unattractive for settlement. There is, however, another possibility: that these distributions are not a record of where people were and were not living, but a reflection of how the cultural identity of early medieval communities varied from area to area, and that some of these identities are archaeologically less visible than others. There has long been speculation that at least some of the ‘blank areas’ in the distributions of Anglo-Saxon settlements and cemeteries reflect the places where native British populations remained in control of the landscape. West (1985, 168), for example, noted the lack of early Anglo-Saxon settlement on the East Anglian claylands, and speculated that this is where a substantial Romano- British population remained: ‘did they survive somehow, perhaps in a basically aceramic condition, or were they, in the main, drawn to the new settlements on the lighter soils to become slaves or some subordinate stratum of society, as indicated by later documentary evidence, or was the population drastically reduced by pestilence or genocide?’ (West 1985, 168).

The Vikings in Ireland: longphuirt and legacy

Antiquity ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 90 (353) ◽  
pp. 1390-1392
Author(s):  
Julian D. Richards
Keyword(s):  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Research Assistant ◽  
Royal Irish Academy ◽  
Major Task ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Grave Goods

Viking graves and grave-goods in Ireland is the longawaited outcome of the Irish Viking Graves Project, which ran from 1999–2005. The project originated at a conference held in Dublin in 1995, at which the limited understanding of Viking burials was identified as a significant shortcoming of the Irish archaeological record. Stephen Harrison was appointed as Research Assistant, and began the major task of making sense of the antiquarian records of the Royal Irish Academy. The primary aim of this work was the creation of the first accurate and comprehensive catalogue of all Viking graves and grave-goods in Ireland. With this volume, that aim has been handsomely achieved.

Regional identities Angles and Saxons?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The West ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Southern Scandinavia ◽  
Burial Rites

Writing in the early eighth century, Bede described how three separate peoples— the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—had settled in Britain some three hundred years earlier, and ever since the genesis of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ scholarship in the nineteenth century archaeologists have sought to identify discrete areas of Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish settlement (e.g. Leeds 1912; 1936; 1945; Fox 1923, 284–95). The identification of these peoples was based upon different artefact styles and burial rites, with most attention being paid to brooches. The degree of variation in the composition of brooch assemblages across eastern England is shown in Table 9.1. Cruciform brooches with cast side knobs, for example, were thought to have been ‘Anglian’, and saucer brooches ‘Saxon’ (although even in the early twentieth century Leeds (1912) had started to doubt the attribution of applied brooches to the West Saxons). In recent years, however, this traditional ‘culturehistorical’ approach towards interpreting the archaeological record has been questioned, as it is now recognized that, rather than being imported from mainland Europe during the early to mid fifth century, regional differences in artefact assemblages emerged over the course of the late fifth to late sixth centuries (e.g. Hines 1984; 1999; Hilund Nielsen 1995; Lucy 2000; Owen- Crocker 2004; 2011; Penn and Brugmann 2007; Walton Rogers 2007; Brugmann 2011; Dickinson 2011; Hills 2011). In early to mid fifth-century England, in contrast, it now appears that Germanic material culture was in fact relatively homogeneous, with objects typical of ‘Saxon’ areas on the continent being found in so-called ‘Anglian’ areas of England, and vice versa. The earliest material from East Anglia, for example—equal-arm, supporting-arm, and early cruciform brooches—are most closely paralleled in the Lower Elbe region of Saxony, with the distinctive ‘Anglian’ identity of EastAnglia onlyemerging through later contact with southern Scandinavia (Hines 1984; Carver 1989, 147, 152; Hills and Lucy 2013, 38–9). Indeed, many elements of the classic suite of early Anglo-Saxon material culture actually developed within Britain as opposed to having been created on the continent (Hills 2003, 104–7; Owen-Crocker 2004, 13), with new identities beingmade in Britain rather than being imported frommainland Europe (Hills 2011, 10).

Kingdoms and regiones: The documentary evidence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
The South ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Early Medieval Period ◽  
East Midlands

During the early medieval period eastern England was occupied by two major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms—the East Saxons and East Angles—alongside a region that Bede referred to as ‘Middle Anglia’. There has been a widespread assumption that Essex (‘the East Saxons’) and Suffolk and Norfolk (the ‘South Folk’ and ‘North Folk’ of East Anglia) were direct successors to these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (e.g. Carver 1989, fig. 10.1; 2005, 498; Yorke 1990, 46, 61; Warner 1996, 4, plate 1; Pestell 2004, 12; Chester-Kadwell 2009, 46; Kemble 2012, 8; Gascoyne and Radford 2013, 176; Reynolds 2013, fig. 4), which would imply a strong degree of territorial continuity from at least the early medieval period through to the present day. There is, however, a recognition in the Regional Research Framework that regional differences within early medieval society across eastern England have seen little investigation (Medlycott 2011b, 58), something that the following chapters hope to address. This chapter will explore the documentary evidence for these early medieval kingdoms and their relationship to later counties, before turning to the archaeological evidence for Anglo- Saxon immigrants and their relationship to the native British population in Chapters 8–10. The clear differences between the Northern Thames Basin, East Anglia, and the South East Midlands that are still evident during the seventh to ninth centuries are outlined in Chapter 11. Finally, Chapter 12 explores the boundaries of the early medieval kingdoms, and in particular the series of dykes constructed in south-eastern Cambridgeshire.Table 7.1 provides a timeline of key historical dates for early medieval England, and key developments within the archaeological record. The earliest list of territorial entities is the Tribal Hidage. The original document has been lost—it only survives in a variety of later forms—but it is thought to have been written between the mid seventh and the ninth centuries (Hart 1970; 1977; Davies and Vierck 1974, 224–7; Yorke 1990, 10; Blair 1991, 8; 1999; Harrington and Welch 2014, 1). The Tribal Hidage lists at least thirteen peoples in and around eastern England, some of whom clearly occupied quite extensive areas, such as the East Angles (assessed as 30,000 hides), East Saxons (7,000 hides), and the Cilternsætna (4,000 hides).

V. The Shield in the Burial Rite

Archaeologia ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 63-70
Author(s):  
Heinrich Härke
Keyword(s):  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Burial Rite ◽  
Grave Goods

Shields are among the more common grave goods in Early Anglo-Saxon burials. In the investigated sample of forty-seven cemeteries with a total of 3,814 inhumations, 317 burials (8·3 per cent) in forty-three cemeteries contained a shield (Appendix 3). The frequency of shields becomes even more apparent if it is translated into percentages of weapon burials: in England, just under half (45 per cent) of all inhumations with weapons had a shield. This proportion is significantly higher than in the contemporaneous weapon burials of Continental Saxons (18 per cent), Franks (16 per cent) and Alamanni (24 per cent; Härke 1989, table 4.2). Excavations of cremation cemeteries in England do not seem to have produced unambiguous remains of shields: the Anglo-Saxons, in contrast to the Continental Saxons, appear to have put shields only into inhumation burials.

The Liudhard medalet

1991 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 27-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Werner
Keyword(s):  
Sixth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Gold Coins ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
As If ◽  
Grave Goods

Although it is a precious and rare material testament to the introduction of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, the Liudhard medalet (pl. I) has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. It is scarcely known to art historians. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the emblem on the reverse of the issue, and to offer an hypothesis on its meaning. Discovered ‘some years’ before 1844 with other gold coins – looped for suspension as if for a necklace of medalets – and jewellery in or near the churchyard of St Martin's, Canterbury, and published in 1845, the medalet recently has been convincingly assigned to a group of grave goods deposited c. 580–90. Besides the coin in question, the group included an Italian tremissis of Justin II, a Germanic tremissis of unsure origin, a Merovingian solidus struck by Leudulf at Ivegio vico and two tremisses from southern France, the first from Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, the second from Agen. Today these objects are in Liverpool, and Philip Grierson has persuasively argued for the inclusion of a Merovingian tremissis in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, as once forming part of the deposit. Most likely all the coins of the Canterbury group were issued during the second half of the sixth century.

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