Article 16

New light on an dark age

Contributed by Steve Woods

Visitors to one section of our website – SLEAFORD ARTEFACTS ELSEWHERE – may have looked at these Anglo-Saxon finds and wondered about that familiar expression ‘The Dark Ages’, used to refer to the centuries following the end of Roman control of Britannia. Certainly, even a brief viewing of the cornucopia in the Early Medieval Europe room of the British Museum will dispel the notion that the departing Legionaries turned out the light on those they left behind. These Britons rapidly became cosmopolitan groups, trading internationally, as Lincolnshire’s pagan grave-goods frequently demonstrate. They were martial in the extreme, of course, and the new creed of ‘Blessed are the meek’ was not one that was easily absorbed. But they all possessed sophisticated craft traditions and between them they supplied the distinctive ethnic mix of native and immigrant that was to give birth to England and ‘the English’. It is certainly true that the documentary sources for early Anglo-Saxon England, before the first charters, are sparse, and those that do exist are not very reliable.

In recent years, however, archaeology has started to fill some of the gaps in the written record, using investigative techniques that were not available to earlier generations of scholars. These advances are now beginning to shed light, for example, on the diet and diseases of our pre-Conquest ancestors as well as on their geographical origins.

Lincolnshire’s Anglo-Saxon graves have yielded a number of dress pins, both functional and ornate. This Sleaford example is one of the most striking of its kind. The British Museum describes it as ‘one of the largest and most unusual dress pins that has survived from Anglo-Saxon England. Dress pins like this, with long shafts, were typical of Anglian culture areas in eastern England. The head of the pin displays a symmetrical design that resembles an owl, or perhaps a human mask with large round eyes. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that the large eyes are also bird heads in profile with raptor-like beaks. What appear to be ribbed ‘eyebrows’ from the front are also serpents with open mouths that spring from the beaks of the birds. The upper axe-shaped section of the pin is undecorated. If this upper element of this pin is taken into account, yet another view of the pin emerges. In this reading, the overall image is that of a frontal helmet, with a plain casque and nosepiece, round eye sockets and ribbed brows. This kind of visual pun is typical of Germanic art styles….Even closer to this pin are the symbols and decorative elements on the helmet from the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, when viewed from the front.’

These similarities of style should not come as any great surprise. The various Anglian tribes of sixth century England would have all looked back to similar origins in an ancestral home across ‘the gannet’s bath’, and their chieftains invariably traced their own lineage (and thus their legitimacy) to a northern god – usually Woden. (In addition to Woden, other deities of these early settlers have left their trace in our days of the week – Tiw, Thor, Frigga). One historian has also conjectured that the designs of the dress fittings – the pins, brooches, buckles, sleeve clasps – that are such a conspicuous feature of Lincolnshire’s grave-goods may, in addition to their practical function, have served as territorial markers, so that a traveller in a new region might recognise the tribal affiliation of the people by the accessories of its women.

In the latter part of the sixth century the tribal territories began to coalesce into fledgling kingdoms. In 616, perhaps a generation or two after the wearer of our dress pin was interred, King Raedwald led his army out of East Anglia and through Lindsey to engage the Northumbrian army in battle near the River Idle. As he came through this district, he may well have recognised that he shared some relation of kinship with the local people. In any event, what is now clear is that the Sleaford area had, by this time, been widely settled by Anglian groups who had brought with them (or perhaps adopted) many of the traditions of their north-west European neighbours.

When George Thomas excavated the Sleaford cemetery, near the junction of Southgate and Mareham Lane in 1881, his report described more than 240 graves. However, he estimated the original number to have been closer to 600. Railway construction had already destroyed much of the site, with further grave contents being reburied in the recent past. And, inevitably, some looting had also occurred. This was, by any measure, a major Anglo-Saxon burial ground, probably even larger than the important cemetery of the same period at Ruskington. A few miles to the West, Loveden Hill was even more extensive, though here most of the dead had been cremated.

Where was the settlement that Sleaford’s cemetery served? It is tempting (if speculative at present) to suppose that it might have the site at Town Road, Quarrington which was excavated in the 1990’s by a team led by Gary Taylor. This location, through its pottery, post-holes and trenches, has yielded evidence of a continuous occupation from the sixth to the later part of of the eighth century. Animal bones indicate that stock-rearing was a mainstay of the economy, with cattle and pigs conspicuous in the early part of the settlement, and sheep gradually becoming important in the later years, together with an increasing use of horses. Taylor suggests that by the ninth century the settlement may have relocated, perhaps to the site of a new church 0.5km to the west. And there is also the possibility and there was some migration to the vicinity of the present Market Place, where Anglo-Saxon remains came to light in the 1970s or to Holdingham, where there have been more recent finds.

There is also the possibility that by the ninth century the settlement may have relocated, perhaps to the site of a new church 0.5km to the west. And there is also the possibility that there was some migration to the vicinity of the present Market Place, where Anglo-Saxon remains came to light in the 1970s or to Holdingham, where there have been more recent finds.

Is there anything useful we can say about the vicissitudes of these lives lived 1400 or 1500 years ago? Sophisticated techniques of palaeopathology were not available in the 1880s but George Thomas was prepared to venture some personal opinions. The stature of the adults was roughly comparable with that of modern Victorians. ‘Such of the femora and tibiae as were sufficiently sound and perfect; I have compared with my own, and pronounce the average height to have been 5 feet 6 inches.’ Thomas believed also that some of the skulls bore marks of severe weapon injuries, though not all of these would have been fatal. There was, in addition, one skeleton in which the head had been detached from the body and positioned near the hip. In a few Anglo-Saxon graves elsewhere, this feature is believed to mark an execution, although all of the other cases are in graves of a later period than Sleaford’s.

As it happens, tantalising new evidence has now presented itself in a local site that can benefit from modern laboratory analysis. In 2000-2001, a small Anglo-Saxon burial ground of seventeen graves was excavated close to Grey Lees, by the side of the Ancaster Road (A153). This site is barely 400 m to the east of another early burial ground, found by men digging for gravel in the 1820s. Tania Dickinson, who has reported the new findings, proposes for the sake of clarity that the earlier site be designated Quarrington 1 and the recent one Quarrington II. The graves at Quarrington II were close to the surface and have certainly been disturbed by ploughing, and possibly by modern nighthawks also. As a result, much has been lost. What remains, however, has yielded grave-goods and valuable insights into the physical condition of these early Anglians.

Like George Thomas, Dickinson has found evidence of violent encounters. ‘Quarrington has also produced a surprising number, proportionally, of weapon injuries, which are actually not common in early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and are more frequent among weaponless than weapon-bearing men’. The daily close contact with cattle created another hazard, especially for young people (although only one of the individuals at Quarrington II lived beyond the age of forty).

While tuberculosis appears in this, and other, early Anglo-Saxon populations, to have been less prevalent than it was to become in the crowded towns of the later Middle Ages, bovine-contracted tuberculosis was probably a persistent feature of many small rural communities. The occupant of grave 15 was a teenage girl who ‘had suffered from tuberculosis for a number of years. She had typical lesions on three surviving lumbar and three thoracic vertebrae, and also severe atrophy of all the limbs, especially the legs, implying extended periods of bed rest or actual paralysis: she must have been attentively cared for during her illness…..In death she received the largest grave-assemblage among this group of burials, and apparently was the only one accorded the full adult feminine-gendered burial kit….’ ‘Overall’ she concludes, ‘these skeletons suggest a community in which disease and hard physical labour took their toll from an early age, and in which occupations differed according to sex.’ This feature of gendered roles – ‘the Spindle and the Spear’ – is a characteristic of many graves of this period.

In the years to come, it seems probable that systematic field-walking, metal-detecting equipment, new construction and just plain chance will uncover further traces of the Anglian communities who eked out a precarious living in this shallow valley on the edge of the Fen. We have to suppose that beneath our feet and wheels lie more people (some of them certainly of Romano-British descent) who settled hereabouts, close to a river with an established crossing-point, which was perhaps already known to them as 'Sleoford'.

AFTERWORD: Even in the wake of the important archaeological finds of recent years, the single most iconic image of the early Anglo-Saxon era remains that of the helmet found in the ship burial at Sutton Hoo. This helmet, believed to be that of King Raedwald, has been reproduced on the page many times and is on the cover of several books. Readers of this newsletter, without the time or the inclination to plunge into the literature, might still be interested in John Preston’s novel ‘The Dig’ (Viking, 2007 – in the County Library). The author has produced a vivid evocation of that summer of 1939, and given speaking parts to some of the main participants. These include Charles Phillips who, some years before, had written about Sleaford’s cemetery in the course of a comprehensive survey of Lincolnshire’s archaeological heritage. The novel also nicely captures the forelock-touching deference of those who knew their station in life which, in the shires at least, was as evident in the 1930s as it had been half a century earlier, when George Thomas could refer to his Sleaford assistants as ‘my labourers’.

Connoisseurs of irony might, however, enjoy a final thought. If Michael Turland's conjecture is correct, this is the same George William Thomas who was convicted of fraud, struck off the Solicitors' Roll, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison with hard labour. We are not told if digging was required.