The Early Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of East Yorkshire: An analysis and reinterpretation 9780860549543, 9781407319032

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The Early Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of East Yorkshire An analysis and reinterpretation

Sam Lucy

BAR British Series 272 1998

Published in 2019 by BAR Publishing, Oxford BAR British Series 272 The Early Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of East Yorkshire © Sam Lucy and the Publisher 1998 The author’s moral rights under the 1988 UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act are hereby expressly asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be copied, reproduced, stored, sold, distributed, scanned, saved in any form of digital format or transmitted in any form digitally, without the written permission of the Publisher. ISBN 9780860549543 paperback ISBN 9781407319032 e-book DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9780860549543 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book is available at www.barpublishing.com BAR Publishing is the trading name of British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd. British Archaeological Reports was first incorporated in 1974 to publish the BAR Series, International and British. In 1992 Hadrian Books Ltd became part of the BAR group. This volume was originally published by John and Erica Hedges in conjunction with British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd / Hadrian Books Ltd, the Series principal publisher, in 1998. This present volume is published by BAR Publishing, 2019.

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in loving memory of James, 1969 -1992.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is based largely on the text of my doctoral thesis, sections of which have already been reproduced as articles (Lucy 1997a, 1997b, forthcoming a, b, c). Its successful completion would not have been possible without the help given by the University of Cambridge, and the museum workers and archaeologists who allowed me access to archives and other inf onnation. I would particularly like to thank Angela Care Evans for allowing me access to the unpublished records for Garton Station; David Evans of the Humberside Archaeology Unit for supplying me with information from the Humberside SMR; Andrew Foscon and Brian Sitch (Hull Museum) for allowing me access to the Mortimer Collection; Cathy Stoertz at RCHM(E) for her help with the Yorkshire Wolds Aerial Survey data; Linda Smith and Ms H Robinson of North Yorkshire County Council, again for access to their SMR; and, especially, Dominic Powlesland for the willingness with which he has made the Heslerton data available, and his interest in and encouragement for my research. I would also like to thank the British Academy for their financial support.

University); Bonnie Effros (University of Alberta); Paul Garwood (Oxford University); Helen Geake (Norwich Castle Museum); Charlie Gere (Middlesex University); Heinrich Harke (Reading University); Clare Herring (Cambridge University); JD Hill (Southampton University); John Hines (University of Wales, Cardiff); Ian Hodder (University of Cambridge); Jeremy Huggett (Glasgow University); Martin Jones (Cambridge University); Sian Jones (University of Southampton); Chris Kniisel (Bradford University); Kevin Leahy (Scunthorpe Museum); Chris Lovelock (English Heritage); Leslie MacFadyen (Cambridge University); Nick Merriman (Institute of Archaeology, University of London); Paul Miller (York University); Martin Millett (Durham University); Mike Parker Pearson (Sheffield University); Simon Schaffer (Cambridge University); Eleanor Scott (King Alfred's College, Winchester); Chris Scull (English Heritage); Andrew Sherratt (Ashmolean Museum); Lisa Shurdom; Bill Sillar (University of Wales, Lampeter); Pamela Smith (Cambridge University); Marie-Louise Stig S0rensen (Cambridge University); Sarah Tarlow (University of Wales, Lampeter); Julian Richards (York University); Lester Thomas; Sue Thomas (Alan Sutton Publishing); Todd Whitelaw (Institute of Archaeology, University of London); Mark Whyman (York Archaeological Trust) and Howard Williams (University of Reading).

I would like to thank the following people for their help, discussions, comments and encouragement: Iain Banks (Glasgow University); John Barrett (Sheffield University); Robin Boast (Cambridge University); Brian Boyd (University of Wales, Lampeter); Richard Bradley (Reading University); Ewan Campbell (Glasgow University); Bella Campbell-Stewart (Cambridge University); Martin Carver (YorkUniversity); Bob Chapman (Reading University); Ruth Charles (Newcastle University); Sue Content (Nottingham University); Linda Ebbatson (Durham University); Mark Edmonds (Sheffield

Finally, I am extremely grateful to my PhD supervisor, Catherine Hills, for all her support; to JD Hill, for all his enthusiasm and insightful criticism; and to Phil Dixon, whose undergraduate tutorials were my original inspiration.

i

CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES

V

LIST OFT ABLES

vii

CHAPTER ONE

THE ANGLO-SAXON

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

CBAP'IERTwo

CEMETERIES OF

EAsTYORKSHIRE:

INTRODUCTION

Introduction Background A Critical History of Anglo-Saxon Studies Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries Early Anglo-Saxon East Yorkshire Outline

1 1 1 2 2 3 3

THE ANGLO-SAXON MYTII AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANGL~SAXON ARCHAEOLOGY

5

2.1 2.2

5 5 5 6 6 6 7 7 7 9

2.3

2.4

2.5

2.6

2.7

Introduction History Before Archaeology 1550-1850 2.2.1 Myths of Origin 2.2 .2 The Birth of Anglo-Saxonism 2.2.2.1 Reformation 2.2.2.2Revolution 2.2.2.3Restoration 2.2.2.4The Effect On Learning 1580-1680 2.2.3 The Eighteenth Century 2.2.4 Conclusions The Nineteenth Century Anglo-Saxonists 2.3.1 Toe Historians 2.3.2 The Archaeologists 2.3.3 Conclusions Chronologies and Typologies 1900-1950 2.4.1 The Culture-Historical Approach 2.4.2 Questioning Tradition 2.4.3 The Anti-German Backlash 2.4 .4 Conclusions Rethinking the Anglo-Saxon Period: 1950-Present 2.5.1 Introduction 2.5.2 A Continuing Tradition 1951-1979 2.5.3 A Reassessment of Material Culture 2.5.4 'Processual' Archaeology 2.5.5 'Post-Processual' Archaeologies Ethnicity and Anglo-Saxon Burials 2.6.1 Historical Evidence 2.6.2 The Implications for Archaeology Conclusions

3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

9 11 12 12 12 14 14 15 15 15 16 16 17 17 18 18 19 20

22

CBAPIER THREE BACKGROUND

3.1 3.2

9

Introduction Toe Significance of Mortuary Evidence 3.2 .1 Culture-Historical and Systems Approaches 3.2.2 Symbolic and Structural Approaches 3.2.3 Social Theory 3.2.4 The Meanings of Material Culture 3.2.5 The Reconstruction of Meaning 3.2.6 Conclusions Aims of the Study The Study Area Geology, Geography and Vegetation of the Area Archaeological Research in Yorkshire Conclusions

ii

22 22 22 23 23 24 24 24 25 26 27 28 31

CHAPTERFoUR

SEX,GENDER, AGE 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

4.9 4.10 CHAPTERFIVE

GRAVE Gooos

AND

Introduction .. . EngenderingArchaeology SkeletalDeterminationof Sex and Age Sex and-Gender in Anglo-SaxonBurials Age in Anglo-SaxonBurials Anglo-SaxonCemeteriesin Yorkshire:Modern Excavations Aims andMethods Results 4.8.1 Do DifferentAssemblagesExist? 4.8.2 Grave-Good Combinations 4.8.3 Sex vs. Assemblage 4.8.4 Age vs. Assemblage 4.8.5 Summary Discussion Conclusions

VARIATION IN ANGLO-SAXON

5.1 5.2

5.3 5.4

BURIAL RITF.S

Introduction Site Selectionand Recording 5.2.1 Site Selection 5.2.2 Discussion_of Recordingand Terminology Aims and Meth.ods : . Results 5.4.1 Heslerton 5.4.1.lGrave Structure 5.4.l.2Body Position 5.4.1.3Positioningof Goods 5.4.1.4Summary 5.4.2 Sewerby 5.4.2.lGrave Structure 5.4.2.2BodyPosition 5.4.2.3Positioningof Goods 5.4.2.4Summary 5.4.3 Uncleby 5.4.3.lBody Position 5.4.3.2Positioningof Goods 5.4.3.3Summary 5.4.4 Garton II 5.4.4.lBody Position 5.4.4.2Positioningof Goods 5.4.4.3Summary 5.4.5 Garton Slack I 5.4.5.lBody Position 5.4.5.2Positioningof Goods 5.4.5.3Summary 5.4.6 Kelleythorpe 5.4.6.lBody Position 5.4.6.2Positioningof Goods 5.4.6.3Summary 5.4.7 CheesecakeHill 5.4.7.lBody Position 5.4.7.2Positioningof Goods 5.4.7.3Summary 5.4.8 Garton Station 5.4.8.lBody Position 5.4.8.2Positioningof Goods 5.4.8.3Summary Discussion 5.5.1 Grave Size 5.5.2 RelationsbetweenAssemblageand Deposition 5.5.3 Variationsin Grave Goods 0

5.5

iii

32 32 32 33 34 34 35 35 41 41 41 42 43 48 48 49

51 51 51 51 51 52 52 52 52 53 55

55 56 56 57 58 58 58 58 59 59 59 59 59 60 60 60 60 60 60 60 61 61 62 62 62 62 62 62 63 63 63 63 63 64

5.6 CHAPTER

Sn:

65

66

6.1 6.2

66 66 66 67 67 68 69 69 69 71

6.5 6.6

Introduction Ideas About Cemeteries and Tune 6.2.1 Cemeteries as a Result of Social Practice 6.2.2 Cemeteries and Temporal Change 6.2.3 The Layout of Anglo-SaxonCemeteries 6.2.4 The Developmentof a Chronology Aims and Methods Results 6.4.1 Heslerton 6.4.2 Sewerby 6.4.3 Uncleby 6.4.4 Garton II 6.4.5 Garton Slack I 6.4.6 Kelleythorpe 6.4.7 Cheesecake Hill 6.4.8 Garton Station Discussion Conclusions

SEVENCEMETERIES IN THE LANDSCAPE 7.1 Introduction 7.2 The Importance of Cemetery Location 7.3 Aims 7.4 Methods and Terminology 7.4.1 Classification 7.4.2 Methods 7.4.3 How Representativeis the Data? 7.5 Results 7.5.1 Cemeteries in the Natural Landscape 7.5.2 Cemeteries in the Historic Landscape 7.5.3 Location of CemeteriesThrough Time 7.5.4 Location of CemeteriesOver Space 7.5.5 · Summary 7.6 Discussion 7.6.1 Cremations and Inhumations 7.6.2 Location of lnhumation Cemeteries Over Time 7.6.3 Relations with the Prehistoric Landscape 7.6.4 Changes in Inhumation Cemeteries Over Time 7.6.5 Relations between the Living and the Dead 7.7 Conclusions

CHAPTER EIGHT

64

CEMETERY DEVELOPMENT AND LAYOUT

6.3 6.4

CHAPTER

5.5.4 A ChronologicalVariation? Conclusions

Discu~ION

AND CONCLUSIONS

8.1 8.1.1 8.1.2 8.1.3 8.1.4 8.1.5 8.1.6 8.1.7 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

The Story So Far History Mortuary Evidence Age, Sex and Gender Variation in Burial Rites The Role of Memory and Tradition The Importance of Landscape Conclusions Why do 'Anglo-Saxon' Burial Rites Start? Why do Burial Rites Change? What are the Wider Implications? Conclusions

72 72

73 73 73 73 74 75

76 76 76 77 77 77 79 79 79 79 85 87 89 98 98 98 99 99 99 100

102 102 102 102 102 103 103 104 104 104 105 106 107

APPENDIX

I

SITE DESCRIPTIONS

109

APPENDIX

II

GAZETIEEROF ANGLO-SAXON SITESIN EASTYoRKSHIRE

127 133

BmLIOGRAPHY

IV

LIST OF FIGURES CHAPTER ONE

Figure 1.1

4

Main areas of early Anglo-Saxonburials

CHAPTER THREE

Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3

Location of Anglo-SaxonCemeteries Excavations in East Yorkshireby Decade and Excavator Excavator of Cemetery against Distance from Bronze Age Barrow

27 29 30

CHAPTER FOUR Figure 4.1 Figure4.2 Figure 4.3a Figure 4.3b Figure 4.3c Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7 Figure 4.8 Figure 4.9 Figure 4.10 Figure 4.11 Figure 4.12 Figure 4.13 Figure 4.14 Figure 4.15 Figure 4.16 Figure 4.17 Figure 4.18 Figure 4.19 Figure 4.20 Figure 4.21 Figure 4.22 Figure 4.23 Figure 4.24

Constituents of Assemblagesat Heslerton Constituents of Assemblagesat Sewerby Illustration of JewelleryAssemblage Illustration of WeaponAssemblage Illustration of Other Goods Assemblage Relative Proportions of AssemblageTypes at Sewerby and Heslerton Percentage of WeaponBurials with Goods Type at Heslerton and Sewerby Percentage of Jewellery Burials with Goods Type at Heslerton and Sewerby Percentage of Other Goods Burials with Goods Type at Heslerton and Sewerby Relationship between Pots, Sherds and Assemblage at Sewerby and Heslerton Biological Sex againstAssemblageat Heslerton Biological Sex against Assemblageat Sewerby Age Group against Assemblageat Heslerton Age Group against Assemblageat Sewerby Jewellery Goods found with % of Age Group at Heslerton Jewellery Goods found with % of Age Group at Sewerby Age Range against Number of Beads at Heslerton Age Range against Number of Beads at Sewerby Age Range against Number of Broochesat Heslerton Age Range against Number of Broochesat Sewerby Age Range against Number of Sleeve Clasps at Heslerton Age Range against Number of Sleeve Clasps at Sewerby Other Goods found with % of Age Group at Heslerton Other Goods found with % of Age Group at Sewerby Weapon Goods found with % of Age Group at Heslerton Weapon Goods found with % of Age Group at Sewerby

36 38 39 40 40 41 41 42 42 42 43 43 43 44 44 44

45 45 46 46 46 46 47 47 47 47

CHAPTER FIVE Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 5.6 Figure 5.7 Figure 5.8 Figure 5.9 Figure 5.10 Figure 5.11 Figure 5.12 Figure 5.13 Figure 5.14 Figure 5.15 Figure 5.16 Figure 5.17 Figure 5.18 Figure 5.19 Figure 5.20 Figure 5.21 Figure 5.22

Average Grave Dimensionsby Assemblageat Heslerton Average Grave Capacityby Age and Assemblage at Heslerton Average Grave Dimensionsby BiologicalSex at Heslerton Average Grave Dimensionsby Flexure at Heslerton Assemblage against Deposition at Heslerton Assemblage against Flexure at Heslerton Age Group against Deposition at Heslerton Age Group against Flexure at Heslerton Biological Sex against Flexure at Heslerton Assemblage against Orientationat Heslerton Age Group against Orientationat Heslerton Number of Annular Brooches againstDeposition at Heslerton Position of Pottery Vesselsagainst Assemblageat Heslerton Position of Wood Vesselsby Age Group at Heslerton Average Grave Dimensionsby Assemblageat Sewerby Average Grave Capacityby Age and Assemblage at Sewerby Average Grave Dimensionsby BiologicalSex at Sewerby Average Grave Dimensionsby Flexure at Sewerby Assemblage against Deposition at Sewerby Assemblage against Flexure at Sewerby Biological Sex against Deposition at Sewerby Assemblage against Orientation at Sewerby V

52 52 53 53 53 53 54 54

54 54 54

55 55 55 56 56 56 56 57 57 57 57

Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure

5.23 5.24 5.25 5.26 5.27 5.28 5.29 5.30 5.31 5.32 5.33 5.34 5.35

Biological Sex against Orientation at Sewerby Assemblage against Deposition at Uncleby Age Group against Flexure at Uncleby Assemblage against Flexure at Uncleby Assemblage against Deposition at Garton Slack I Age Group against Deposition at Garton Slack I Assemblage against Deposition at Kelleythorpe Assemblage against Flexure at Kelleytborpe Assemblage against Orientation at Kelleythorpe Age Group against Orientation at Kelleythorpe Assemblage against Flexure at Cheesecake Hill Assemblage against Deposition at Garton Station Assemblage against Flexure at Garton Station

58 58 59

59 60 60 61 61 61 61 62 62

62

CHAPTER SEVEN

Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 7.4 Figure 7.5 Figure 7.6 Figure 7.7 Figure 7.8 Figure 7.9 Figure 7.10 Figure 7.11 Figure 7.12 Figure 7.13 Figure 7.14 Figure 7.15 Figure 7.16 Figure 7.17 Figure 7.18 Figure 7.19 Figure 7.20 Figure 7.21 Figure 7.22 Figure 7.23 Figure 7.24 Figure 7.25 Figure 7.26 Figure 7.27 Figure 7.28 Figure 7.29 Figure 7.30 Figure 7.31 Figure 7.32 Figure 7.33 Figure 7.34 Figure 7.35 Figure 7.36 Figure 7.37 Figure 7.38 Figure 7.39 Figure 7.40 Figure 7.41 Figure 7.42 Figure 7.43 Figure 7.44 Figure 7.45 Figure 7.46 Figure 7.47

Type of Cemetery against Size Cemetery Type against Altitude Cemetery Type against Slope Position Cemetery Type against Direction of Slope Cemetery Type against Distance from Water Cemetery Type against Drift Geology Cemetery Size against Position on Slope Cemetery Size against Drift Geology Cemetery Size against Distance from Water Predominant Bcxly Position against Cemetery Altitude Predominant Bcxly Position against Position on Slope Predominant Bcxly Position against Drift Geology Predominant Bcxly Position against Direction of Slope Predominant Bcxly Position against Altitude of Cemetery Predominant Bcxly Position against Position of Cemetery on Slope Predominant Bcxly Orientation against Direction of Slope Predominant Bcxly Orientation against Drift Geology Predominant Bcxly Orientation against Distance from Water Assemblage Type against Drift Geology Assemblage Type against Cemetery Size Assemblage Type against Predominant Body Position Assemblage Type against Predominant Orientation Assemblage Type against Direction of Slope Predominant Bcxly Orientation against Predominant Bcxly Position Cemetery Type against Distance from Linear Earthwork Predominant Bcxly Orientation against Coincidence with Linear Earthwork Position of Cemetery on Slope against Coincidence with BA Barrow Presence of Animal Bones against Distance from BA Barrow Predominant Bcxly Position against Distance from IA Cemetery Presence of Animal Bones against Distance from IA Cemetery Cemetery Date against Size Cemetery Date against Predominant Orientation of Bcxlies Cemetery Date against Predominant Body Position Cemetery Date against Altitude Cemetery Date against Presence of Animal Bones Cemetery Date against Drift Geology Cemetery Date against Distance from Linear Earthwork Cemetery Date against Distance from Bronze Age Barrow Cemetery Size against Distance from Iron Age Cemetery Distribution of Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries by Type Distribution of Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries by Size Distribution of Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries by Predominant Body Position Distribution of Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries by Predominant Goods Provisioning Distribution of Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries by Predominant Orientation Distribution of Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries by Date Distribution of Early Anglo-Saxon Settlement Sites Distribution of Romano-British Sites

vi

78 80

80 80 80

80 81 81 81 82 82 82 82 83 83 83 83 83

84 84 84 84 84 84 86 86 86 86 87 87 87 87 88

88 88 88 88 89 89

90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97

APPENDIX

I

Figure A.la Figure A.lb Figure A.le Figure A.2 Figure A.3 Figure A.4 Figure A.5 Figure A.6 Figure A.7 Figure A.8 Figure A.9 Figure A.IO Figure A.11 Figure A.12 Figure A.13 Figure A.14 Figure A.15 Figure A.16 Figure A.17 Figure A.18 Figure A.19 Figure A.20 Figure A.21 Figure A.22 Figure A.23

Site of Heslerton Settlement and Cemetery Plan of Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Heslerton Layout of Graves at Heslerton Plan of Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Sewerby Breakdown of Assemblage at Other Cemeteries Plan of Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Uncleby Jewellery Grave Good Types at Uncleby Other Grave Good Types at Uncleby Weapon Grave Good Types at Uncleby Plan of Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Garton II Jewellery Grave Good Types at Garton II Other Grave Good Types at Garton II Plan of Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Garton Slack I Other Grave Good Types at Garton Slack I Plan of Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Kelleythorpe Jewellery Grave Good Types at Kelleythorpe Other Grave Good Types at Kelleythorpe Weapon Grave Good Types at Kelleythorpe Plan of Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Cheesecake Hill Jewellery Grave Good Types at Cheesecake Hill Other Grave Good Types at Cheesecake Hill Plan of Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Garton Station Jewellery Grave Good Types at Garton Station Other Grave Good Types at Garton Station Weapon Grave Good Types at Garton Station

110 111 112 113 114

115 116 116 116 117 118 118

120 118 121 122 122 122 123 123 124 125 126 126 126

LIST OF TABLF.S CHAPTER FIVE

Table 5.1

Burial Details

51

CIIAPI'ERSIX Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4

Assemblage by Cluster at Heslerton Age Group by Cluster at Heslerton Biological Sex by Cluster at Heslerton Relationship of Burials to Earthworks at Heslerton

70 70 70 70

CHAPTER SEVEN Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3

Cemetery Attributes Distances of Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries from Prehistoric Earthworks Significant Tendencies of Cemeteries by Chronological Divisions

Vll

79 85 98

CHAPTER

1.1

ONE:INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION "The brutal Saxon invaders drove the Britons westward into Wales and compelled them to become Welsh; it is now considered doubtful whetherthis was a Good '!bing. Memorable among the Saxon warriors were Hen gist and his wife (? or horse)Borsa, the first English Queen (or horse). The country was now almost entirely inhabitedby Saxons and was thereforerenamedEngland, and thus (naturally) soon became C of E. This was a Good Thing" (W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman1066and All That)

This work is a study of mortuary practices in East Yorkshire in the early Anglo-Saxon period, from the fifth to the late seventh century AD. In it I attempt to employ an approach which is contextual in two ways: both in terms of the data, and in terms of the ideas constructed around those data. The former involves using all the available evidence (rather than a supposedly representative sample), ranging from large-scale well-recorded modern excavations down to briefly recorded nineteenth century finds. The analysis at each stage, from that at the level of the individual body to that of the wider landscape, aims to make optimal use of this data in appropriate ways. I do not attempt to test a pre-formulated model which aims to account for patterning in the archaeological evidence. Rather, my approach is based in the belief that archaeological evidence is the accumulation of certain consequences of human actions, or practices, albeit practices which are constrained to a greater or lesser extent by the conditions within which people live, and which may be deliberate or unconscious. I therefore believe that patterning within that evidence is indicative of certain aspects of a society, although it is by no means directly reflective of those aspects. My approach also attempts to be contextual in terms of its position within a wider discipline. In order to understand how and why a discipline has developed in certain directions, and why debate is structured in particular ways, a detailed knowledge of that discipline's past is essential. It is only through such historiographical work that both new and old ideas can be fully and fairly evaluated, in relation to the discipline as a whole, rather than to a single internalised debate.

1.2

BACKGROUND

The original impetus for this research arose during the course of my undergraduate degree. When researching for essays on early medieval archaeology, it seemed that the arguments employed by scholars in the field relied on overly simplistic models when trying to explain the changes in the archaeological record between the Roman and the Anglo-Saxon period. Gender and ethnic stereotypes were rife - the whole of the two centuries between the 'fall' of Roman Britain and the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were conceptualised as a time of conflict in a warrior-based society, firstly between male 'Britons' and 'Anglo-Saxons', and then between different groupings of the Anglo-Saxons themselves, the Britons having been summarily dispatched (Pader 1982: 74-7).

Obviously, this is a caricature, but it does sum up the main problem which I had with traditional approaches to this period: the treatment of different cultural groupings as political forces, rather than as groups of people. There seemed to be a fundamental contradiction between the ways in which the archaeological evidence for the period was used to illustrate the (supposedly) historical record, and the nature of that archaeological evidence itself. The many cemeteries of the early Anglo-Saxon period contained people of all age groups and sexes, with varying forms of ornament and other goods. Although a proportion of adult burials did contain weapons, these were in a minority when compared with the numbers which contained other types of goods. The settlement evidence, in addition, consists of undefended rural settlement - wooden post-hole buildings, small huts or work-houses dug into the ground, and animal enclosures. The society which this archaeological evidence brings to mind is not one in a state of incessant warfare and conflict, but one consisting of men, women and children, living in predominantly farming communities. I saw two obvious problems in the way that Anglo-Saxon archaeology was interpreted: the heavy reliance on traditional historical frameworks, and the view of archaeological evidence of the period as straightforward. Recent historical source criticism has highlighted the subjective nature of early documentary sources, with early authors writing for political and religious masters, for whom they tailored their work (Austin 1990; Goffart 1988; Hedeager 1993; Yorke 1993). It has also been pointed out that the ethnic stereotypes which we employ when thinking about the early medieval period are inadequate: that early medieval ethnicity was a far more subjective and contingent notion than we often realise (Amory 1993; Geary 1983; Pohl 1997; Reynolds 1985). Thus, traditional interpretations of the period employ outdated historical ideas (e.g. Beresford Ellis 1992; Hamerow 1994; Palm and Pind 1992). Recent archaeological and anthropological research has, in addition, shown funerary rites to be arenas of social negotiation, and have demonstrated the often subtle, and sometimes contradictory, usage of material culture in those rites (e.g. Hedeager 1993;Parkin 1992). Burials do not necessarily directly reflect the nature of a society - they can be used to emphasise a dominant ideology; they can also be used to subvert the dominant order (Barrett 1990; Hodder 1982b; Morris 1987; Thomas 1991). Recent research has shown that meanings of material culture are formulated in local contexts, and that meanings attached to an object can vary widely over space and time (Barrett 1991; Hodder 1987; Seirensen 1987, 1991). Anglo-Saxon archaeology is not immune from the conclusions of such research. Although Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are often discussed as if inhumation or cremation was the 'normal' way to dispose of a body, this cannot in fact be assumed. The decision to inhume or cremate a corpse is very much a cultural decision - in prehistory bodies were disposed of in a number of ways, most of which would now seem, to us, barbaric. Because we, in the later twentieth century, inhume or cremate our dead, we cannot assume that this has always been the case, or even that

centuries AD in eastern England that the archaeological evidence is predominantly funerary, and this has been the case ever since the discipline of Anglo-Saxon archaeology began to develop in the late eighteenth century . Indeed, the first early Anglo-Saxon settlement sites were only excavated in the l 920s (Leeds 1923, 1927). The general imbalance between the archaeological evidence for the Ii ving and the dead is exemplified by the fact that by the late 1940s, while there were well over a thousand burial sites recorded, only a handful of settlement sites were known (Webster 1986: 123).

such burial practices should be seen as unremarkable . Early Anglo-Saxon burial rites are not static, but vary widely over the country and over time. It is my belief that exploring variation in burial rites can say far more about the societies employing them than trying to reduce the rite to a static homogenous entity, constant over space and time , until the advent of Christianity brings a new rite. However , in order to explore this variation, previous ideas which were formulated with regard to the significance of these rites must first be critically examined.

1.3 A CRITICAL

The nature of evidence from these cemeteries is very different from the archaeology of the periods which precede and follow it. The Roman period was characterised by settlement evidence, monumental architecture, distinctive building styles, imported pottery and metalwork. The archaeological remains reflect the world of the living: forts, roads , villas , settlements , enclosures . Cemeteries are found in some numbers but these generally concentrate around settlement sites. The centuries following the early Anglo-Saxon period are also focused on the living on settlements, trading and manufacturing sites. Burials are found, but these are generally unaccompanied by grave goods, and concentrate around ecclesiastical foundations, often within rural settlements or urban sites.

HISTORY OF ANGLO-SAXON

STUDIES

My preliminary reading around the subject area made it plain that over previous decades, even centuries , there have been a limited number of ideas put forward to explain the pattern of events in the fourth to seventh centuries AD, virtually all of which envisaged change as being ·caused by some external influence from the continent, usually in the form of invaders or settlers (to paraphrase the National Curriculum for history) . The aim of writing a critical history of Anglo-Saxon studies was to show the way in which ideas about the 'Anglo-Saxons', their customs, institutions, relations with the native inhabitants, and the process by which the British became the English (usually a variant on mass migration, military invasion or political conquest) have altered over the past four centuries. These changes can be related not only to the political, religious and social contexts of the time, but also to personal circumstances and beliefs of scholars. Obviously, shifts in interpretations do not occur independently of empirical evidence, but in a dialectic with it (Damm 1991a). Ideas have thus also been influenced by the ch~ging nature of early AngloSaxon archaeological evidence, especially the more recent emphasis on settlement, environmental and landscape studies .

The early Anglo-Saxon period, in contrast, is typified by cemeteries and funerary sites, which are found mainly in the eastern half of the country. An early Anglo-Saxon cemetery can be identified by the nature of the burials, and the goods included with them. Corpses were either cremated ( on a pyre or in the grave) or inhumed, and were usually deposited in graves or burial pits dug into the ground, but occasionally they were either inserted into an existing earthwork, or they had a stone cairn or earthen mound raised over them. lnhumation burials were predominantly extended or lightly flexed, supine, and were often oriented with heads to the west (Faull 1977: 5). Both cremations and inhumations were often furnished with distinctive types of jewellery and other types of omamen 4 such as brooches and other dress-fastenings, bead strings and waist ornaments such as girdle-bangers and latch-lifters. Some graves were furnished with weaponry, with spears being the most common item, followed by shields and then swords. Helmets and chain-mail are extremely rare (Harke 1990: 25-6) . Other items found in burials are pottery sherds or vessels - either the decorated urns in which cremations were often placed, or the food vessels which sometimes accompanied inhumation burials. Glass, metal and wood vessels are also found occasionally with inhumations, as are items such as toilet-sets (tweezers, 'earscoops ' etc.), cosmetic brushes, cylindrical metal 'thread boxes', mounted crystal balls and other amuletic items. Metal knives are extremely common along with belt-fastenings and buckles. Goods in cremation burials are often burn 4 suggesting they were placed on the pyre with the corpse.

Explicitly describing the historical contexts of the circumstances in which archaeological interpretations have been produced allows different interpretations of the periodwhich are more in line with current understandings of the ways in which archaeological evidence changes over time, and its significance and meaning. A critical history also provides a detailed historical background against which previous interpretations can be evaluated . The aim is not to judge them by today' s standards, but to place them within the historical development of the discipline, and understand how they came about. The aim of this history is not to show that the present is better or inevitable, but to demonstrate that both past and presen t interpretations are contingen 4 and can only be j udged by their accordance with archaeological evidence.

1.4

ANGLO-SAXON

In late sixth and seventh century cemeteries, variations in the burial rite are found, with the distinctive boat-burials at Sutton Hoo (Bruce-Mitford 1975-83; Carver 1989) and Snape (BruceMitford 1974: 114-69; Filmer-Sankey 1987), 'deviant' burials such as the satellite burials at Sutton Hoo , and other types of 'Final Phase' cemeteries, such as westerly-orie nted, unfurnished

CEMETERIF.S

A critical history of Anglo-Saxon studies also serves to show the importance of evidence from cemeteries in histor ical reconstructions of the period. It is a feature of the fifth to seventh 2

earthworks was a distinctive rite (Meaney 1964: 18-9). Although similar practices were found in other areas, such as the Peak District and WC?~sex,burials in barrows in these areas tended to be few in number, whereas in East Yorkshire, whole cemeteries were based around them (though see Williams 1998 for a revision of this data). Other unusual rites were also identified. Faull's doctoral thesis (1979) described the practice of crouched burial in many early Anglo-Saxon inhumation cemeteries in East Yorkshire, and argued for this being a survival of Iron Age and native Romano-British burial practices in the region. Comparing this rite with burial practices south of the Humber, she concluded that East Yorkshire was a place where survival of the late Roman population could be identified.

types and those with 'Kentish' type jewellery (see Geake 1992 for a summary, and Hyslop 1963 for discussion of the goods found at these sites). Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are also different from the burial places of the Roman and later Anglo-Saxon periods in their geographical location. They are found predominantly in rural situations, away from the walled towns of the Roman period or ·the later urban sites of the Christian period. It is easy to see how the archaeological remains of this period, being characteristically different from those preceding and following, were interpreted as evidence for migration or invasion, especially as the historical sources appeared to attest to major population change at the temporal boundary between the Roman and Saxon periods.

There is thus a tradition of East Yorkshire being 'odd' in its burial rites, with both crouched burial and secondary burial in prehistoric earthworks as distinctive features. Another unusual feature of the area is the excavation of an associated settlement and cemetery, at West Heslerton (Powlesland et al. 1986; Powl~~l3:_nd 1987, 1989, in press). Associated settlements and cemeteries have also been excavated at Mucking (Hamerow 1993) and West Stow (West 1985), but this is generally extremely unusual in Anglo-Saxon archaeology. It was originally my intention to compare the settlement at Heslerton with the cemetery, but as the settlement is in post-excavation, and the number of well-recorded cemeteries in this area is so high, this study deals mainly with funerary archaeology.

Recently, new approaches have been developed in early AngloSaxon mortuary archaeology which have started to consider variation in the totality of the burial rites seen, rather than variation in associated artefacts. For example, Ellen-Jane Pader ( 1982) looked at how people were buried, and what they were buried with, in her examination of symbolic representation in inhumation cemeteries in East Anglia. Julian Richards ( 1987) compared decoration and style of cremation urns with skeletal evidence relating to the person (or persons) inside. Karen Brush also paid some account to skeletal evidence, firstly in her analysis of the different assemblages with which cremations and inhumations at Spong Hill were furnished (Brush 1988), and then in her wider study of variation in early Anglo-Saxon burial costume (Brush 1993). Harke, in his examination of the weapon burial rite (1989a, 1990, 1992a, b) took skeletal and pathological evidence into account when considering the symbolic meanings of the practice of including weapons as grave goods. Martin Carver, in his role as director of the Sutton Hoo Research Trust, has sought to set the burial site in both its local context, and the wider geographical, political and historical contexts in which it was situated (Carver 1989, 1992). These approaches have served to reinvigorate the field of early AngloSaxon mortuary analysis, focusing study on the people buried in the cemeteries, rather than on the goods buried with them.

1.5

EARLY ANGLO-SAXON

EAST

1.6 Oun.INE In order to set the study in its disciplinary context, and provide a detailed background against which to evaluate ideas, Chapter Two is a critical history of Anglo-Saxon studies, concentrating particularly on changing interpretations of cemeteries, and of Anglo-Saxons. Following this is a background chapter (Chapter Three), which describes the study area, its history of archaeological research, and the perspective on mortuary practices used. The next three chapters concentrate on the analysis of eight large, well-recorded inhumation cemeteries in the study area. Chapter Four starts at the level of the individual grave, analysing burial offerings in terms of observable features of the grave's occupant, such as age and biological sex, in order to critically assess notions of Anglo-Saxon age and gender categories. Chapter Five widens this analysis to look at how age, biological sex, and the cultural identity conferred by the grave goods are reflected in other aspects of burial such as the positioning of the body, and the dimensions of the grave. Chapter Six examines the spatial layout of these cemeteries, and relates this to chronological changes both within individual sites and between different cemeteries. Chapter Seven expands the analysis to include all the burial sites recorded in the region, in order to assess differences in location and chronology between sites, by placing them in their geographical and historical contexts in the landscape. Chapter Eight then discusses the implications of this analysis for the interpretation of Anglo-Saxon funerary remains, makes some brief concluding remarks, and suggests directions for future research.

YORKSWRE

There is a general assumption that early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, during the period of their existence, were fairly homogenous in time and space, although some spatial and chronological variation did exist in the distribution of different rites. Some areas were characterised mainly by cremation cemeteries, such as Norfolk and Suffolk, while others, such as most of England south of the Thames, contained mainly inhumation burials (see Fig. 1.1). Large areas contained both sorts of burial, often in the same cemeteries, such as the south Midlands. These regional variations were often seen as representative of the ethnic divisions believed to exist, for example, between southern 'Saxon• areas and eastern •Anglian' areas. Toe cemeteries of East Yorkshire have also been viewed in ethnic terms, but with a slight difference. This area was identified as one in which secondary burial in prehistoric

3

Mainly lnhumation Burials

Ullllllllffllllll Mainly Cremation Burials IIIIIIIIUI11Mixed Burials

IS:»mMainly Secondary Barrow Burials

Figure 1.1: Main Areas of Anglo-SaxonBurials (after Meaney 1964) 4

CHAPTER Two: THE ANGW-SAXON MYTH AND THE DEVEWPMENT OF ANGW-SAXON ARCHAEOLOGY "Like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, we see farther than they" - Bernard of Chartres, northern France c.1130

2.1

centuries. In this chapter I will argue that these frameworks are no longer relevant to the new agendas being set in Anglo-Saxon archaeology, and the new sorts of questions being asked, and that different ways of interpreting the evidence must therefore be developed.

INTRODUCTION

To date, there has been no detailed critical history of AngloSaxon archaeology. There have been excellent studies onAngloSaxon historians (Burrow 1981; MacDougall 1982; Smith 1987), but work on Anglo-Saxon archaeology and its practitioners has been largely confined to brief historical surveys serving as introductions to wider studies (Arnold 1988; Higham 1992; Richards 1987). These are largely uncritical, internal approaches, documenting the rise of the discipline and the careers of its practitioners, and detailing their contributions to present understanding and knowledge. Their aim is usually to demonstrate past failures and weaknesses, in suppon of new approaches. However, there is little critical consideration of the intellectual and socio-political backgrounds of these men and women, and the impact which this had on their research (although Laing and Laing 1979 is a brief but perceptive exception). There is also little appreciation of the wider context of Anglo-Saxon archaeology, in terms of its strong associations with the spheres of historical and literary scholarship.

2.2

HISTORY BEFORE ARCHAEOLOGY

2.2.1

MYTIIS

1550-1850

OF ORIGIN

The emergence of Anglo-Saxon archaeology in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was intimately involved with a rich tradition of historical research which had come before it. Even after the divergence of archaeology into a separate discipline in the nineteenth century, it was still regarded as a 'handmaid' to history, providing evidence to support the established historical narratives (Levine 1986: 29). These narratives were often based around a form of origin story which had developed over the preceding three centuries, and was inextricably linked to political and national self-awareness and definition (Champion 1990). It is imponant to examine this earlier development, as during these years the groundwork was laid for the histories which archaeology was later used to support, and they thus helped to determine the ways in which archaeological evidence was (and sometimes still is) interpreted.

Remedying this situation involves tracing the development of narratives about the Anglo-Saxons from the sixteenth century, when such ideas began to take over from the Brutus legends, and the people of Britain started to perceive themselves as having a Germanic ancestry, rather than a Trojan one. Changing conceptions of the Anglo-Saxons, their origins, institutions and characteristics, can be followed through the historical, political and religious writings of the next four centuries, and can be seen to affect, and be affected by, some of the imponant issues and debates of the day.

MacDougall has traced in great detail the development of the two major origin stories in early English history: the Brut, by which the British could trace their origins to the Trojans (via Japhet, Brutus and Anhur), and the Anglo-Saxonism which gradually replaced it during the course of the sixteenth century (featuring Hengis4 Horsa and Alfred as its heroes). He argues (1982: 1) that such narratives enable people to locate themselves; they offer explanations of the unknown and of hallowed traditions, and they form the basis of belief ~ystems, providing moral validation for attitudes and activ ..ties, and binding a society together.

With the formalisation of Anglo-Saxon archaeology into an academic discipline towards the end of the nineteenth century, the focus of this investigation alters slightly, shifting to an examination of the way that the archaeology itself was interpreted within these developing historical frameworks, and concomitantly, how changing ideas about the interpretation of archaeological evidence have come to affect in more recent years the very nature of such frameworks.

That there was an audience for such stories is evidenced by their pervasiveness: the Brutus myth (represented in its most popular form by the History of the Kings of Britain written c.1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth) was widely accepted as historical truth from at least the twelfth to the sixteenth century, in many different versions. In the increasingly sceptical age of the sixteenth and seventeenth century its historical and political validity was gradually eroded (although stories about King Arthur, Merlin et al. have in the last fifty years experienced a renaissance). Due to political and religious conflicts the Brutus myth came to be replaced by an origin story which was more easily supponed by historical documents which had become briefly available following the dissolution of the monasteries and the dispersal of their libraries during the Reformation. This latter version is still historical dogma, if not as powerful as it

Historical and archaeological interpretations are not objective and non-ideological, but are contingent and subjective. Oianges in the agenda of a subjec4 in the questions asked by researchers, and in the interpretations made of the evidence, can be seen as the outcome of a continuing dialectic; a two-way relationship between the history of that discipline and new ideas and discoveries within it. The continual restructuring of a discipline can therefore be seen as the ongoing result of this dialectic, with the setting of new agendas, and the asking of new sons of questions. However, it is the case that established ways of interpreting Anglo-Saxon cemetery evidence, in terms of mass population movements or military invasions, are reliant on historical frameworks which were laid down in previous

5

once was, for many people in England nowadays would regard themselves as being descended from the Germanic peoples said to have settled here in the fifth and sixth centuries, an idea which is still current in school teaching, for example in the Key Stage II history unit of the National Curriculum 'Invaders and Settlers' (Department of Education 1995) and in children's books (e.g. Ross 1985; Triggs 1992).

fully developed in that earlier institution (MacDougall 1982: 38). Ecclesiastical corruption could thus be shown to date from the Norman invasion of 1066, which the Pope had blessed (Hill 1958: 60). This idea was later expanded into the theory of the 'Norman Yoke', which the Saxons had to throw off in order to be free again. Parker's work prompted the editing and publication of various Anglo-Saxon texts, and he collected (and perhaps failed to return) manyoriginal manuscripts (thirty eight of which still survive in Corpus Christi Library in Cambridge) (Page 1975; 1993).

This latter origin story, termed Anglo-Saxonism, developed from its role in the political and ecclesiastical debates of the sixteenth century, to flourish as a form of racial determinism by the middle of the nineteenth century. By tracing this development, and relating it to the political and social issues of the time, the extremes that this narrative reached can be understood, and its impact on the development of archaeology elucidated.

2.2.2 THE BIRTII

The role and nature of historical scholarship at this time should be stressed. History in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not of the narrative kind which we understand it to be today. Rather, it was used as a lawyer uses precedent, with specific parallels being drawn between past and present situations, and the past being quoted and used to justify present actions or viewpoints. The uses of history were part of a political and philosophical debate, both sides of which made use of historical arguments to justify their positions, stressing the particulars of the past which suited their case best {Hale 1967: 10-11).

OF ANGLO-SAXONISM

2.2.2.1 Reformation The Arthurian/Brutus story was intimately linked with the new Norman-French ruling class in medieval England, reflecting their desire fornon-English ancestors (Geoffrey of Monmouth's original manuscript was dedicated to King Stephen), and it became an integral part of the idea of chivalry and knighthood. This narrative was later heavily drawn upon in propaganda supporting the Welsh Tudor dynasty (for example in Spenser's Fairie Queene which linked Arthur with Elizabeth the First (MacDougall 1982: 20)), and also James Stuart. Its eventual rejection was a symptom (and also partly a cause) of ecclesiastical and political changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

2.2.2.2 Revolution The Reformation had transferred lands and property from the clerical landowners to big lay landowners, who therefore had a vested interest in Protestantism, and a concomitant fear of 'Popery', towards which both Charles I (R. 1625-1649) and, later on, Charles II (R. 1660-1685) and James II (R. 1685-89) were suspected of leaning (Hill 1958: 67; Kenyon 1978: 260). As Parliament increasingly became a mouthpiece of these landlords and the new wealthy class of merchants in the early seventeenth century, it came into conflict with the interests of the monarchy. The pressurised government began to depend more on prerogative courts and the church as instruments of its rule, in an attempt to dispense with Parliament and over-ride the common law (Hill 1958: 64-5). However, security of personal property depended on the common law, and thus: "A defence of Anglo-Saxon liberties was also a defence of property against the state, against arbitrary taxation" (ibid: 66). ProParliamentary antiquarians therefore turned to historical sources for justification of their arguments. Men such as Verstegan, Speed and Selden were strong proponents of the idea of the free Anglo-Saxons and their democratic and representative government, using these historical arguments in the political debates of the day (Bacon 1647; Ferne 1643; Hunton 1643; Speed 1611; Verstegan 1605). Those who wanted to limit royal authority therefore stressed the antiquity of parliament, arguing that it had authority prior to and superior to that of kings (MacDougall 1982: 56). Sir Edward Coke (1642) was one of the staunchest advocates of this view, identifying Parliament with the Saxon witanagemotdescribed by Verstegan ( 1605), and even the conventusof the Germans described by Tacitus in his Gennania (Kenyon 1983: 14).

Although Polydore Vergil (appointed historiographer to Henry VIl in 1507) completed his Anglica Historiain 1513, it was not published until 1534. It was only after the king's son and successor, Henry VID (R. 1509-1547), had broken from Rome, and established the Church of England, that this version of the past which seemed to support a non-Roman church, and furnished a set of non-French ancestors, found favour with the monarchy for the first time, especially as it stressed the imperial nature of kingship (MacDougall 1982: 18). In a similar manner the surveys of British antiquities made by the King's Antiquary John Leyland in 1533, and Camden's Britannia (1586) were intended to supplant Romanist papal history with non-classical national history (Stewart 1993: 140-1). The dissolution of the monasteries during the Reformation had made many previously unknown documents available (those that were not destroyed), and historical records became the primary source of material used by antiquarians to establish the legitimacy of the new church (MacDougall 1982: 32). A precedent for the autonomous Church of England was sought in the church of Saxon England. Matthew Parker (who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1559) took on the responsibility of justifying and maintaining the English church. The Privy Council's broadsheet of 1568 authorised him to take possession of "auncient recordes or monumentes written" in order to examine, record, and then, theoretically, return them (Page 1993: 43-4). He wished to demonstrate continuity from the pure, primitive Saxon church, and show that papal claims were not

In order to make use of Tacitus' evidence, anti-absolutist arguments obviously relied on a Germanic origin for English people and institutions. William Camden ( 1551-1623) was the first English scholar to look at the origins of the Anglo.,Saxons; he saw a Germanic victory over the native British inhabitants as "entire and absolute" (MacDougall 1982: 45-6). In his Britannia(1586: 4-6) he explicitly denounced the Brutus origin 6

2.2.2.4The Effect On Learning 1580-1680

story: "I have often strained my invention to the utmost to support it. Absolutely to reject it would be to wage war against time, and to fight against a received opinion", although he tl)en proceeded give at length reasons why many "very learned and judicious men" rejected it. Others also employed historical evidence in political polemic. Richard Verstegan, in his Restitutionof DecayedIntelligenceinAntiquity(1605)stressed that the English possessed the Germanic qualities of faith, courage, justice and constancy of purpose, while minimising the impact of Danish and Norman invasions, and thus stressing continuity from Saxon times to the present (Kliger 1972: 77; MacDougall 1982: 47-8).

Such historical enquiry was a dangerous pursuit in the climate of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. The Society of Antiquaries, founded in 1580, had close links with the parliamentary opposition, and its members did much to elaborate the doctrine of continuity from Anglo-Saxon times which supported their position (Hill 1958: 61). This Society had been forcibly suppressed by the Government during the reign of James I (R. 1603-1625), and Robert Cotton's famous library was searched in 1630, after which he could only consult manuscripts under official supervision (ibid: 63). For similar reasons the Dutchman Isaac Dorislaus was deprived of his history lectureship at Cambridge in 1627 after his first lecture, which had been on Tacitus; in it he had ''placed the right of monarchy in the people's voluntary submission" (quoted in Hill 1958: 64) (Dorislaus was later assassinated by Royalists while in the diplomatic service of the English Republic (ibid.)).

Such emphasis on the free and self-governing nature of the Germanic tribes (on the authority of Tacitus) supported the case for limited authority of the monarchy. For example, Nathaniel Bacon's Historical and Political Discourse of the Laws and Governmentof England (1647) went into six editions, firmly implanting in the English mind the association of the Goths (i.e. the Germans) with the tradition of democratic liberties (Kliger 1972: 139-41). Obviously, such models relied on the complete replacement of British institutions with Saxon, calling either for the expulsion of all the natives (as proposed by Hunton in his Treatiseof Monarchy (1643)) or at least their conquest and enslavement (Ferne 1643). Such views are plainly reliant on Gildas (versions of his De e:xcidiowere published in 1525 by Polydore Vergil and in 1557 by Parker).

In 1638 Henry Spelman had founded a lectureship at Cambridge to promote the study of "domestique Antiquities touching our Church and reviving the Saxon tongue" (Levine 1987: 89) and in 1644 the first holder of the chair, Abraham Whelock, had brought out an important edition of texts including the AngloSaxonChronicle,Bede's HistoriaEcclesiasticaand OldEnglish Law (Douglas 1951: 61). In 1659 the first Anglo-Saxon dictionary (by William Somner, the chair's second holder) reflected the continuing interest paid to the subject in the universities, and the rapid growth in knowledge of the AngloSaxon language (Levine 1987: 90-1). However, after the Reformation, with the consequent removal of Anglo-Saxonism from political controversy, yet its continuing importance in a nationalistic sense as the story of the origin of the English, it was increasingly seen as a suitable subject for authorised academic study, for it no longer presented a real threat to the established government, and could even be drawn upon to support their interests.

2.2.2.3Restoration With the victory of parliamentary supporters in the civil war, the challenge to men of property came no longer from royal absolutism, but from popular democracy, with the radicals coming to see the law itself as part of the Norman bondage (Hill 1958: 71), and the people (i.e. the jury) being superior both to law and to parliament (ibid: 79). After the execution of Charles I in 1649both conservatives and Parliamentarians began to group together in search of a government which would guarantee property against this rebellious movement, a search which was eventually to result in the establishment of a 'free parliament' and the restoration of Charles II (ibid: 86; Kenyon 1978: 178-9).

2.2.3 'Im;

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

During the later eighteenth century, the political contexts of European conflict, and the subsequent rise of nationalism created an atmosphere favourable to a rise in popular and academic opinion of the Anglo-Saxons. This led to an increase of scholarship in this subject at the turn of the next century (Colley 1992; Hobsbawm 1990). During this period, belief in continuity of Anglo-Saxon institutions, such as parliament and the constitution, became heavily supplemented by the idea of continuity of Anglo-Saxon traits and personal characteristics.

The effect of such intensive political usage was that by the end of the seventeenth century the Anglo-Saxon CJriginstory was generally accepted as historical dogma, and had come to be un integral part of the self-image of the English, along with Protestantism and patriotism (Hill 1958: 67). The free, selfgoverning and democratic nature of Anglo-Saxon institutions was unquestionably accepted, despite the changes wrought on Anglo-Saxonism by its use in political invective. As Hill states: "The continuity of English law and institutions, as a peculiar and particularly admirable feature of English development. ..in origin ...is doubly propagandist: it springs from Coke's theory used against Stuart absolutism, as modified by the need of the victorious Parliamentarians to defend their position against radical attack and to pretend that there had been no Revolution" (1958: 91). An integral part of this theory was the ideas about Anglo-Saxon invasions which it implicitly supported: for a complete replacement of native institutions by Anglo-Saxon ones, the indigenous population either had to be subdued or expelled.

From the Restoration until the middle years of the eighteenth century, the Anglo-Saxons appear to have suffered a decline in general estimation, while the admirable nature and continuity of their institutions was widely accepted. Many works viewed the English as a Gothic people with a Gothic constitution (Echard 1720; Molesworth 1694; Oldmixon 1724). This period is one which has been described as the "sleep of history", when historical research was not seen as having wider social relevance (Piggott 1976). In fact, the popularity of classical antiquities, culminating in the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, suggests that this was not the case, but rather that it was nonclassical study which went into decline, perhaps due to the 7

virtual cessation of its use as propaganda in political debate during these years (Levine 1987: 92, 96; Smith 1987: 43) . Indeed, there is evidence that it was thought positively distasteful for the 'polite ' gentleman at this time to read the barbarian authors and study the defaced remains of the Middle Ages (Levine 1987: 96).

model of the ancient German order to be found in modern times (see for example Stuart 1768). However, after Bishop Percy argued in his translation of Mallet's NonhemAntiquities (1770) for the Celts and Germans being distinct peoples ( whereas before a common Gothic past had been assumed for all the peoples of northern Europe), history began to be interpreted along more racial lines, often with the Celts and the Germans being opposed to one another. For example , Pinkerton in his Dissenation ( 1787) declared the Celts inferior by nature and incapable of raising themselves from savagery, and stated that no great man had ever come of pure Celtic stock. He tried to show that the Goths were really Scythians (the eighteenth century equivalent of the Aryan race, to which it was thought all the great nations belonged) , especially praising the virtue, wisdom and courage of those who had overthrown the Roman Empire (Peardon 1933: 115-6). This work had a huge impact. Being widely referred to, it familiarised its readers with an interpretation of history in racial terms, and also reinforced the idea of the superiority of the race to which the Germans belonged (ibid: 117).

The emphasis at this time was on the characteristics of institutions, not people. Thus in 1757, whilst praising the skill of the Saxons in "wisely constituting civil societies", Lord Hawkesbury admitted that they were "ridiculed for their ignorance and barbarity" (Hawkesbury 1757: 3-5 quoted in Hill 1958: 94). Likewise, Montesquieu ' s Des L 'Esprit des Lois ( 1750) portrayed England as an example of a sound political system, which had originated in the forest-clearings of Gennany, and been transferred by the immigrants to similar clearings in the sparsely-populated woodland of post-Roman Britain . This was one of the most influential political tracts ever written , being widely read in England and America (MacDougall 1982: 81 ), and served to reinforce the already entrenched view of the Germanic origin of British institutions .

The development of such attitudes can perhaps be linked to the increasing importance of issues of nationhood and nationalism (c.f. Hobsbawm 1990). After the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, Britain was a Protestant state :. Successive wars with France, a Catholic country, throughout the eighteenth century provided an 'other' in opposition to which Britons defined themselves, and thus an idea of 'Britishness' was super-imposed over an array of internal English, Welsh and Scottish differences (Colley 1992).The near success of the Jacobite Revolt in 1745 provided a stimulus for "an intensely creative period in terms of patriotic initiatives and discussion of national identities" over the next twenty years (ibid: 85) . This time saw the founding of the British Museum and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as an increase of interest in English, Welsh and Scottish culture (ibid: 85-6). French contamination was perceived as an evil, and many believed that Britons needed to become more moral and united. Evidence for this was sought in the past: in 1756 John Frere called for the English, Lowland Scots and the Hanoverian Kings, all of whom were descendants of the Saxons, to live in harmony with the Ancient Britons (the Welsh) (ibid: 90).

The increasingly turbulent 1760s, however, saw propagandist enthusiasm for the Anglo-Saxons themselves grow. In her History of England, published from 1763, the republican Mrs Catherine Macaulay argued that the Civil War "overturned the tyranny settled by the Norman invader", but she regretted that in 1660 and 1688 Parliament had not returned to "the more wholesome principles of the Saxon constitution" (quoted in Hill 1958: 94). This book was a best-seller at a time just before the Wilkesite agitation and the American Revolution prompted calls for Parliamentary reform, which also helped revive the idea of the free and democratic nature of the Anglo-Saxons (Hill 1958: 94-5). This use of the 'Norman Yoke' theory by Parliamentary reformers drew on and closely followed the arguments of the seventeenth century debates (ibid: 99). Two works which had enormous impact were those of Hume ( 175462) and Gibbon (1776-88) which pictured a despotic Rome in decay giving way to the manly, freedom-loving German people (MacDougall 1982: 82). Popular history was beginning to be couched in more personal terms. As an area of scholarly interest, Anglo-Saxonism was influenced by the more general changes in the nature of scholarship in the later eighteenth cen~ury. The rational atmosphere of the Enlightenment encouraged empirical work and the use of original sources (Levine 1987: 105-6), and history became a matter for objective validation, rather than impassioned invective. From the 1770s political use of the past therefore changed, as the appeal to the past came to be challenged by the appeal to reason. The medieval past could no longer be seen as showing the rightful pattern of the presen t, for this was too easy to refute with historical scholarship. Rather, the 'Whig ' view of history came to predominate, whereby in the past could be seen the faint originals of a later world (Smith 1987: 88). Thus Burke in 1790 could state that from Tacitus "thus were delineated the faint and incorrect outlines of our constitution which has since been so nobly furnished and so highly finished" (Burke 1790: 328-9).

Likewise , the French Revolution in 1789 prompted Burke ( 1790) to eulogise the British constitution and social system, stressing its antiquity and emphasising national differences in govemmentandhistory(Peardon 1933: 163-4). The Napoleonic Wars and the loss of America in the War of Independence around the turn of the century also served to bring the ties between England and Scotland closer together (Colley 1992: 144). Such patriotic feeling in Britain at this time prompted an interest in periods of national origin and glory, and specifically renewed enthusiasm for the medieval period, both pre - and post Conquest (Peardon 1933: 229-30; Smith 1987: 56). The uniting of a Protestant Britain also facilitated the creation of oppositions with Catholic Ireland, and antagonism to increasing Irish immigration into Britain after 1800 (Colley 1992: 330). The first historian to make full use of the Anglo-Saxons in this patriotic sense was Sharon Turner. In his A History of the AngloSaxons(1799-1805) he stated that ' the subject of Anglo-Saxon

The English political system was believed to be the closest

4

8

antiquities had been nearly forgotten by the British public; although a large part of what we most love and venerate in our customs, laws and institutions, originated among our AngloSaxon ancestors" (ibid: vii). In 1820 (in the preface to the 3rd edition: v-viii) it could be related of him that, looking back, "his favourite desire has been fulfilled - a taste for the history and remains of our Great Ancestors has been revived, and is visibly increasing". Turner was the first of the 'Germanist' historians, who believed that the Germanic element was responsible for our finest features: 'This nation exhibits the conversion of ferocious pirates, into a highly civilized, informed and generous people - in a word, into ourselves" (1799-1805 vol. Il: xi-xii) and that: "Our language, our government, and our laws display our Gothic ancestors in every part. They live, not merely in our annals and traditions, but in our civil institutions and perpetual discourse" (ibid. vol. I: 188-9). Turner wished to demonstrate that the English language was principally Saxon, in reaction to Hume's view that it was predominantly of French origin (Peardon 1933: 221). In like manner, Rev. J arnes Ingram, in his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of AngloSaxon at Oxford in 1807, made an appeal for Anglo-Saxon studies to be based on patriotic grounds (Peardon 1933: 2445). Thus all aspects of the subject - archaeology, language and architecture among them - could be used to reinforce the current opinion of the English (and hence British) nation .

were Goths, neatly matched current religious and political divisions. In the next century, the development of Darwinian social evolutionism was to bolster the idea that different nations and peoples were biologically distinct 'races' . This had an enormous impact on the way in which the Anglo-Saxon history of the nineteenth century was to develop, and exerted a concomitant influence on the emerging discipline of AngloSaxon archaeology.

2.2.4

From 1800 to 1850, historical scholarship in Germany had been undergoing dramatic changes, linked to ideas of national cultural independence, and a rise in respect for the non-Classical past (Burrow 1981; Hale 1967; Rowlands 1988). Rather than a source of national shame, barbarian origins came to be seen as a dynamic impulse in a people, prompting continuous innovation and cultural change (Rowlands 1988: 59). This new attitude, at first, had little impact on English historians of the time, although after the 1830s there was some editing and translation work being done by Thorpe and Kemble (Burrow 1981: 119). It was not until 1849 that an English historian again turned to the subject of the Anglo-Saxons (although in 1845 Thorpe had translated Lappenberg •s A Historyof Englandunder the Anglo-SaxonKings).

2.3

THE NINETEEN111 CENTURY

ANGLO-SAXONISTS

2.3.1 THE HISTORIANS In the first half of the nineteenth century, accounts aimed at children and a non-scholarly readership perpetuated explicitly racial interpretations (Heyck 1982 : 132), for example, this dialogue between a mother and her children: " ...as the Saxons continued in the country after the Conquest, and were much more numerous than the Norman settlers, we are still almost all of us chiefly of Saxon descent; and our language, and many of our habits and customs, sufficiently declare our origin" (Penrose 1823: 69-70). In the second half of the century , these attitudes were to become dominant in historical scholarship also.

CONCLUSIONS

Anglo-Saxonism remained the dominant origin story from the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, strongly identified with Protestantism and democracy, although this period saw some dramatic changes in the basic structure of this narrative. Political usage of the story consistently emphasised continuity of institutions from before the Norman Conquest. In this version it was utilised by the monarchy in the middle of the sixteenth century, who wished to prove the continuity of the pre-Conquest church; by anti-absolutists in the seventeenth century, in their pressure for a democratic parliament; and by other parliamentary reformers in the eighteenth century . Each century subtly altered the substance of this origin story, but they all stressed continuity of institutions above everything else. This can be seen to change towards the end of the eighteenth century, with an increasing emphasis on continuity of national traits and characteristics, and the associated rise of interpretations of history which were couched along racial lines.

In 1834 Kemble had studied philology

under Grimm at Gottingen, having become interested in the Anglo-Saxon language while a student at Cambridge. In 1849 he published The Saxons in England in which he questioned the narratives of Bede and theAnglo-SaxonChroniclereproduced in the works of Turner and Lappenberg (Sims-Williams 1983a: 1): "I confess that the more I examine this question, the more completely I am convinced that the received accounts of our migrations, our subsequent fortunes, and ultimate settlement are devoid of historical truth in every detail'' (1849 I: 16). He regarded the earliest historical sources as "a confused mass of traditions borrowed from the most heterogeneous sources, compacted rudely and with little ingenuity, and in which the smallest possible amount of historical truth is involved in a great deal of fable" (ibid: 3).

Eighteenth century attacks on slavery had put many people on the defensive. By seeing differences in physical and social characteristics as biological, they were able to justify and maintain social and class differences (Montagu 1974: 24, 43). Such thinking was a powerful weapon in an age of conflict and hostility between newly emerging nations. Increases in British (and English) patriotic feeling through the eighteenth century arose in response to conflict with other nations, such as the French, who were undergoing a period of intense self-definition at this time. A way of viewing history in racial terms facilitated the opposition of warring and antagonistic countries both in terms of their past histories and in terms of their present characteristics, which were perceived to be determined by this past (Colley 1992; Hobsbawm 1990). The distinction made after 1770 between ancient Germans and Celts, whereas before all

The first critical historian to deal with the Anglo-Saxons in the narrative manner, he nevertheless exhibited signs of wholehearted Germanism in his work. He did not doubt that the migrations took place, and that the current population of 9

England were Germanic in their spirit and institutions , but he did not require the extermination of the native population: "the mass of the people, accustomed to Roman rule or the oppr~sion of native princes, probably suffered little by a change of masters, and did little to avoid it" (ibid: 20) . Such ideas, however, attacking the English national story with the weapons of foreign scholarship (Sims-Williams 1983a: 1) were not found congenial by the increasingly nationalistic public . Far more in favour were the works of Edwin Guest, and the historians of the Oxford School, such as Freeman, Stubbs and Green, containing the fullest expression of the tenets of la,ter nineteenth century Anglo-Saxonism (Freeman 1869, 1972, 1881, 1888; Green 1874, 1881, 1883; Guest 1850, 1883; Stubbs 1870, 1880, 1906). These ideas can be summarised as follows: - that the Anglo-Saxons were an identifiable and historically attested race, with common ties of blood , language , geographical origin and culture ; - that Anglo-Saxon societies are the fullest expressio n of civil and religious liberties, a fact which is directly attributable to their peculiar genius in political affairs ; - that the Anglo-Saxons of Britain had virtues and talents which made them superior to all; - that attributes (which included reason, restraint, selfcontrol, love of freedom, hatred of anarchy, respect for the law and distrust of enthusiasm) were transmissible from one generation to the next; - that serious threats came from physiological or biological forces inside the nation or race, including . deterioration, limitation or contamination (Curtis 1968: 11-12). Such ideas are obviously derived from racial theory, with its view of historical peoples as distinct races, the inheritable characteristics of which are threatened by mixing with the blood of another 'race'. Such views were obviously incompatible with any survival of the native population at the time of the Germanic migrations.

Kemble, although not one of the main proponents of these more virulent ideas, was still susceptible to the general atmosphere of the period, which equated the traits of ones ancestors with present ones. Such thinking is apparent in both his history and his archaeology (1849, 1856, 1863). Others took the tenets of Anglo-Saxonism to greater extremes, especially during the 1860s and 70s, when the influence of the 'Oxford School' of Freeman , Stubbs and Green was at its peak. This historical tradition relied on literal readings of historical evidence, such as Bede and Gildas, and attributed Victorian success directly to their Teutonic forefathers: "our forefathers really became the people of the land in all that part of Britain which they conquered" and "were thus able to grow up as a nation in England, and their laws, manners and language grew up with them, and were not copied from those of other nations (Freeman 1869: 28). Green thought that "the English conquest was a sheer dispos·session and slaughter of the people whom the English conquered" and that "the new England ...was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome" (Green 1874: 9, 11). Such ideas plainly relied on extermination of the native population . Stubbs, the first trained historian to hold the Chair of Modern History at Oxford (from 1866-1884) , was convinced that England rested on Teutonic foundations: "The political institutions that we find established in the conquered land ...are the most purely German institutions that any branch of the German race has preserved" (1880 vol. I: 6). Such historical models were heavily dependent on the atmosphere of racial determinism which pervaded these years, well illustrated by Kingsley (the historical novelist who held the Chair of Medieval History at Cambridge from 1860): of the Teuton, he asserted in a lecture that Teutonic purity "had given him, as it may give you, gentlemen, a calm and steady brain , and a free and loyal heart; the energy which springs from health; the self-respect which comes from self-restraint; and the spirit which shrinks from neither Gcxl nor man, and feels it light to die for wife and child, for people, and for Queen" (1875: 46).

The last tenet was mainly restricted to the more vociferous proponents of this theory, such as Robert Knox, who advocated the removal of all members of the Celtic race from English soil, as "England's safety requires it" (1872: 379). Curtis (1968: 12) argues that such propositions held powerful appeal for those who sought an explanation for the stability and prosperity of the time, and also justification for the continuing expansion overseas. It may also have been the case that this polemical use of the past, rather than being a weapon of the reformers and republicans, as it had been in the earlier years of the century (Briggs 1985: 219; Smith 1987: 156), was now taken on board by the establishment, who sought ways to actively maintain the recently achieved political and social stability of the 1860s. The emphasis of Anglo-Saxonism on the Teutonic characteristics of democracy would have proved attractive to an elite which favoured reform over revolution . It is noticeable that the majority of members of the large number of archaeological and historical societies founded between the 1840s and 1860s (along with those of most other literary or learned societies) belonged to the rural elites or the professional classes (Levine 1986: 8-9).

Such ideas of 'national' characteristics were extremely prevalent at this time, with Anglo-Saxons often being compared favourably to Celts, who were assigned the traits which were deplored or despised by the upper and middle Victorian classes, such as femininity, violence , emotional incontinence and indolence (Curtis 1968: 64-5). Curtis (ibid: 89) suggests reasons for this: "this racial and emotional antithesis contained many reassuring features for those respectable Victorians who were apprehensive about the ability of the Anglo-Saxon race and the capacity of their own class, to survive the growing menace of democratisation, social mobility and alien or Celtic immigration". Such nationalistic feeling was thus a way of justifying manifestos of hostility to ' foreigners ', such as the Irish (Hobsbawm 1990: 109). Racial interpretations of history can be seen as a response to particular social and political conditions of the mid to late nineteenth century, and featured greatly in the writing s of 'popular' historians such as Green, Freeman , Stubbs and Kingsley. The influence of the Oxford School was so great because of the popularity and accessibility of their writings. Green's Short History (1874), for instance, sold hundreds of

10

thousands of copies, and became a manual for schools and a companion for advanced students (Gooch 1952: 331 ). Kingsley's lectures at Cambridge were far more popular than those of the academic historians. Their work influenced the ideas of a whole generation of children and young people. Although by the 1880s, the more extreme forms of invective were no longer generally current, and strident Anglo-Saxonism was toned down by its former proponents, in the face of a long tradition of criticism of such ideas by other scholars (e.g. Allen 1880; Nicholas 1868; Palmer 1885; Pearson 1867; Pike 1866; Saint John 1862), its influence was still pervasive in popular thought. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, history became a more scholarly discipline, with growing emphasis on the use of primary sources, such as original documents, of which indepth studies were made (Jann 1985: 218-9). Broad generalisations thus gradually fell out of favour within the academic profession (although even in the next century, they were still to be found in popular writings (Churchill 1956; Loyn 1962; Whitelock 1952)). Even men such as Freeman and Stubbs discounted ideas of total native extermination in their later works (Freeman 1888; Stubbs 1906). While Freeman could state in 1869 (Freeman 1869: 28) that by the end of the sixth century "there seem to have been hardly any Welshmen left in the English part of the country except those who were slaves", in 1888 be asserted that "I most strongly insist on the survival of a large British element in a large part of what we now call England" (ibid. 1888: 91), and that "I think we may say that this fashionable doctrine of the extermination of the elder British population bas never really been taught by anyone" (ibid:92). The agenda, however, had by this time been defined, and the actual fact of the migrations hardly ever questioned. There remained an implicit assumption that English identity could be equated with Germanic origins.

2.3.2 THEARCHAEOLOGISTS Archaeology only began to emerge as a separate discipline from history, with its own expert practitioners, methods and techniques, in the middle years of the nineteenth century (Hudson 1981; Levine 1986). Before this, students of ancient remains had been termed 'antiquarians', and their interests encompassed many different spheres of historical research, such as philology, numismatics and church architecture, as well as excavation and survey. After 1850, these different spheres of activity began to develop into distinct disciplines of historians, archaeologists, antiquarians and museum and library workers, disciplines which were formalised by their role in universities, with the exception of antiquarianism (Levine 1986).

this interest manifested itself in the foundation of numerous local archaeological societies, which were primarily a creation of the middle and professional classes (Levine 1986). The interests of these societies reflect this social bias (Ebbatson 1994). The Rev. James Douglas was the first person to identify artefacts as Anglo-Saxon, publishing as Nenia Britannia (1793) the results of his excavations from 1779-93 in the furnished inhumation cemeteries of Kent, with their distinctive styles of weaponry and jewellery. Other early medieval burials had been excavated before this, such as those discovered by Rev. Bryan Faussett from 1757-77 in east Kent, who failed to realise their significance, thinking them Roman . His journal of these excavations was published by Charles Roach Smith in 1856 as lnventorium Sepulchrale. The popularity of Anglo-Saxon archaeology was given a boost in 1844 by the first British Archaeological Association conference in Canterbury, at which the Faussett collection was on display, and caused many to question their conceptions of Anglo-Saxons: " ... we are accustomed to regard them as half savages, without refinement, rude in their manners and skilful only in the use of their weapons. But [...here] the followers of Hengist and Horsa seem to rise up before us ...our previous notions vanish ...we see at once the refinements of Saxon life ...and the skill and taste of Saxon workmen" (Wright 1845: 10). Douglas bad identified such Kentish remains as Anglo-Saxon, and had discussed in his last chapter the problem of establishing the ethnicity of these remains of northern tribes (for they were patently not Roman). He was unable to suggest a way of approaching this problem, but Roach Smith recognised that the first step was to look at regional differences (Rhodes 1990: 31). Roach Smith (1850: 88-9) linked the regional variations in brooch styles to Bede's account of territories, likening these to English dialects and suggesting that both indicated a descent from tribes of common origin, language and customs (Rhodes 1990: 53), although Kemble the year before had cast doubts on Bede's reliability (see above). Smith's meeting with the Danish archaeologist Thomsen in 1852 encouraged him to continue with such a classificatory approach (ibid.). Wright also used this method, expanding on Roach Smith's ideas in The Celt. the Roman and the Saxon (1852) to explain in detail the differences between the artefacts of the three apparent tribal groups (Anglian, Saxon and Jutish). A friend of Kemble's, he too displayed caution when it came to documentary sources (for example, of Gildas: "The whole story, built apparently on some slight notes in an old continental chronicle, displays the most profound ignorance of the period to which it relates" (1861 (2nd Ed.): 395)), basing much on classification: "we can only arrange the objects which come under our examination according to the peoples to whom they belonged, and as they illustrate their manners and history" (ibid: vii). In 1855 Wright produced the first distribution map relating to this period (showing 81 Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in relation to Roman roads, rivers and towns), and used it to argue for the different areas of tribal groupings (Rhodes 1990: 54).

In the first half of the nineteenth century archaeology and antiquarianism were coterminous, both concerned with excavation and collection, local history, topography and the ecclesiological movement (ibid: 12). With the rapid town expansion and development, and the building of railways, many archaeological remains came to light during this period, stimulating an unprecedented interest in the material remains of Britain's past. In order to make sense of the increasing amount of archaeological remains, attempts were made to date and categorise them. In the second half of the nineteenth century,

Kemble was the first to use the comparative technique in AngloSaxon archaeology, studying the similarities between funerary 11

of racial detenninism. Influence also ran the other way, however. Although there was some historical criticism of the idea of total extermination of the native population , the archaeology appeared to support just that. There were no artefacts which could be readily attributed to the 'British' , but only those distinctive 'Germanic' styles of metalwork and pottery, many of which could be paralleled by discoveries on the continent.

urns from Suffolk and Germany: "the urns of the "Old Saxon", and those of the "Anglo-Saxon", are in truth identical, as there was every reason to suppose they would be ...Toe bones are those of men whose tongue we speak, whose blood flows in our veins" (1855: 280). The decoration on these urns was common to these two regions, but rarely elsewhere. Accompanying ornaments similar to the ones contained in the German urns were found in Norfolk , Cambridgeshire , Derbyshire , Sussex, the Isle of Wight , Gloucester and Warwickshire, and therefore these urns could not be Slavonic, as once thought, but had to be Germanic (ibid : 280) . Kemble thought that by the comparisons of such urns "we are brought. ..many steps nearer to our forefathers on the banks of the Elbe and its tributary rivers, and we can henceforth use indifferently the discoveries of Englishmen and North Germans for the elucidation of our national treasures" (1863: 230).

Archaeological evidence was thus used to support the picture given in the historical sources for the fifth and sixth centuries as a period in which the native population was exterminated or driven to the west, leaving the empty English landscape free to be populated by Teutonic tribes with their own language and institutions . Anglo-Saxonist history and archaeology were thus mutually reinforcing . The atmosphere of the time, especiall y the unpopularity of the Irish (i.e. the Celts) meant that such racially- inspired interpretations were favourable to many scholars. Although some ( e.g . Kemble and Wright) were sceptical about the veracity of individual historical sources , they could not help but be influenced by the current ideas of their time to a certain extent .

These men can be seen to have pioneered some of the most influential techniques of archaeology . The development of distribution maps and the comparative method to study cultural influences predates similar work in prehistory . Whereas the 'culture-historical ' approach to prehistory only arose with the work of Kossinna ( 1911) and Childe ( 1925), and Palaeolithic archaeologists were involved in the Darwinian controversy, the Anglo-Saxon period was clearly defined by historical records , and thus did not have to prove its own existence and timespan . In addition, Anglo-Saxons themselves seemed to be historically attested to, and thus it was an acceptable practice to trace their movements through their material remains. There were three main tribal groupings mentioned in historical texts, and thus differences between these could be sought. AngloSaxon archaeology had an established home in the historical disciplines, and the frameworks within which archaeological evidence could be interpreted were already in existence. The combination of these factors meant .that Anglo-Saxon historians and archaeologists (many of whom, like many universityeducated men, were Anglicans - Levine 1986: 96) could carry out their research untroubled by theological concerns, unlike their contemporaries working on deep prehistory .

Such interpretations determined the questions which were asked of the archaeology . The emphasis was on chronology and typology: when did the invasions take place, to which areas did the different tribes migrate, and what was the ultimate fate of the native population? It was assumed that these could be answered by detailed study of the material remains. For example, Rolleston sought to determine the extent to which the Romano-British population was exterminated, and the relationship of language and laws to the two different populations. He concluded ( 1870: 118) that "we know, from finding cremation urns of the Anglo-Saxon type all over England nearly , that the whole of the country was overrun by a heathen population". Such topics and approaches were to remain the pertinent ones for the next fifty years. Even with the formalisation of archaeology and history into different specialist disciplines (c.f. Levine 1986), Anglo-Saxon archaeology , as the excavation and interpretation of material remains, was still interpreted within these historical frameworks, and used as evidence for them. This could not have been otherwise, in the framework of thought at that time.

There was a gradual accumulation of material through excavation of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and the popular sport of 'barrow-digging' (wherein Anglo-Saxon burials were frequently found, often by members of the local and national archaeological societies), in the later nineteenth century. This enabled chronologies and typologies to be developed and refined, ~thout any major upheavals in the basic historical frameworks which had already been established. Often archaeologists claimed to be independent of the historical evidence, but ideas and perceptions of the migration period still permeated their interpretations, and affected the questions which were asked of the evidence . It was easy to use this archaeological evidence to support a picture of one group of people eradicating, or totally dominating the population preceding them (Kemble 1863; Rolleston 1870).

2.3.3

2.4

CHRONOLOGIES AND TYPOLOGIBS

2.4.1 THECuLnJRE-HISTORICAL

1900-1950

APPROACH

Early medieval archaeology is dominated by cemetery excavations. By the late 1940s there were around 1,130 cemeteries known, but just six settlement sites (Webster 1986: 123) . Early Anglo-Saxon sunken-featured buildings were occasionally found before this , such as those at Sutton Courtenay excavated by Leeds in the 1920s (Leeds 1923, 1927), but post-hole buildings have only been identified in recent decades. Anglo -Saxon archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century was therefore directed towards classifying these funerary remains, and their accompanying objects , into chronological and typological schemes, and then relating these to the pertinent issues outlined above: the nature and progress of the inv asions, the distinction of the differen t tribal areas ,

CONCLUSIONS

Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon archaeology, and the agenda of the subjec t, were heavily influenced by the historical ideas of the nineteen th century, ideas which were often framed in terms 12

and the fate of the native population. Although this closely resembles the 'culture-historical' approach of prehistoric archaeology at this time, it can be seen asa development from late nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon archaeology, rather than a borrowing from prehistory. Indeed, it might be suggested that prehistoric archaeologists both in England and on the continent were borrowing methods from their counterparts working in the historic period. Important work in this area was done by E TLeeds. In 1912 he had attempted a typology of saucer brooches. His concern in The Archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon Settlements (1913) was to attempt a "general survey of the material in keeping with the advanced ideas demanded by modern scientific methods ...especially in regard to the correlation of English and Continental material, which has necessarily a most important bearing on the question of the origins of the Anglo-Saxon race" (1913: 3), material which he felt had been severely neglected by the majority of scholars (ibid: 2). In the tradition of Kemble and Wright, he was sceptical of both the historical sources: "Gildas' account, though interesting, has all the appearance of a work based on traditions which had already been passed on by several mouths and those by no means impartial" (ibid: 10), and literary sources, for example, "the element of boastfulness that forms so marked a trait of the northern sagas" (ibid: xi). He thought that archaeology could provide many of the answers: Anglo-Saxon remains could "furnish valuable evidence of the movements of the invaders, because close comparison is possible with similar remains on the Continent, many of which can be dated with certainty" (ibid: 12). He also outlined the principles of comparative dating for artefacts: in a large numbers of artefacts of one type, both their form and their decoration could be seen to develop by an evolutionary process (ibid: 28). Female graves were most useful in this respect, as "Even in these early times the subservience of the feminine mind to the dictates of fashion is clearly perceptible, more especially in that most distinctive article of feminine attire - even far back in prehistoric times - the fibula or brooch" (ibid: 29). In 1956 Harden was to state that this work had transformed Anglo-Saxon archaeology, "giving it its Continental background, showing for the first time how the material was to be studied and interpreted, and raising in acute form the questions of the validity and limitations of the surviving literary sources. It made the masses of archaeological material intelligible for the first time. All work done since on paganperiod grave-goods has been done under its shadow or in working out or modifying its conclusions" (1956: xiii). Praise indeed, even bearing in mind that this was written for Leeds'

Baldwin Brown's TheArts in Early England (1903-15) was a survey of all the available evidence for the pagan period, and exhibited some sociological considerations, in addition to the usual historical ones, for which he relied heavily on Leeds (1913). With regard to the grave goods, be stated that "from this movable apparatus of life of our Teutonic forefathers we guess their appearance, their habit and equipmen4 their personal and social goings-on. The value of their materials, the elaboration of their execution, at once indicate the social status and grade of culture of owner and of maker" (1903-15: 24). "In the case of the Teutonic migrations in general the moving mass was made up of families not individual men-at-arms, and the women accompanied their husbands and fathers along the march and to the verge of the battlefield". Early female finds "seem to attest the presence of women even in the earlier stages of the westward movement. Possibly these were ladies of the Amazonian temper" (ibid: 47). Chadwick ( 1907) bad a great influence on archaeological interpretation. He asserted that we must reject the notion "that the invasion was carried out by small groups of adventurers acting independently of each other. It seems to me incredible that such a project as the invasion of Britain could have been carried out successfully except by large and organised forces" (1907: 12). He also did not doubt the veracity of Gildas' statements about the extermination of many of the natives (ibid: 184). This view can certainly be seen to have been adopted by Aberg, who in The Anglo-Saxonsin England (1926) continued the work on brooch types. His intention in this work was to establish new points of departure for establishing chronology (Aberg 1926: iii). He thought that the actual invasion "asfar as can be judged, was undertaken with large and organised forces" and that a date for it between AD400 and 450 tallied well with the archaeology (ibid: 1). He concurred with Chadwick (1907: 88) that no marked differences could be seen in the culture of Saxon and Anglian areas in the fifth century, but that Jutish areas were very distinct (Aberg 1926: 1-2), with regional differences only developing in the course of the sixth century (ibid: 3).Asurvey of all the different brooch types led Aberg to formulate a typological sequence for the ornamentation, consisting of three stages: spiral, Salin Style I animal ornament and Salin Style Il animal ornament and interlacing, concluding that these three were in sequence, but that their limits were elastic (ibid: 159). A German archaeologist, Gustaf Kossinna, had stated in his The Origin of the Germans (1911) that "Sharply defined archaeological culture areas correspond unquestionably with the areas of particular peoples or tribes" (1911: 3). Some English prehistorians (Childe 1925; Hawkes 1931; Piggott 1931) drew upon these ideas of culture (later rejecting the racist connotations involved in Kossinna's work, which used archaeology to establish supposed historical rights to territory; anywhere that 'German' artefacts were found, modern Germany either held by right, or was entitled to win back by force (Arnold 1990: 464-5; Sklenar 1983: 151; Trigger 1989: 165-6)). Toe methods which had been used in Anglo-Saxon archaeology for over fifty years thus appear to have been taken on board by the expanding field of prehistoric archaeology. Prehistoric archaeology, on the other hand, was not to have any major impact on AngloSaxon archaeology until the more widespread discovery of

Festschrift. Leeds' work was not completely new, however, and it can be seen to have much in common with the work of Kemble ( 1855, 1863) and Rolleston (1870), although by the early years of the twentieth century many more cemeteries had been excavated, and standards of recording were somewhat improved (although some later nineteenth century archaeologists had high standards of recording, e.g. Mortimer 1905). What was new was Leeds' emphasis on refining the typologies and chronologies, and developing conceptual frameworks within which these could be accommodated.

13

settlement sites in the 1950s and 60s began to make use of the techniques of excavation refined by prehistorians.

2.4.2

understand the settlement: the distribution of the pagan cemeteries may reveal the areas which were first or most thickly populated, and the grave-goods which they contain may throw light on the cultural affinities of those who used them" - a stance which epitomised the interests and aims of Anglo-Saxon archaeology from 1850 until at least 1950.

QUESTIONING TRADITION

There was debate in the 1920s and 30s over the nature of the invasions, as well as doubt about the reliability of the historical record (e.g. Wadstein 1927; Zacbrisson 1927). Lennard (1934: 204) surveyed this debate. He pointed out that in 1874 (the year of publication of the first volume of Stubbs' Constitutional History) few would have questioned that the conquest "was the result of a series of separate expeditions, long continued and perhaps, in point of time, continuous, but unconnected, and independent of one another" (Stubbs 1874: 59). Since 1907 and the publication of Chadwick's The Origin of the English Nation, however, he noted that the opinion of historians had undergone a radical change, with the invasions seen as a highly organised force, conquering the country, and then splitting into petty kingdoms (Lennard 1934: 204). This debate can perhaps be related to the political events of this period which culminated in the First World War, and the resultant fear of conquest by the highly organised annies of other countries. Current situations were perhaps providing useful analogies for the past. Myres joined in this debate, preferring a middle line: of areas of dense Saxon settlement (as defined by the number of cemeteries) he noted: "it is hard to deny the probability that a settlement en masseof this kind means considerable political cohesion, and at least the potential existence of a formidable host" ( 1937: 322).

2.4.3 THEANTI-GERMAN

BACKLASH

Survival of the native population became a much more agreeable idea in the 1930s and 40s, perhaps due to the increasing unpopularity of things Germanic in the build-up to and aftermath of the Second World War (Collingwood and Myres 1936: 319; Petrie 1937: 98). As Myres stated (1937: 328): "We cannot deny that the recent trend of archaeological opinion has been towards the probability of considerable native survival, in the main, no doubt, of folk whose negative cultural condition reflected their fairly complete social demoralisation". This trend was also apparent in Leeds' later work. In Early Anglo-Saxon Art and Archaeology ( 1936) he noted that "throughout history the victims of invasion have exaggerated their own sufferings. They have presented so lurid a picture of destruction, bloodshed, and atrocities that the other side of the picture, the survival of a large proportion of the native population, amid unquestionable hardship and terrorism, is either ignored or forgotten" (1936: 1). He identified some classes of artefact as belonging to a native substratum in AngloSaxon culture, such as the penannular brooch (ibid: 3). He also painted an unattractive picture of the newcomers: "an impoverished people, a race of pirates ... who at length obtained a permanent foothold in this country" ( 1936: 20) and "they retained many of their primitive habits" - something clearly demonstrated by their dwellings (here Leeds made the common misinterpretation of the rubbish which is usually deposited in an sunken-featured building after it has gone out of use:) "In such cabins, with bare head-room, amid a filthy litter of broken bones, of food and shattered pottery, with logs or planks raised on stones for their seats or couches, lived the Anglo-Saxons" (ibid: 21-2).Heconcluded that "Only Gildas could exterminate the Briton; the Roman never did nor indeed tried to, and it was beyond the power of the Anglo-Saxon. That his failure was his ultimate gain, is beyond all need of proof' (ibid: 114).

Myres showed an increasing awareness of the problems of using archaeological evidence from cemeteries, and of advances in prehistoric archaeology: "it is obvious that groups of objects deliberately deposited in graves hardly ever provide the chronological information which can be drawn from the unconscious accumulations of debris on a series of house floors or the successive reconstructions of a town or fort". Cemeteries were "often excavated at a time when too little importance was attached to keeping separate the objects belonging to each body, or under conditions which rendered careful record impossible", causing archaeologists to arrange artefacts on typological, rather than chronological grounds (1937: 318). Thus "Anglo-Saxon archaeology will never provide us with a political narrative, for it bas too little to say of personalities: nor can it supply any dates which are close enough to help the historian to reconstruct a detailed sequence of events" (ibid: 319), which suggests that these were acceptable aims of the archaeologist at this time.

Kendrick ( 1938: 61) wrote in similar vein with regard to AngloSaxon art and craftsmanship: " ...the long strings of garish nobbly beads, the big fantastically shaped brooches, the exaggerated forms of girdle-hangers, pins, bucket mounts and the like, and the sprawling lumpiness of most of the ornamental metalwork, strengthen the total effect of uncouth barbaric craftsmanship that was usually incapable of rising above awkward ostentation and over-elaboration in display". Interestingly, Kendrick thought that the fine jewellery found in Kent and other areas, now dated to the later sixth and seventh century, actually belonged to Arthurian Britain. He saw it as a "natural resurgence of barbaric tendencies set free by the withdrawal of the Romans" ( 1938: 59) and that "it is, in fact, precisely because of its new stamp, because of the alert invention and vigorous development behind it, that the native inhabitants of the land in which it appears can be regarded as the only people able to have produced it" (ibid: 60). Such views were characteristic of a

His purpose here was not, however, to demonstrate the uselessness of archaeological evidence. He was at that point involved in a country-wide survey of Anglo-Saxon pottery (a study prompted by his contribution to Collingwood's Roman Britain (Collingwood and Myres 1936) - during his survey of the archaeological evidence for the Anglo-Saxon settlements, he saw the lack of any systematic studies of pottery), and thought that this less durable type of artefact could be used in the investigation of "the character and distribution of the earliest settlements, the continental presence of the invaders, the fate of Romano-British institutions and populations" (1937: 320). As he stated in 1936 (Collingwood and Myres 1936: 359): "There are two ways in which archaeology may help us to 14

time when things Arthurian were gaining in popularity (for example, T. H. White's novels, first published in 1937), perhaps symbolic of an increase in insular patriotism at this time. Stories which emphasised native survival were more conducive to the atmosphere of the period than those which related tales of invasion and conquest. An historical work which did not concur with such value judgements was Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England (1943). Relying on the historical evidence (of Bede he stated that "In representing the gens Anglorum as a composite people drawn from three distinct Germanic nations Bede was reflecting the common opinion of his time, and the vitality of tradition makes it unlikely that this opinion was fundamentally mistaken" (1943: 10.11)) and on the testament of place-names ("the extreme rarity of British place-names in Sussex points to English colonisation on a scale which can have left little room for British survival") he was led to the conclusion that "Throughout England the essential fabric of the social order, the fundamental technicalities of law, and the organisation by which they were administered, are all of obvious Germanic origin" (ibid: 315). He did, however, pay some attention to the opinions of his contemporaries: "There is no reason to think that the Romano-British population of any part ofEngland was deliberate!y exterminated by its English conquerors" (ibid: 314). His views reflect the increasing divergence of archaeological and historical approaches throughout this century, typified by the eventual removal to the English Faculty of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic from the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge in the mid 1960s.

2.4.4

CONCLUSIONS

Two main developments can be seen in the first half of the twentieth century in Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Firstly, chronologies and typologies became increasingly sophisticated for many classes of artefact, including pottery. This encouraged scholars to think that archaeology could provide answers to the historical and dating questions they were asking. Secondly, these questions, in the minds of Leeds and Myres at least, were changing subtly, with more emphasis on the questions of native survival, and debate about the actual nature of population movement in the fifth and sixth centuries - was this highly organised invasion or unstructured mass migration? There was no doubt in scholars' minds, however, that there had been large population movements of some son, for the characteristic features and institutions of English people and institutions were still largely perceived as having Germanic origins. Evidence from cemeteries was predominant, and this was interpreted within art-historical frameworks of changes in style over time and between areas, changes which could be directly related to the 'progress' of the Anglo-Saxon migrations, and the differences between tribal areas. The sheer wealth of material from the many hundreds of cemeteries resulted in great specialisation within the subject. In order to attain the depth of knowledge which detailed approaches demanded, many experts worked on one artefact type alone. This meant that broad syntheses of the period were either rarely attempted, or were compiled on the basis of the distribution of one artefact type (for example Myres' Anglo-

Saxon Potteryand the Settlementof England ( 1969)). Over the next forty years innovative methods of using dating, environmental and settlement evidence were to come to the fore, along with new ideas about the interpretation of mortuary evidence and material culture. This was to have a huge impact on the uses to which Anglo-Saxon archaeology was put.

2.5

RETBINKING

TI1E ANGLO-SAXON

PERIOD:

1950-P~ENT 2.5.1

INTRODUCTION

The methods and aims of Anglo-Saxon archaeologists as outlined above did not change overnigh4 and some would argue that they have not changed yet (for example Arnold (1988: 9): "To many scholars of the Anglo-Saxon period the study of artefacts with a view to placing them into dated sequences is archaeology and is accompanied by little or no questioning of the basis of the method"). However, after 1950 there were significant changes, both in scientific techniques (especially in recovery and dating), in theoretical approaches, and in the organisation of the discipline. The increased emphasis on professionalism, on rescue archaeology, and on rapid publication, changed the ethos of scholarship. After 1950 field archaeology became increasingly separate from both scientific and academic archaeology, creating divides within the discipline which have still not been healed. This bas resulted in increasingly specialist roles, reinforcing the idea that the past could be recreated using individual aspects of the material culture (e.g. Evison 1979; Leeds 1949; Myres 1969, 1977; Swanton 1973, 1974), and thus serving to discourage the undertaking of syntheses of the period which employed all the available evidence. The picture of the relatively empty landscape into which the Anglo-Saxons moved and created their 'forest clearings', an idea popularised by Montesquieu in 1750, also underwent a radical change. The development of aerial photography (Crawford and Keiller 1928; Crawford 1953; St Joseph 1966) led to the realisation that Iron Age and Roman Britain were far more densely settled than had previously been though4 with estimates for the late Roman population of up to four million people (Higham 1992: 8). Environmental research (for example, pollen analysis) demonstrated that the landscape did not consist of unbroken tracts of forest in the fifth and sixth centuries, but had already been cleared and worked for hundreds of years (e.g. Bell 1989; Hoskins 1955; Turner 1979). Landscape archaeology and systematic fieldwalking also showed that before the seventh and eighth centuries settlement consisted primarily of scattered hamlets and farmsteads, thus calling into question all place-name evidence which was based around the assumption of fixed village communities, named after the original Germanic leader (Taylor 1983: 117). Probable continuity of field boundaries also challenged the assumptions of mass population replacement in the fifth and sixth centuries (Bonney 1972). Obviously, knowledge such as this has been built up over a long period of time, and is only recently being synthesised with artefactual research (e.g. Garwood 1989; Hamerow 1991;

15

Hawkes and Dunning 1961). The fundamental changes in Anglo-Saxon archaeology which occurred after 1979 were largely due to the questioning of this assumption, combined with the reassessment of the historical models prompted by the landscape and environmental archaeology outlined above.

Higham· 1992; Hodges 1989b; Reece 1989; Whyman 1993), due to the realisation that a proper understanding of the past can only be achieved by making use of all the available data (Hodder 1986, 1987). Over the past forty years, changes in dating technology have revolutionised prehistory, prompting the creation of new chronological frameworks and theories of material culture change, a revolution which was eventually to have an impact on the interpretation of Anglo -Saxon archaeology.

2.5.2 A CONTINUING

TRADmoN

2.S.3 A RE~ESSMENT

OF MATERIAL CuLTIJRE

As early as 1956, Lethbridge had challenged the automatic equationof grave goods and ethnicity: "Because a large number of ornamentsare found in a series of graves and it can be shown that the origin of the style of ornaments lies in some continental district or other, is it any proof that the people in those graves were descended from those in the land in which that style of ornament was formerly common? Of course it is not" (1956: 113). He maintained that Leeds had defined distinct areas of fashion, but "no one could prove that the wearers of these ornaments were Saxons, or Angles, or Romano-Britons or a mixtureof them all. The wearersbecame Anglo-Saxons in name only...Typologyis not to be despised, but it must not be regarded as a fool-prooftime-scale. Because we speak of a collection of objects as Anglo-Saxon, we must not assume that they indicate the presence of a pure-bloodedTeutonic stock in the district in which theywere found.They indicate no more than the presence in that district of people with a taste for barbaric ornaments of Teutonictype" (ibid: 114).

1951-1979

Anglo-Saxon archaeology in the 1950s, 60s and 70s continued in much the same way as it had in previous decades, with a few notable exceptions. 'Throughoutthis period, the same emphasis on the importance of chronology and typology for answering historical questions is apparent in research (Hunter Blair 1977: 27; Wilson 1960: 29). For example, Hawkes was interested in the ethnic affiliations of the Kentish settlers, relying on the accepted historical frameworks: "it seems best, really, to believe what we are told. The Saxons came in 443" (1956: 94), and identifyingthese ethnic groupings throughthe grave-gocx:ls.The questions asked were still with regard to the date and progress of the barbarian incursions, and increasingconsiderationof their impact on the native inhabitants, which manifested itself in a rise of interest in the sub-Romanarchaeologyof western Britain (e.g. Alcock 1971; Ashe 1968; Morris 1973). This should be seen in the context of a wider tradition of popular Arthurian literature (for example Sutcliff 1959, 1979, 1981;White 1958).

He also noted the need for a new approach to the period: "Much here dependson breakingdown the remainder of the wall which separatesthe work-roomsof the students of Roman Britain and Saxon England" (ibid: 120) - finds should be examined against a backgroundof continuous exchange of ideas between Britain and the Continent,stretchingback into the Iron Age. With regard to material culture "there does not appear to be much other than individual taste on which we can rely - taste, formed by chance, continued by custom, and hardened perhaps into tradition" (ibid: 121). In this short article, Lethbridge summarised the shift in perspective which was to prompt a radical rethink of the migration period in later years. However, as is apparentfrom the direction of work in the 1960s and 70s, his arguments were not heeded. Perhaps most telling was a review of this edited volume by Hunter Blair (1956) where he dismissed in a single line these radical ideas, which predated the rejection of the 'invasion hypothesis ' by prehistorians by ten years (c.f. Clark 1966):"Lethbridge writes in characteristic vein". This dismissive attitude was probably due to academic disdain of a man whose archaeological research could sometimes be considered ' alternative' . However, such innovative ideas were not heard again until the 1980s.

Myres was still interested in relations between Saxons and native Britons. Looking at pottery assemblages in cremation cemeteries he observed that: "nearly every series of urns that one examined included one or two specimens that, however barbaric in form or decoration, were, in some way difficult to define, undeniablyRomano-Britishor even 'Late Celtic' in feel'' (1956: 16). He termed this pottery Romano-Saxon and stated that it "reflects in varying degrees the survival of the native population in different communities, no doubt mainly in the form of captive women in whose hands the older craftsmanship here and there maintained a faint and flickering continuance" (ibid: 34). This type of pottery was later argued (Gillam 1979; Roberts 1982) to in fact be provincial Roman in origin. The traditional historical frameworks were still in place. In 1974, Hawkes saw Anglo-Saxon archaeology as entering a fruitful area of enquiry, "with historians and place-name specialists joining archaeologists in seeking a fuller understanding of the direction and character of the Germanic people's landtakings, the nature and development of their settlements and economy, their society, and their relations with surviving late Roman institutions and peoples" (1974: 408). In the areas of Yorkshire and Humberside, Faull and Eagles (both 1979) sought to identify the Anglo-Saxon takeover through the archaeological record.

Doubts about the traditional approaches were starting to be expressed in mainstream archaeology by 1979, notably in two review articles. Hills went through the different classes of evidenceused to arguefor Anglo-Saxon settlement, and argued that archaeologyshould not be used uncritically (1979: 298). Her conclusion of this review was that "the density of Roman sites now known from some areas suggests a population which, even after wars and pestilence as savage as Gildas would have us believe they were , cannot have been reduced to an inconsiderable remnant. Intermarriage and political control may have resultedin large numbers of the existing population taking

In all the works cited above, the role of material culture was seen as straightforward. The different styles of artefact were thought to directly reflect the mixture of the Germanic settlers who migrated to England in the fifth and sixth centuries (and possibly as early as the fourth, in some areas - see Evison 1965; 16

on an "Anglo-Saxon" colouring whatever their antecedents" (ibid: 313). Dickinson (1980) was a review specifically of research on Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. Her historiographical approach emphasised that the limitations of the questions being asked went back to the framework originally defined by Leeds in 1913 ( 1979: 11), although in recent years cemeteries had become less prominent in archaeological research (the edited volume by Wilson ( 1976) The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon Englandomitted cemeteries altogether), with the emphasis of research increasingly on economics, social structures and settlement sites (Dickinson 1980: 12). She argued for an improvement in the traditional methcxis of chronology and for the use of stratigraphic and spatial analyses of cemeteries (ibid: 17-19). These two articles reflect an increasingly critical approach to the archaeological evidence, fostered in part by contradictions generated by new environmental evidence. There were also other changes, of a more theoretical nature, as can be seen in a paper on the Frankish settlement of Gaul, as interpreted through the cemetery evidence (James 1979). This concluded that new burial rites seen in the fifth and sixth centuries had more to do with changing social structures and political change than largescale immigration. This marks the start of the questioning of direct 'readings' of the early medieval archaeological evidence, and their replacement by more symbolic, contextual approaches, which were to characterise the next fifteen years.

2.S.4

'PROCESSUAL' ARCHAEOLOGY

The 'invasion hypothesis', whereby all cultural change could be accounted for by population movements, began to be challenged by prehistorians in the mid-1960s (Clark 1966; Hodson 1962, 1964). The revolution of chronology brought about by radiocarbon dating strengthened this argument, as it showed that prehistoric periods had lasted far longer than previously thought. Material culture change which before could have been accounted for by 'invasions' and 'migrations', was now more readily explained by internal change (Renfrew 1973). Under the influence of Renfrew, this approach developed to encompass "a belief in past societies and social processes as the prime object of archaeology's endeavours, and the possibility of reconstructing them, the adoption of systems theory as a means of explaining social organisation, and a view of culture as an adaptive response" (Champion 1991: 132). The emphasis was on building of societal models (e.g. 'peer-polity interaction' and the 'chiefdom' model), explanation of change, and the development of analytical techniques to facilitate this, including sophisticated computer-aided and mathematical approaches.

suitable models is long overdue" (ibid: 5). Arnold saw himself somewhat as a pioneer - he described one of his works as "a personal interpretation produced in the face of numerous difficulties, not the least being the breaking away from traditional methodologies and doctrines .. .It is hoped that it will provide a flexible structure which can be refined and developed and which may help to break down the monolithic structure and mystical nature of the subject" (1988: 16). The arrogance implicit in such an approach naturally antagonised those with long careers in Anglo-Saxon archaeology, especially as Arnold's grasp of the wealth of archaeological detail was relatively poor, and his use of historical sources subjective (for example, his interpretation of Wessex as an aggressor, merely because its name was often mentioned first in West Saxon chronicle entries recording battles (1988: 167)). His work thus failed to make any significant impact on the practice of Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Hodges (1989b) was more persuasive in his attempt to rewrite Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Although slightly evangelical in tone ("what matters is to re-examine the period by opening new doors. This should enable us to consider the existing sources afresh, thereby enriching the discipline" (1989b: 9)), his argument for a 'North Sea culture zone' (ibid: 24) was coherent and his assumptions clearly stated. The recognition of the historical tradition of Gildas and Bede as a story which "bears the hall-marks of a community at a much later date searching for its origins, translating an often confused oral tradition onto parchment to legitimate the political status quo" (ibid: 23) owed much to the critical research of modern historians (e.g. Dumville 1977; Lapidge and Dumville 1984; Sims-Williams 1983a, b). His work was, however, still very much within the processual frameworks of interpretation, using ideas of 'systems collapse' and 'peer-polity interaction' to explain the changes in material culture at this time. Oddly, in terms of his theoretical perspective, he focused on 'great men' as catalysts of cultural change (1989b). In the past ten years, such approaches have been criticised for their "unwillingness to accord human consciousness or volition any role in bringing about cultural change" (Trigger 1989: 327). A movement which arose in prehistoric archaeology partly in reaction to this pre-occupation with 'systems' and 'processes' has been termed 'post-processual' by some of its adherents.

2.S.S

'PosT-PRoc~uAL'

ARCHAEOLOGm

One of the main adverse reactions to the processual approach was that it reduced "a rich variety of human experience to mere adaptive strategies against a non-human environment" (Champion 1991: 134). The role of the individual was denied, humans were reducedto automatons reacting solely to changes in their surroundings. Various alternative perspectives were put forward, such as Neo-Marxist, structural and symbolic archaeologies. The most important element of the Neo-Marxist approach was an emphasis on ideology, defined as: "beliefs whose function is to naturalise or legitimate the asymmetrical relationships within a society, or to mask them or deny their existence" (Champion 1991: 135).

In Anglo-Saxon archaeology these approaches are most evident in the work of Chris Arnold (1980, 1982, 1984, 1988) and Richard Hodges ( 1989a, b), both students at Southampton where the 'processual' movement was strong in prehistoric archaeology, during the time when Colin Renfrew was professor. Arnold's aim was "to test the remarkably few theories that have been propounded concerning the end of Roman Britain and the migrations, and to examine new possibilities against the archaeological evidence alone" (1984: 10), claiming that "a critical examination of the evidence and the generation of

Ian Hodder is one of the main proponents of post-processual 17

archaeology, and insists on the active role of material culture in social interaction(Hodder 1982a,b). He has also emphasised the need for a contextualapproachin all archaeologicalresearch, rather than concentrating on one form of evidence, or one artefacttype (Hodder 1986, 1987, 1989).Others have stressed the role of human agency in the past, allowingfor the possibility of individuals to choose whether to act in certain ways or not (Barrett 1987, 1988a;Hodder 1989; Johnson 1989; Mizoguchi 1993).

Thus, in recent years the relevance of early medieval archaeology for supporting historical frameworks has been questioned.Rather "the archaeologist seeks to understand the processes, both cultural and non-cultural, which combine to producethe arrangementsof materialcultlll'ebeing studied...and subsequentlyto recognisepatterning in the data susceptible to interpretationat a higher level. Viewed from this perspective it is possible to pose the question of whether narrative history can provide a relevant framework for the recognition and understandingof archaeologicalphenomena" (Whyman 1993: 61-2). Reece has put this more strongly: "the whole 'problem' of the DarkAges is causedby the irrelevance of our historically constructedmodels" (1989: 236).

Some aspectsof these approacheshave alsobeen seen in AngloSaxon archaeology.One of Hodder's research students, EllenJane Pader, looked at some East Anglian cemeteries from a structural and symbolic perspective, concluding that "the sex based relations were seen to be articulatedby the constraints placed upon the distribution of artefact classes, artefact and skeletal positioning" (1982: 129), and also that these relations differed between cemeteries.

In a similar way Julian Richards lookedat the symbolic aspects of Anglo-Saxon funerary urns (Richards1987, 1992),and other burial rites. This work also reflected new attitudes towards mortuary analysis, which post-processual archaeologies had also given rise to (c.f. Barrett 1988b, 1990, 1991; Barrett et al. 1991; Thomas 1991 and see Chapter Three): "Mortuary ritual reinforces cultural differences and helps classify Anglo-Saxon society. It provides a means of describing social identity...we must accept that many of those given a Germanic burial rite were not immigrants from North Germany and Scandinavia. The form of burial is a symbol being used to assert the domination of Germanic culture, not the annihilation of the previous inhabitants" (Richards 1992: 135). Also, "The increasingpopularity of weaponburialsamongstthe inhabitants of sixth-and seventh-centuryEnglandmayrepresent the growth of an "Anglo-Saxon invasion" origin-myth as much as an increase in warfare. The myth probably emphasised a shared ethnic past, valiant sea journeys and distinguished ancestors rather than post-Roman colonial vestiges"(ibid: 147).Heinrich Harke has also analysed the weaponburialrite, concluding that "neither the ability to fight, nor the actualexperience of fighting were relevant for the decision as to who was buried with, or without, weapons (1992a: 153).

2.6

ETHNICITY AND ANGLO-SAXON

2.6.1

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

BURIALS

However, scholars dealing with the early medieval period cannot escape the historical sources: they have been used to structure interpretationsof the period as long as archaeology has existed. What we can do, (and what historians have been doing for many years),is to assess exactly what those historical sources are evidence for. To date, this historical critique has highlightedtwo things:that the early medieval view of ethnicity was radicallydifferentfrom our twentieth century perspective on it; and that early medieval historians were as subjective, and their historiesas contingent, as their modem counterparts. Examination of the contexts in which 'ethnic' groups were named by early historians has cast doubt on their supposed biological nature. Modern historians have increasingly come to see the medieval idea of ethnicity as something far more fluid and ambiguous than nineteenth and twentieth century views had assumed.Rather than something determined solely by biologicaldescent, and blood relations, it is now viewed as intimatelyinvolvedwithrelationsof power, politics and loyalty; a subjective creation, rather than an objective fact of being (Amory 1993:2-3; Geary 1983: 16; Hedeager 1993: 123,Pohl 1991, 1997:25). Early writers did use such tenns as gens and nation to characterise social groups. However, rather than perpetuate stereotypes of entrenched divisions between Romance and Germanic groups, one must determine why certainpeopleand groupswere identified in this way, and under what circumstancesethnicitywas considered important (Geary 1983: 17-18).

Thus, symbolic and contextual approacheshave started to be used by Anglo-Saxon archaeologistsin their interpretations of changingmaterial culture. However, this is not, as some would see it, a radical change in perspective. From the nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon archaeologists have been critical, to a greater or lesser extent, of their sources, both archaeological and historical. There has been active debate between some scholars as to the veracity of the histories of Bede and Gildas, and about the significance of material culture for indicating population change. Until the late 1970s,however, the general consensus was that material culture was a passive indicator of ethnic affiliation, and that important subjects for study were the progress of the Anglo-Saxon invasions,and the distribution of tribal groups across the country. In the past twenty years, it is this view which has radically changed,with the recognition of the active nature of material culture in creating and reinforcing aspects of identity and the realisation that the views of the early medieval historians were highly subjective.

Looking at the contextual usage of such terms, the characteristics stressed by contemporaries were origins, customs,laws and language, all of which were relatively fluid and arbitrary(ibid: 19). Originscould include ones geographical origin, couldreferto personalancestors, or even to the common notion of an entire people's origin. Customs too were open to change, as can be seen in the adoption of Germanicfashionsof dress by some Romansin the late fourth century (James 1979: 72; Reece 1989:235).Languagewas also fluid,for bilingualism was characteristic of large portions of the early medieval populationofWesternEurope,especially the elite (Geary 1983: 19-20; Hines 1994: 57). Wenskus has demonstrated that the peoples of the migrationperiod acquired their ethnic identity 18

through allegiance to particular royal or aristocratic families, whom they fought alongside, and whose traditions they adopted (Geary1983: 22; Wenskus 1961). It was thus a grouping brought about by political means and for political purposes. In James' words (1989: 47), peoples did not produce kings, but kings produced peoples. Indeed, ethnicity may even have been unimportant for some groups: "It seems likely that, for the lowest classes, social role and geographical location were more important defining traits than ethnic identity" (Amory 1994: 4). Early medieval ethnic affiliation was thus strategic and subjective; it was not an explanation of antagonisms, but a means of identifying the opposition, and distinguishing oneself from them. The same ideas still hold true today. Ethnicity is created out of such oppositions, it is not a primary cause of them. In light of this, it is therefore possible for one person to hold several different ethnic affiliations at the same time, giving primacy to one or another depending on the situation. As a cultural construct, rather than a biological fact, it is flexible and is constantly renegotiated. As James notes (1989: 47): "Early medieval peoples are not biological entities, like races; sometimes they appear to be no more than men and women who are temporarily grouped together, by others, by themselves or, more commonly, by their leaders. They may have a common language, a common culture, a common way of dressing ...but if they have, all these things may have been imposed on them by conquest or cultural domination". The second product of source criticism is the realisation that early medieval historians, whose work has had tremendous impact on later histories, were also influenced by the social and political conditions of their own time. These seventh and eighth century historians were invariably in the employment of aristocratic or ecclesiastical masters, whose ends they served with their histories (Wormald 1983; Yorke 1993). Austin ( 1990: 16) has surmised the intentions of men like Bede and Gregory of Tours: "literate administrators who set about the task of writing the history of their political masters and thereby justifying their greater hegemonic power. For this reason the histories were written in terms which rooted these early statemaking heroes, such as Edwin or Clovis, in social groups of specific ethnic name, with the intention of projecting a mythical but potent image of cultural homogeneity to match the political unity they intended". Hedeager (1993: 124) has similarly characterised an Anglo-Saxon England "whose Christian authors legitimized their Christian nations and Christiankings through a pagan prehistory" tracing their genealogies back to origins rooted in the Scandinavian tribes and mythology which were favourably compared to the origin traditions of the declining Roman Empire. These histories were not, therefore, objective and non-political, but were often written to serve various ends, predominantly those of the newly established church or the dominant elite.

distribution of certain features of archaeological evidence, 'Anglo-Saxon' cemeteries being an obvious example. However, the reconsideration of the meaning of such cultural groupings has led to radical reassessment of the historical sources, and this must in due course influence archaeological interpretations. It cannot be assumed that a burial with Germanic style grave goods necessarily contained a person of Germanic geographical origin, let alone that one with 'Anglian' or 'Saxon' goods belonged to one of the supposed ethnic groups described by later historians. Indeed, Austin (1990: 17) has suggested that "these people in the Migration cemeteries became Angles or Saxons or Franks or Burgundians long after they were dead and past caring, simply because the people broking power in the protostates a century or two later needed a coherent identity, a name and a homeland, and because archaeologists in the successor nation states and empires needed, or chose, to sustain that identity within their current polity and ideology". Indeed, the term 'Anglo-Saxon' was only first used in the ninth century (Wormald 1983: 120), and was little used from the tenth until the sixteenth century (Reynolds 1985: 398). As Reynolds ( 1985: 414) points out: "we might do well to remember that the early medieval English did not call themselves Anglo-Saxons. If we want to call them that, we ought to think hard about what we mean, and what others may think we mean, by the name that we have chosen to use".

2.6.2 Tm: IMPLICATIONS

FOR ARCHAEOLOGY

These ideas have implications for archaeological interpretation. They mean that we can no longer think about the events of the fifth and sixth centuries in terms of the basic racial opposition of Briton vs. German. It has been demonstrated above how this opposition was formulated in the nineteenth century, due to the nationalistic atmosphere of the time and the motivations of historians. Historical source criticism has shown that this opposition is inappropriate and ineffective when analysing the situation of the early medieval period: by attributing events to racial oppositions and antipathies, the real causes of change are obscured. Toe fifth, sixth, and especially the seventh, centuries were a time when ethnic identities were created - they did not cause change; rather, they were created as a result of social and political developments. Anglo-Saxon archaeology has to abandon the inherent idea of the 'island race' or 'Little Britain' - the people residing in the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries would have had no conception of themselves as a single political entity, let alone a racial one (despite the attempts by Gildas and Bede to convince us otherwise). Wormald has demonstrated that there was no historical conception of a national English identity at all before the tenth century. £thelstan, grandson of Alfred, was the first, in 928 AD, to proclaim himself 'King of the English' (Wormald 1994: 5). He argues that earlier references to 'engla-londe'were due to Gregory the Great 's sixth century reference to the pagans to whom the first mission was dispatched as 'Angles' (ibid: 12). Those who converted to Christianity therefore became children of the mother church of the 'English' founded at Canterbury . If one was Christian, one was also English, a situation which presents intriguing parallels with that of the sixteenth century, when if one was Protestant, one claimed an

Thus, until recently, it bas been assumed that the cultural groupings, such as Angles, Saxons, Burgundians and the like, described in early medieval sources, were ethnic groupings, representing people of common biological descent, who had migrated en masseto new lands. It was also thought possible to identify these same ethnic groupings by mapping the spatial 19

of evidence for "British" material at this time - perhaps the only goods available, and the only burial practices used, were the ones which have in the past been ascribed to the "Anglo Saxon" way of life. Perhaps there was no "native" alternative? Another point made by Amory may also suggest an interesting parallel with Britain. By the eighth century, Burgundio had become an ethnic term, applied to everyone in the region, yet "Although this identity was based on territory , eighth-century men and women thought it derived from their "racial" descent , and they propounded fantastic theories about the fate of the former "Roman" section of the population: (Amory 1994: 26).

Anglo-Saxon ancestry . Thus we can conclude that any loyalties which did exist in the fifth and sixth centuries would have had a localised and personal basis. The debate must distance itself from ideas about racial groupings and racial motivations, and concentrate instead on questions of identity. Changes in the early medieval period were changes in the way that people acted and viewed themselves, rather than 'natural' changes due to inherent racial antipathies . However, it is also necessary to view Britain in relation to a wider geographical context, for it was linked both with Ireland and with the Continent in political, economic and social spheres. Carver (1994: 4) has stated that "Britain in the 5th to 9th centuries is ...a frontier zone where a Romanised Irish Sea zone confronts a Gennanised North Sea zone. The affiliation between peoples and incipient nations and the economies they adopted are determined not by physical proximity but by political proximity" .

2.7

CONCLUSIONS

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century narratives about the Anglo-Saxons were influenced by their use as propaganda and invective in political and religious debates. The emphasis was on proving the continuity or discontinuity of social and governmenta l institutions, and therefore changes in the fifth and sixth centuries could be thought of as the result of a political takeover . Towards the end of the eighteenth century , however , history came to be thought of increasingly in racial terms, and continuity of national characteristics required the complete replacement of the native population by an incoming Germanic one. General opinion thus came to regard the period as one in which the native Romano-British population had been extenninated, driven to the west or enslaved.

Current archaeological debate is still debating the ethnic impact of migrations . Hamerow ( 1994: 164) for instance , in outlining her view of the important questions concerning this period, has stated: "Few would now contest the assertion that not all the people buried in 'Anglo-Saxon cemeteries' and living in 'AngloSaxon houses' were in fact immigrants or the direct descendants of immigrants. If that is the case, then what proportion were of Germanic stock, and how did the 'rest' perceive and express their ethnic identity?" I would argue that this ·question is irrelevant. There may well have been some population movement in the fifth and sixth century, but it is a mistake to see this as anything unusual. Until recent centuries there has always been some degree of movement between the east coast and the continent, both temporary, in terms of trade, and permanent, in terms of settlement. It is only with the development of pan-English nationalism and a bureaucratic state that this has ceased.

However, environmental research and archaeological survey in the twentieth century brought about the realisation that the late Roman population was far larger than had previously been thought, and that previous explanations for the change were no longer plausible. Combined with changes in prehistoric archaeology, which came to concentrate more on explaining change rather than documenting it in terms of population movement , Anglo-Saxon archaeology has started in the last fifteen years to use more contextual and symbolic approaches in the investigation of the material culture.

What is certain is that any population movement which did occur in the early medieval period was not on a large enough scale to displace the existing population (Jones 1996). The important thing is not where people were born at this time, but how they viewed themselves. We must recognise that even a single person could have had several different 'ethnic identities', and that these may have changed over a lifetime. Essential evidence when looking at this period is what pottery is used, how it is made, decorated and deposited; how the dead were disposed of; what settlements looked like; the appearance and treatment of the body. These things are important, not because they indicate where a person, or a person's ancestors were born, but because they signal certain things about society: how people viewed themselves, how they viewed their place in the landscape , and how they saw their relationships with other individuals and other communities.

This review of the last four hundred years of Anglo-Saxon studies, and of the last two hundred years of Anglo-Saxon archaeology has traced the way that historical interpretation has changed according to its political and social context, and , more importantly, according to the data available for analysis . I would argue that Richards (1987: 10) is wrong when he sees innovative influences on Anglo-Saxon archaeology as coming entirely from prehistoric archaeology: "The history of the study of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries can be seen as a microcosm of the history of mortuary studies in general, reflecting, after a timelag, developments in interpretative models in prehistoric archaeology , themselves related to changes in anthropology and other related disciplines ". Anglo-Saxon archaeology, except perhaps for some influences found in the last fifteen years, can be seen to have had a distinct development from that of prehistoric archaeology, often using 'advances ' ofprehistorians decades before they were made in that discipline .

Amory (1994 : 8) has argued that in Burgundy in the fifth and sixth centuries there may have been no non-Roman ways of doing things - everyone documented in the historical sources took part in the same activities, and these activities represented a general cultural environment, rather than an ethnic division in behaviour . A similar argument could be applied to eastern England in the same period, which woul d account for the dearth

What has changed in recent years is the realisation that all history, including that of the early medieval historians such as Bede and Gildas, is subjecti ve and contingen t (Am ory 1993,

20

1994; Austin 1990; Geary 1983; Goffart 1988; Hedeager 1993; Pohl 1991; Yorke 1993). With the subsequent removal of a reliable historical framework for the migration period, its research methods become those of prehistory, which in the 1980s and 1990s became more focused on the development of self-critical and contextual approaches to archaeology. These are centred on the social aspects of existence, at a more localised and detailed level than bef or~. Anglo-Saxon archaeology, in the light of this theoretical position, cannot be used for tracing

broad political developments as a primary aim. What it can be used for is the investigation of local conditions of existence at this time: of social issues such as gender, power, age and status relations within small communities, which until now have been largely neglected. It is out of these local conditions which larger political developments would have arisen, and thus it is with local conditions that one must start an investigation of the migration period.

21

CHAPTER THREE: BACKGROUND

3.1

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter, the development of myths and traditions about the •Anglo-Saxons' were discussed in their historical and archaeological contexts. It was concluded that the traditional interpretative frameworks for the •Anglo-Saxon migrations' need radical reassessment, in light of new ways of viewing the significance of material culture, and the formulation of different research priorities and interests. The emphasis should no longer be on the development of fine-grained chronologies for the arrival of the assumed immigrants, but rather on a reconsideration of what can actually be inferred from spatial and typological variation in archaeological evidence. This is supported by recent debate over the appropriateness of using frameworks based on historical documents (usually noncontemporary in space or time) to explain such material patterning (Champion 1991; Geary 1983). New frameworks, both theoretical and practical need to be developed.

3.2

THESIGNIFICANCE

3.2.1

CuLTURE-HISTORICAL

OF MORTUARY EVIDENCE AND SYSTEMS APPROACHES

Until the 1960s, burials were regarded as closed contexts within which different material traits could be confidently associated. These contemporary groupings of objects were essential for the construction of chronologies, which perceived proto- and prehistory in terms of population movements and cultural diffusion (Chapman et al. 1981: 3). In contrast, the 'processual' archaeology which developed during the 1960s and 1970s, in reaction to the limitations of the culture-historical approach, was optimistic about the ability of archaeology to shed light on the workings of past societies, arguing that mortuary practice was a system of communication designed to relay information about the dead person to the living community (Binford 1971; Saxe 1970; Tainter 1978). This was a strategy enabling the community to adapt to changes in society brought about by the death of a member (Thomas 1991: 104). The theory behind this approach rested on the idea that the treatment of the corpse depended on the marking out of a selection of the social identities which that person had held in life (Saxe 1970: 7). It was thus assumed that the number of the identities available to that person would have increased with the complexity of the social system. In a similar manner, the energy expended on that burial would have been proportional to the size of the group with responsibilities to that individual, and would thus have reflected their social rank or status within that society.

The evidence from the early Anglo-Saxon period consists of a great many inhumation and cremation cemeteries, containing both furnished and unfurnished burials, along with a much smaller number of buildings and settlement sites. Although fine metalwork hoards are found at this time in Scandinavia, they are largely absent from England. In Chapter Two it was concluded that this evidence cannot be used to chart the progress of •Anglo-Saxon invaders' across Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. Such a view is reliant on historical frameworks which have been shown to be inappropriate for analysing archaeological material. The evidence testifies to local conditions of existence rather ~ban large-scale political processes. The area chosen in which to base this study, East Yorkshire, is one which has some peculiar local funerary practices, such as crouched burial, in its Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, which are often located around prehistoric earthworks (see Chapter One). Such peculiarities serve to highlight the localised nature of burial practice, despite broad similarities with other areas.

The combination of these two ideas resulted in the hypothesis that mortuary variability reflects the degree of organisational complexity of social systems (Barrett et al. 1991: 120; Binford 1971: 18), i.e. that the more variation found within the burial practices of a particular society, the more complex its social organisation was. As one of the systems constituting society, a separate sphere of mortuary theory was developed, which dictated how this evidence should be interpreted (Binford 1971; Chapman et al. 1981; Saxe 1970; Tainter 1978).

This chapter will begin by presenting a brief review of recent developments regarding the significance of mortuary evidence in archaeology. Interpretation of burials, and the cemeteries which they constitute, is an area of heated debate. This is especially true of those periods of prehistoric archaeology which rely almost entirely on funerary evidence, such as the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. This debate has given rise to much deliberation over the theoretical issues concerned with interpreting such evidence. Much of this debate, although unrelated in time to the evidence from Anglo-Saxon England, can be drawn upon when deciding what exactly it is that AngloSaxon burials and cemeteries are evidence for, and in what ways they can be analysed and interpreted. I will then outline the aims of this study, before going on to describe the study area.

Aspects of this mortuary theory were made use of by some Anglo-Saxon archaeologists in the 1980s (see Section 2.5.4). Arnold ( 1980) sought differences in the control of resources and wealth of various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by analysing and comparing grave-goods in their pagan cemeteries, while Hirst ( 1985: 97) stated that "it seems reasonable to assume ...that it is valid to compare the numbers and types of grave goods of whole cemeteries and to infer that the variations in these reflect differences in the wealth and power of the societies using the cemeteries". However, given the general unpopularity of systems approaches within Anglo-Saxon archaeology, it was unsurprising that such uses remained limited. Most scholars in this field continued to use and interpret cemeteries as they always had done: as evidence for the progress of the Germanic

22

migrations (Eagles 1979; Hawkes 1982, 1989; Hunter Blair 1977; Myres 1986; Swanton 1973).

3.2.2

SYMBOLIC AND STRUCTURAL APPROACHES

Developments during the 1980s in prehistoric archaeology, in turn, criticised the systems approach to burial for its limited view. A major criticism of Binford's work was that the symbolic representation which takes place at a funeral may not be direct or unambiguous, and that material culture patterning does not constitute a mirror image of social organisation (Barrett 1990: 181; Hodder 1982b: 141; Morris 1987: 38). Such critique led to broad discussions about the nature and role of ideology within mortuary practice, and also about the meanings of material culture. Some archaeologists, notably those drawing on Nee-Marxist theory, saw ideology as a way of maintaining traditional authority by disguising and legitimating inequality (see Tarlow's 1992 critique of Parker Pearson 1982). The point was made that ways of doing things, such as burying people, do not have to directly reflect reality. Mourners can choose how they bury a person, and their choice can be motivated by the desire to hide or obscure that reality (Parker Pearson 1982). Others contested this view as simplistic, however (Johnson 1989: 195; Miller and Tilley 1984b; Pader 1982). Possibly more fruitful were the symbolic and structural approaches which characterised much archaeology of the early 1980s. These have been seen as forcing a radical reappraisal of the nature of material culture, with it being seen as akin to language, with its own internal logic and meaning, and its ability to communicate (Hill pers. comm.). The attempts by Richards (1987), Brush (1988) and Pader (1982) to apply such approaches to Anglo-Saxon archaeology were innovative in the field. Richards concluded his major work on the fonn and decoration of cremation urns ( 1987: 205): "stylistic variability in AngloSaxon pottery can operate on several levels. Different attributes are used to mark different aspects of social role. There is a sliding scale of visibility of these attributes, according to the size of the audience that the message is being broadcast to". What is lacking from these accounts, however, is any sense of why such messages were important to their recipients - there was no consideration of the impact of mortuary ritual on the conditions of life, or of the role of the individual in transmitting, receiving or interpreting such messages.

3.2.3

These ideas have been heavily drawn upon by archaeologists such as John Barrett, Koji Mizoguchi and Julian Thomas in their interpretations of mortuary evidence (Barrett 1988b, 1990; Mizoguchi 1993; Thomas 1991). These approaches have all stressed that burial is not a separate area, governed by its own theory (contraBinford 1971; Chapman et al. 1981; Saxe 1970) but, rather, is an essential part of human experience. This perspective rests on a specific conception of the nature of human society and the way that it operates. It is seen not a static, fixed entity, but as a creation of the people who constitute it. Social systems are seen as being constructed out of particular social practices, and those practices take place within the specific cultural and historical conditions they maintain (Barrett 1988b: 30, 1989a: 305). A dialectic thus exists between people's actions and the conditions of the world which they inhabit. People are competent and knowledgeable about their world, but at the same time their actions may be situated within unacknowledged conditions, and have unintended consequences (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 116). The actions of people create the societies in which they live (for there can be no society without people), yet that society structures the very way that they act within it (Giddens 1984: 25). Giddens also makes the useful distinction between 'practical' knowledge, as a 'way of going on' in everyday, routine activities, 'discursive'knowledge, whereby individuals knowingly assign reasons and meanings to their actions, and unconscious sources of cognition and motivation (Giddens 1979, 1981: 27). Ideology is seen as discursive knowledge which is called to mind to explain the world. It is thus a dominant discursive reading of key cultural values, a reading which is powerfully reproduced through ritual: "It is through ritual that particular traditions are given precise cultural definitions because ritual controls transitions between those conditions. Burial rituals enable the transition from life to death and by doing so they give an explicit cultural definition to the symbolism associated with this life:death opposition" (Barrett et al. 1991: 7). Although death is not an everyday occurrence, mortuary rituals are still among the strategic engagements through which people reproduce the conditions of their own lives (Barrett 1990: 182). There is debate as to the relative importance of death and burial in different societies. Thomas, for example, sees mortuary practice (which includes burial) as an hegemonic practice which reproduces society and maintains relations of dominance, and which also provides a direct link between the manipulation of power and the representation of the human body (Thomas 1991: 140). Tarlow (1992), however, has stressed the role which human emotion and grief, as well as the manipulation of power, plays in the human response to death. People and the communities which they constitute, react in different ways to death. Indeed, as Thomas himself has pointed out, death and the dead may be of greatly varying significance in different societies (1991: 104).

SOCIAL TIIEORY

A recent development in archaeological interpretation has been that of social theory, specifically the application of structuration theories to archaeology. Such theories state that society is constituted of social practices and the actions of people, and that it cannot be analysed any other way, such as in terms of economy, or environment, for example (Bourdieu 1977; Cohen 1989; Giddens 1979, 1981, 1984). This position involves an analytical framework within which the social actor is assumed to know a great deal about the ways in which society operates and is thought to be more or less capable of reasserting, manipulating or transforming social rules within a given situation (Johnson 198 9: 191).

An important consequence of all these views is that mourners are seen as the active participants in burial practices (Barrett 1990: 182), and it is recognised that the dead do not participate in their own funerals. Rather, the treatment of the corpse is a

23

transform rules of meaning (S0rensen 1991: 121, Barrett 1991: 3) . The meanings of objects themselves are not coincidental or arbitrary, but rather are given by their context (Hcxlder 1987; S0rensen 1987, 1991: 121 ). As objects are re-situated in different contexts , this meaning may therefore change according! y (Barrett 1991: 3). Because material culture is nonverbal, its meaning is less distinctively defined . Objects and people therefore participate in a silent discourse, in which meanings may go unnoticed, but in which they may also be more profound (Damm1991a: 179, 1991b: 130): the message "goes without saying because it comes without saying" (Bourdieu 1977: 167). It is therefore only possible to attempt to analyse the significance of goods in Anglo-Saxon burial ri tual s whe n viewed in detail in thei r local contexts . Thi s involves examining how individual bodies are arranged in the ground , and how any objects positioned around them contribute to the overall visual effect. What is required is a detailed picture of a specific local ritual, rather than of general trends over a wide area.

powerful symbolic medium made use of by the mourners (Barrett 1988b: 30; Thomas 1991), and the purpose of the burial ritual is display (Barrett 1990: 186). Mizoguchi (1993: 224-5), following Thomas (1991 ), has gone so far as to view corpses as being like "portable artefacts, carrying bundles of symbolic meanings". Such approaches have also meant that attention has been focused on the role of material culture within burial rites, as this is what symbolic meanings are often associated with. The implications of this approach for Anglo-Saxon mortuary evidence are manifold. In previous analyses, it has almost been as if the corpse buried itself, with its favourite belongings . In light of recent theoretical developments, however, it is the role of the mourners which comes to the fore. It cannot be the corpse who makes the decision as to what, if any, decorative metalwork to be buried in, or whether to take along a spear, shield or sword. It is the mourners who must make these decisions, along with deciding how deep or wide a grave to dig, in which direction it should point , where to position the grave in the landscape, and how to arrange the body and grave goods within it.

3.2.S THERECONSTRUCTION OF MEANING 3.2.4

THE MEANINGS OF MATERIAL CuLTIJRE

A task of the archaeologist is thus to attempt to reconstruct past meanings of material culture , and the role that those meanings played in the way that society operated. However, what material culture actually meant to the people using it can never be reconstructed. It is only by looking closely at the contexts in which it was employed, that it is possible to see how it was used to structure social relations (Barrett 1987, 1988a, 1989a). As meaning is context dependent and subjective, a multiplicity of different meanings may be present (Hodder 1986). As Barrett (1991: 6) states: "The material evidence does not exist as the mute record of a past society, but exists as the fragmentary remains of worlds once inhabited by speaking and acting humans, who used those material conditions to structure and defend certain traditions of discourse". Use in different contexts by different people will create different meanings. For effective communication to take place, however, there must be general, if unspoken, agreement between the people involved in that discourse as to the significance of that material culture, and it is only this general meaning which the archaeologist can hope to recover.

Recent analyses of Anglo-Saxon mortuary practice have tended to work on a large scale, looking for patterns across wide areas of the country (Brush 1993; Harke 1989a, b, 1990; Hines 1984). This followed in the footsteps of an earlier tradition of AngloSaxon archaeology which inferred large scale population movements and political developments through limited aspects of the archaeological evidence (Evison 1979; Kemble 1855, 1863; Leeds 1949; Myres 1969). All these approaches, past and present, rest on the assumption that aspects of material culture retain the same meanings and are always made use of in the same way in different areas, among different communities, and at different times. An example of this would be, say, to assume that a certain brooch style would suggest the same meanings when being worn by a Iiving person in fifth century Kent, as it would when being included as a grave good in a burial in late sixth century Yorkshire. Material culture is not a passive indicator of social features (such as age, sex, gender, class or ethnic affiliation), but is rather an active entity, which both helps to create and maintain social groupings and divisions. Material symbols are negotiated and manipulated as part of strategies (conscious or otherwise) of individuals and groups (Hodder 1982b: 217) . Because this manipulation is active, such symbols may be used to mark, exaggerate or contradict certain types of inf onnation flow and social relationships (ibid: 228). Thus, in line with the views on the structuration of society outlined above, "material culture does not so much reflect social conditions as participate in the restructuring and transformation of those conditions" (Barrett 1990: 179). Material culture is a set of resources which, firstly, guides actions upon the world, secondly, enables effective communicative action between both groups and individuals, and thirdly , allows monitoring of actions and the effect of them as the world is thereby transformed (ibid.).

The advantage which the archaeologist does have in this respect is a long time-frame in which to work. By observing change in the local contexts of archaeological evidence, a picture can be built up of developments over a wider area, and over time, contributing to the reproduction of the social system (Barrett 1988b: 30). Such change should be expected, as society, and thus the role of material culture, is never static, but continually evolving . It is possible, however , that such change may be obscured , possibly because of the role traditional authority or other forms of ideology may play (Parker Pearson 1982).

3.2.6

CoNCLUSIONS

To sum up, I can do no better than to quote John Barrett in full: "Material culture represents the material universe which was partially available for humans to draw upon as a medium for action . It is thus both the conditions for actions and the results of action. As such material culture is also the medium of

Thus material culture is simultaneously actively creating and pass ive ly symboli c (S0rensen 1992: 36). It is an integral component of social life, being used to express, create and 24

discourse (the code) by which social relations are negotiated and reproduced: it is meaningful. That meaning would have been known to the people involved in that discourse, although their subjective knowledge of the code will have varied. Archaeologists cannot recover that particular subjectivity. However an understanding of the code is possible if we think through the specific contexts (i.e. relationships) which the material code structured in a particular discourse. Such an understanding constitutes historical knowledge and we are able to perceive the reproduction and transformation of the code" (Barrett 1989a: 305).

The first step in this study is to examine the validity of the most basic assumptions made in Anglo-Saxon funerary analysis at the level of the individual body. Intimately connected with this is the recognition that treatment of the corpse is the actions of the mourners, and should be viewed in this light (Barrett 1988b: 31; Barrett et al. 1991: 122; Mizoguchi 1993: 224-5). There are often broad generalisations made within Anglo-Saxon funerary archaeology about categories of people, and their related roles within society, on the basis of the grave goods found with them. For example, common assumptions are that people with many fine goods were rich, and therefore powerful, that a burial with jewellery was a woman, and that one with weapons was a man. These attributions of jewellery to females and weapons to males are so accepted by archaeologists that skeletal sexing is often ignored in the face of this 'cultural sexing', i.e. 'what the grave goods tell us'. The attributes of 'gender' are then used in interpretations of the nature of society, leading to an extremely stereotyped view (e.g. Evison 1987; Hirst 1985).

Decoration and treatment of the corpse in the burial ritual thus presents an ideal opportunity for the production and reproduction of society, as funerals mark events where social roles are publicly renewed, reinforced and reclassified (Damm 1991b: 130), and the associated material culture provides an extremely visible and effective way of contributing to that reproduction. Burials represent an element in social discourse, but they do not necessarily reflect social organisation. Instead, they show aspects of that organisation being contested and rearranged in different ways (ibid .). That social discourse is conducted entirely by the mourners. The corpse is a passive vehicle for their active use of material culture.

Looking critically at such assumptions includes examining the correlations between grave goods, biological sex, gender, age and social status. In order to test these as independent variables, obviously only cemeteries with independent sexing and ageing of the skeletons by bone specialists are appropriate for this section. There are two such cemeteries in East Yorkshire, Sewerby (Hirst 1985) and West Heslerton (Powlesland et al. 1986; Powlesland 1987, 1989, in press). Once these issues have been rigorously examined, and analysis conducted, conclusions about people of different ages and genders and the way they were furnished in death can then be compared with other aspects of the burial rite, which is as important in creating an impact on the mourners.

The implications of these views for Anglo-Saxon archaeology are extensive. Fundamental to the traditional approaches expressed in artefactual studies was the assumption that patterns of material culture are dictated by and directly express group identity (Whyman 1993: 62). If, however, material culture is active, it cannot be assumed to simply reflect social categories such as gender, ethnicity, status or age. Rather, it must be recognised that any social groupings which are distinguished by the use of material culture in burial were an active creation of the mourners, who felt it important to make those distinctions. Changes in the archaeological evidence through time and between areas should be viewed in this light, rather than be seen to represent static ethnic or other social groupings, as has been the case in most previous analyses of Anglo-Saxon burial archaeology (with the notable exception of Pader 1982).

3.3

Toe way that the grave is dug - its size, shape and orientation and the way that the body is placed within it are also involved in contributing to the overall visual effect. A body which is haphazardly flung face down into a shallow grave will suggest dramatically different meanings, and ideas about the deceased, to the observers of the burial than one which is carefully arranged on its back, within a deep, well-cut grave. Thus, building on the conclusions of individual skeletal characteristics and provisioning of goods, correlations with other aspects of the burial will be looked at. This will thus be an investigation of whether aspects of the deceased's social persona (based on skeletal factors and their 'cultural• representation by the mourners) can be related to the other elements in the way in which that person was buried. In addition, exploration of the variety of burial methods may suggest possibilities for the interpretation of the significance of the burial rite in helping structure non-Christian Anglo-Saxon societies. Conducting this analysis cemetery by cemetery requires an adequate sample in which to look for correlations. Therefore, for this section, cemeteries with more than twenty graves, and a relatively high standard of recording can be used. In East Yorkshire, in addition to the two modern excavations at Sewerby and West Heslerton which have already been mentioned, there are six sites which can provide this level of detail: Uncleby (Smith 1912a), Cheesecake Hill, Kelleythorpe, Garton II (all Mortimer 1905) and Garton Slack (Grantham and Grantham 1963-6; Mortimer

AIMS OF THE STUDY

Some of the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries of East Yorkshire have been recognised as 'unusual' with the distinctive practice of crouched burial at some sites, and locations around prehistoric earthworks (see Chapter One). These peculiarities have been used by some scholars to argue for continuity from RomanoBritish to Anglian rites (Eagles 1979; Faull 1977, 1979). Toe overall aim of this study is to investigate the archaeological evidence in detail, from a clearly defined theoretical standpoint, in order to reassess traditional interpretations of these burial rites. The aim is also to see how ·cemeteries and burial rites varied in a particular area, and if, or how, they changed over time. I wish to look at the way that material culture (i.e. the grave goods) was used within these rites in order to observe the long-term effects on social structures, on the ways that people lived their lives, and the wider political and social implications of such changes.

25

1905) , all mainly excavated in the nineteenth century, and the modern excavation at Ganon Station (British Museum records; Stead 1991).

full, and thereby reach some understanding of its meaning within individual contexts. By starting at the level of the individual burial, and working outwards to look at the situation of cemeteries in the landscape and of burial rites in time, it is hoped that some sense can be made of the way that mortuary practices helped to structure and maintain societies, by mediating the relations of the people who constituted those societies. This study is not, therefore, one which aims to examine the general social organisation of the period, or to trace largescale population movements.

If burial, as has been suggested, does play a large part in structuring society, then we would expect to see changes over time, either in the form of burial or in the role which it plays. The needs, roles and relationships of the people of whom a society consists are not static, but are continually changing and renegotiated. Toe presence and significance of change can be investigated, both by looking at the variation over time within a large cemetery, and by looking for differences between cemeteries which date to different periods. Thus the varying aspects of the deceased which were being stressed can be examined, along with whether any rigid practices can be seen to have governed burials over a length of time, or across an area. If burial rites seem to have stayed the same, this will also need investigation, as some mechanism, such as ideology, would have been enforcing uniformity. In this stage of analysis it will be necessary to think about how burial practices come into being, how they are maintained or changed, and what their function is. Thus, an examination of the way that burial rites changed over time from the fifth to the eighth century can be made using the same database of well-recorded cemeteries, which will have been used in the previous stage of analysis.

3.4

THE STUDY AREA

Bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Humber River to the south, and the River Derwent to the west and north (see Fig. 3.1), the area comprising what used to be East Yorkshire (and is now North Humberside, plus a small part of North Yorkshire) was one with a long tradition of Anglo-Saxon archaeological research, as well as prehistoric and medieval investigations . This was the core area in which the nineteenth century antiquarians J R Mortimer and Canon Greenwell conducted their enquiries. These men, unusually for their time, published extensive records of their excavations (mainly into barrow mounds, but also elsewhere), which are of an extremely high quality for their time, with detailed recording of the positions of individual skeletons, of the positions of goods within graves and of the overall cemetery layout (see Greenwell and Rolleston 1877; Mortimer 1905). These investigations were mainly into Bronze Age round barrows, and other prehistoric linear earthworks, but these were frequently used in the early AngloSaxon period as a focus for furnished inhumation cemeteries. Mortimer and Greenwell also published details of these early medieval finds, along with the earlier prehistoric material.

Cemeteries do not exist independently of the landscape in which they are situated. Until their eventual abandonment they are continually evolving, being added to by each new burial. There must always be an original decision to make the first interment at a site: can any features governing this be identified (for example, do all cemeteries occupy similar places in the landscape)? The date range of a cemetery is governed by how long people continue to make use of that site as a burial place. The reasons for their abandonmen~ can be investigated. Such an analysis of the funerary record of an area as a whole, using all known burials and cemeteries can elucidate the relationship of cemeteries, and thus the people who created them, with the landscape, in terms of natural or prehistoric features, or contemporary Anglo-Saxon sites.

Also within the bounds of this area several modern excavations of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, dating from the fifth to seventh centuries AD, have taken place. The large site at Sewerby at which almost sixty inhumation burials were excavated (Hirst 1985) and that at West Heslerton with almost two hundred inhumations, as well as some cremations (Powlesland in press) were both extremely well-recorded excavations (West Heslerton especially so, with its use of computer recording). Both of these sites were only partially excavated, and further burials are thought to remain under a road which bisects the site at West Heslerton, and under farm buildings at Sewerby. Both Sewerby and West Heslerton also had sexing and ageing of the skeletons carried out independently by bone specialists.

Early Anglo-Saxon burials a.re distinguished because they display different features from Roman burials which came before and later Christian Anglo-Saxon and Medieval burials which followed. Thus, having examined in detail the burial rite of an area, the implications for looking at long-term chronological change across traditional archaeological 'periods' will be examined, as will the relation of Anglo-Saxon burial archaeology of one region to that of neighbouring areas. The effect that these conclusions may have on the ways that we think about and make use of Anglo-Saxon mortuary evidence will then be investigated.

Unusually, there have also been two major works of synthesis dealing with this area during the Anglo-Saxon period (Eagles 1979, Faull 1979), containing summaries of research and site gazetteers which could provide checks on primary and secondary sources (see Chapter Eight for further discussion of these works). Other sources for the area included the valuable transcription of the Yorkshire Wolds Aerial Photography Survey (by RCIIME), the Wharram Percy Deserted Medieval Village Project, the York Environs Project, the Humberside Survey (Loughlin and Miller 1979) and the Humberside and North Yorkshire Sites and Monuments Records .

To summarise these aims, it is hoped that by approaching the study of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries from a people-centred perspective, with an emphasis on the actions and practices of individuals, the theoretical problems which have hindered similar studies can be circumvented. Such a contextual, localised approach will try not to make assumptions about the nature and role of burial practices, and the role of material culture within this , but rather will attempt to investigate it in

26

This area is also unusual for the richness of its prehistoric archaeology. This is in part due to the long-term use of a great deal of the higher ground of the Wolds for pasture rather than agriculture, which facilitated the survival of prehistoric monuments such as barrows and linear earthworks. Tne middlelate Neolithic period (early to late third millennium BC) is wellattested to by the henge and cursus monuments centred around the Rudston monolith, and by several long barrows and large round barrows. Many early Bronze Age (late third to early second millennium BC) round barrows also survive, still visible in the landscape. This area is also unique for the presence of many hundreds of late Iron Age burials (c. 400-0 BC), deposited under square barrows which are characteristically found in extensive linear alignments. East Yorkshire is considered to be the only area of Britain with a visible Iron Age burial rite. Thus the area of East Yorkshire, with unique prehistoric archaeological evidence, and extensive and well-recorded Anglo-Saxon cemeteries (along with one of the few large AngloSaxon settlement sites known in the country - that at West Heslerton associated with the cemetery), was ideal for a detailed contextual study of Anglo-Saxon mortuary ritual. Details of

database compilation, individual site selection and site descriptions, along with methods of analysis, will be given in the appropriate chapters.

3.5

GEOLOGY, GEOGRAPHY AND VEGETATION OF TIIEAREA

The topography, geology and vegetational history of an area will determine to a certain extent the uses which people will have made of it in the past, some of which may survive in archaeological forms such as earthworks or burial monuments. Its more recent history may well have dictated what fragments of that archaeology have surviv~ and what has been lost to erosion, ploughing, road and railway construction, town expansion, and other natural or human factors . A look at the history of archaeological research in the region will examine those factors which facilitated excavation, recording and preservation of any surviving archaeological remains. The area chosen for the study consists of four distinct geographical areas: the Vale of Pickering, the Vale of York, the Yorkshire Wolds and the Plain of Holderness (see Fig 3.1). It is

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Figure 3.1: Location of Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries (redrawn by Yvonne Beadnell after Hirst 1985) 27

the chalk Wolds which seem to dominate the entire region, forming an L-shaped spine, rising to between 100 and 200m OD, running north from the Humber to Malton, then turning east towards Bridlington. They represent the northernmost extent of chalk in England, and occupy almost a third of the study area (Eagles 1979: 13). Well-draining soils lying over the chalk make these grassy slopes some of the most fertile land in the area (Ellis 1990: 32).

Thus, those remains which survived did so due to their original location away from land affected by destructive agricultural processes. Other human factors which destroyed many such sites were the extensive construction operations of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These, such as the roads and railways built across the Wolds, and the building of suburbs to towns such as Driffield and Kingston-upon-Hull, brought many archaeological remains to light. The survival of such remains was dependent upon those carrying out archaeological recording and research in the area.

Between the Wolds and the sea to the east, the chalk dips beneath the increasing thickness of glacial deposits, such as gravel terraces and boulder clays, which comprise the Plain of Holderness (Catt 1990: 16). Toe relief of this area is flat to gentle slopes, with poorly draining soils (Ellis 1990: 31). Until the drainage schemes of the nineteenth century, much of this area would have been marshlan~ similar to the East Anglian Fens (Eagles 1979: 15).

3.6

ARCHAEOLOGICAL RE'SEARCH IN YORKSHIRE

In order to understand the variable preservation and recording of Anglo-Saxon archaeological evidence in East Yorkshire, one needs to look at the history of archaeological research in the area. Strategies of excavation and recording, research interests and priorities, are all governed to a certain extent by personal aspects, as well as being influenced by broader academic, social and archaeological trends (Levine 1986; Shanks and Tilley 1987) . In the case of East Yorkshire, where unique archaeological evidence, such as crouched Anglo-Saxon burials in prehistoric earthworks, has given rise to local traditions of interpretation, this is especially important.

In much of the Vale of York to the west of the Wolds, older Triassic rocks underlie glacial deposits or lake sediments , although on the east side of the Vale narrow outcrops of Jurassic rocks (mudstones, limestones and sandstones) run north-south (Catt 1990: 16). Again, the relief of the area is flat to gentle slopes with poor to fair-draining soils (Ellis 1990: 31). The Vale of Pickering, with its alluvium and sand and gravel terraces, is bounded by the limestone plateau of the Howardian Hills at its western extremity and the high boulder clay between Seamer and the coast to the east (Eagles 1979: 11). The River Derwent forms the focus of the Vale, and like the Plain of Holderness much of the low-lying area would have been poorly drained until nineteenth century drainage works (ibid: 12), and would thus have been of little use for agriculture until that time (Flenley 1990: 51).

Archaeology became popular nationally amongst the educated classes in the mid nineteenth century, as illustrated by the formation of hundreds of local archaeological and ethnological societies at this time, and by the large crowds which often used to attend barrow openings. Indeed, such excavations were often planned as entertainment for the field-outings of such local societies, such as those carried out by the Yorkshire Antiquarian Club in 1849 and 1853 around Aldro, Acklam and Riggs (Marsden 1974: 96). Toe hey-day of such excavations was in the years 1840 to 1870 (ibid: 94). In Yorkshire, these were primarily in the highly visible prehistoric (mainly Bronze Age) barrows, although intrusive Anglo-Saxon burials were sometimes encountered.

Thus the topographical picture is one of fertile Wold margins surrounded to the east, north and south by poorly-draining lowlying areas. Throughout the history and prehistory of this area, very different use, in both settlement and agricultural terms, has been made of the higher Wolds as opposed to the lower lying areas of Holderness and the Vales of York and Pickering. In prehistory the Wolds seem to have been the focus of human activity, to judge by the vast numbers of Bronze Age round barrows and extensive linear earthworks which demarcate the landscape. These constructions are often also the focus of AngloSaxon inhumation cemeteries. It is likely that the higher ground of the Wolds was used for pasture. This is certainly true for the period encompassed by written records, for the majority of burial mounds on the Wold tops survived unaffected by ploughing until well into the nineteenth century (Mortimer 1905: ix). The lower, more productive slopes were more likely to have been used for arable agriculture in both distant and more recent times, for both Greenwell and Mortimer commented on the distribution of Bronze Age barrows as being confined to heights and, to a lesser extent, slopes, but rarely encountered in valley bottoms (Mortimer 1905: xxiii). Until the drainage schemes and intensive farming methods of recent centuries, the low-lying areas of Holderness and the Vales of York and Pickering would have been of marginal agricultural (and thus, presumably, settlement) use.

Obviously, we only have information about nineteenth century excavations from those antiquarians who made the effort to publish their results (which were of variable standard). Excavations by Sir Christopher Sykes of Sledmere at the end of the eighteenth century are only passingly referred to (Mortimer 1905: x), and thus the earliest well-known 'barrowdigger' to work in East Yorkshire was Albert Conyngham, later Lord Londesborough. He excavated a barrow at Kelleythorpe in 1851,finding a central beaker burial, and ten intrusive AngloSaxon burials (but missing another 41 which were found in later years). His aim was to find the primary burial, and he usually went about this by making a large cutting above the centre of the barrow. Londesborough did make records of his diggings, but after the sale of the Londesborough estates in 1924, it is reported that many boxes of antiquities collected by him were dispersed or destroy~ and a pile of manuscripts and maps burned on a bonfire (Marsden 1974: 96) . Toe history of nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon archaeology in Yorkshire is dominated by two men: Canon William Greenwell

28

(1820-1918) and J RMortimer (1825-1911). Greenwell, based in Durh~ opened some 295 burial mounds, principally in East Yorkshire (Greenwell and Rolleston 1877: v) but also in other counties. He published his findings in the monograph BritishBarrows(1877) (which has been describedas the dullest book ever written) (Marsden 1974: 99). Although the monograph records barrow dimensions and precisely describes each mound and its contents, no use was made of maps, plans or sections, and only some pottery and artefacts were illustrated, along with some skulls described by his co-worker George Rolleston, Linacre Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Oxford (ibid.), reflecting interest in the parallel field of ethnology. These men tried to use chronometric techniques to distinguish the original prehistoric interments from later intrusive Anglo-Saxon burials (Greenwell and Rolleston 1877: 123). Greenwell described his excavation method as follows: "My practice has always been to drive a trench, the width of the barrow as originally constituted and before it was enlarged by being ploughed down, from south to north, through and beyond the centre. I have not always thought it necessary to remove the whole of the north and west sides as they are generally found to be destitute of secondary interments; in very many cases however, I have turned over the whole mound" (quoted in Marsden 1974: 99).

Agnes executed the remarkable illustrations (between the ages of 13 and 19) (ibid: 105-6). Unlike Greenwell, he was invariably present at these excavations (exceptionally, his brother Robert stood in): "With the view of preventing error the facts collected during this long period were accurately recorded at the time the inspections took place ...! have exposed, or assisted in exposing, every interment in the district described in this volume. I have observed everything in situ, and with my own hands removed the relics" (Mortimer 1905: xvii). In the 1905 volume, almost every barrow was illustrated in plan, and many were also drawn in section (Marsden 1974: 107-8). A self-taught man, Mortimer was reticent about his contribution to scholarship: "My intention being rather to supply information to the antiquary than to gratify the taste of the "general" reader, much descriptive repetition has been rendered unavoidable. However, I trust that whatever this narrative may lack in literary merit will be somewhat counterbalanced by the attention and care that has been bestowed upon the researches it describes" (Mortimer 1905: ix). The decline in barrow excavations towards the end of the century in this area is partly due to the cessation of the activities of these two men (see Figs. 3.2 and 3.3). Speaking of the 1930s, E V Wright remembered that "the great names of East Riding archaeology in those days were still Greenwell and Mortimer ..jt was one of the tenets of faith for local archaeologists that the subject remained under their domination" (Wright 1990: 74). However, the decline in barrow excavations nationally has been attributed to the fact that other areas of archaeology, such as Roman and Medieval sites became suitable subjects for study (Sargent 1993: 384). It may also be the case, as Morris has suggested ( 1992: 423), that the decline was due to a depletion in the numbers of upstanding barrows. In the Yorkshire Wolds, however, the lack of large numbers of Roman sites and medieval towns (with the exception of York and Malton), and the survival of Bronze Age barrows and increasing discovery of the distinctive Iron Age square barrow cemeteries, resulted in a bias towards the fruits of excavation of funerary monuments, "a bias which perhaps lingers to this day for the Wolds at least"

In the 1860s Greenwell came into conflict with Mortimer, a corn-dealer from Driffield, who had been prompted to start collecting flints and fossils by visits to the Great Exhibition in 1851, and who had started opening barrow groups on the Wolds in 1860. Mortimer was unusual in being 'in trade', at a time when archaeology was dominated by an elite network of leisured amateurs, who consisted mainly of the clergy, lawyers and doctors (Morris 1992: 421). It may have been their differences in social background, as well as Mortimer's criticism ofGreenwell's archaeological techniques, which prompted the antagonism. In a letter to Sir John Evans, Greenwell complained that "that scoundrel Mortimer has been spreading calumnious reports, to the effect that I am destroying all the Wolds barrows and missing half the interments, in fact doing the work in a thoroughly bad way. This is with a view to stopping my getting leave. His conduct. ..has been that of a rascal" (Evans 1943: 123). Eventually, such acrimony was replaced by more goodhumoured rivalry, and later the two men co-operated on the excavations of Iron Age barrows at Danes Graves (Marsden 1974: 101). Mortimer also used large sections of Greenwell's extensive 1877 introduction in his own later work.

16 14

12

Mortimer was indeed more systematic than Greenwell, and prepared a detailed map locating all the barrows which he excavated (304 prehistoric barrows in all, along with Iron Age barrows at Danes Graves (Mortimer 1897, 1898, 1899, 1911) and some flat Anglo-Saxon cemeteries). He believed that "Ancient burial mounds, like many ancient manuscripts, can reveal the secrets of the past. It is therefore highly desirable that the whole of their contents should be, as far as possible, carefully intopreted before they are entirely swept away" ( 1905: ix). He also preserved many of the finds from these sites (now in the Hull Museum), and published detailed descriptions of each grave in his Forty YearsResearchesintoBritishand Saxon BurialMounds of East Yorkshire( 1905), for which his daughter

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Figure 3.2: Excavations in East Yorkshire by Decade and Excavator 29

Grantham brothers of Driffield, who carried out local excavations , including early medieval sites such as Garton Slack I (Grantham 1963-6), and established their own private museum (Eagles 1979: ix) .

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In the 1950s the Iron Age square barrow cemeteries first commented on and excavated by Mortimer and Greenwell came to the fore of local research, mainly through the offices of Ian Stead, now at the British Museum, who has excavated many hundreds of barrows from 1959 to the present day (Stead 1971, 1977, 1991). Some Anglian burials have also been found on these sites (e.g. at Garton Station, Stead 1991: 17-24). Other notable work in the 1950s was the partial excavation of the Anglo-Saxon inhumation cemetery at Sewerby by Philip Rahtz in the 1950s (continued by Susan Hirst in the 1970s (Hirst 1985)), and further work at the Sancton Anglian cremation cemetery (Myres and Southern 1973; Timby 1993).

20

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Local field work has always remained active, as indicated by the formation of the East Riding Archaeological Society in 1969, and the starting up again of the Hull Museums Publications series in 1963 (No. 213 published after a gap of 22 years) (Wright 1990: 82). Of late, there have been two major research projects in the region dealing with the early medieval period: the Wharram Percy medieval village (including prehistoric, Roman and Anglian remains) (Beresford and Hurst 1990), and the Heslerton Parish Project, which centred around the AngloSaxon settlement with its associated cemetery (Powlesland 1986, 1987, 1989, in press). Heslerton was a long term rescue excavation, funded by English Heritage.

(Wright 1990: 74). Perhaps the real decline was due to the changing social make-up and interests of the archaeological societies, and the absence from the area of any wealthy private archaeologists after World War I. The lingering bias towards funerary evidence was perpetuated by the influence of Tom Sheppard, curator of the Hull Municipal Museum from 1901 to 1941. Appointed at only 24 years old, with no museum experience but a proven track record in field geology, he was from the start enthusiastic about the funerary archaeology of the region. He spent his first eighteen months in the post redisplaying the whole of the museum's collection (a great success, with many visitors), and must have been involved at this time with the preparation of Mortimer's Forty YearsResearches,for which he wrote the preface. He saw the museum's role as primarily one of education, organising hundreds of lectures for schoolchildren, and also "saw the role of the museum in providing people with a sense of place, and pride in their area, and the value of museums in attracting people to visit the city" (Schadla-Hall 1989: 5). Sheppard wanted a localmuseum, representative of the surrounding area, and even tried to persuade the British Museum to return local artefacts (largely without success). He did, however, obtain the extensive Mortimer Collection, which had previously been housed in a purpose-built museum in Driffield, but which was in danger of being dispersed . After many years delay, the collection was finally put on display in 1929 (Schadla-Hall 1989: 11-13). Sheppard also carried out excavations, such as the Anglo~Saxon cemeteries atHornsea (Sheppard 1918) and Staxton (Sheppard 1938), and the settlement site at Elloughton (Sheppard 1940).

The history of Anglo-Saxon archaeology in East Yorkshire is very much a history of individuals, with the vast amount of data being excavated by a relatively small number of people. In the early period, the attitudes of Mortimer and Greenwell meant that, unusually for their time, they published their results in great detail. This has resulted in a significant corpus of nineteenth century excavations which are of a comparable standard to work of this century. This corpus has been significantly added to by the results from three modern statefunded cemetery excavations, at Heslerton, Sewerby and Garton Station, of which the first two have the advantage of independent sexing and ageing of the skeletal remains. East Yorkshire has thus seen many Anglo-Saxon excavations, an admirable number of which have been published. It was not until the late 1970s, however, that any major synthetic works on the early medieval period appeared. Bruce Eagle's The Anglo-Saxon Settlementof Humberside (1979) and Margaret Faull's doctoral thesis of the same year are two extensive pieces of work which cover archaeological evidence, place-names and use later historical documents. They are, however, both heavily reliant on the traditional historical frameworks. Since then, works of similar scope have tended to concentrate on the prehistoric periods, especially the Iron Age (Bevan 1994; Millett 1990; Ramm 1978; Stead 1979). There is a need, therefore, for a modem work on theAnglo-Saxon period, which takes account of the major developments in archaeological thinking of the last two decades, as well as incorporating the modern excavations at Sewerby, Garton Station and Heslerton.

Some field-work in the first three decades of the century was carried out by local societies, but by 1930: "while the records of archaeological discoveries in the Humber region were both extensive and varied, ranging over all periods from the Palaeolithic onwards, there was a lack of modern excavated evidence" (Wright 1990: 77). The foundation of Hull University College was to exert some influence in this in the 1940s and 1950s. The excavation sub-committee of the University's Local History Committee maintained some momentum in field-work (ibid: 79), and this was supplemented by the researches of the

30

3.7

CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter I have outlined the theoretical stance of this study, one which emphasises the active nature of material culture, and the conscious and unconscious manipulation of that material culture by people in the past. Although such perspectives have mainly been developed within prehistoric archaeology, they are wholly applicable to the funerary remains of the Anglo-Saxon period. In accordance with this perspective, the specific aims of the project (which overall were to examine the archaeological basis for traditional interpretations of the fifth to seventh centuries) were then outlined, starting at the level of the individual body. By examining the separate burials for evidence of the practices which the mourners employed in the course of the funeral, it was proposed to explore the funerary archaeology of a region from the 'centre outwards'. This would involve moving from the decoration of the individual corpse to the structure of an inhumation, in terms of the construction of the grave and the positioning of the body within it. Following this, it was intended to examine the spatial layout of separate burials within cemeteries. This stage would involve looking at changing burial practices through time at individual sites. Building on this, it was then proposed to look at all the recorded Anglo-Saxon funerary archaeology of East Yorkshire in terms of its

geographical location, in relation to natural and historical features, in order to investigate similarities and differences between burial rites of communities in different areas. This would then be related to longer-term sequences of change in burial rites in that region. The archaeological evidence from East Yorkshire is extremely rich, due to a relative lack of industrialisation and the preservation of many sites in pasture. The evidence, where it has been excavated, is also remarkably well recorded, both in the nineteenth century, due to the intensive excavations of Mortimer and Greenwell, and in more recent years, with the modern excavations of large cemeteries at Sewerby and Heslerton. There were also in existence two works which synthesised much of the evidence for this area in the AngloSaxon period, and could thus act as guides to primary and secondary sources. In the next chapter, the burials from Sewerby and Heslerton will be examined, with reference to the ways in which bodies were decorated, and furnished with grave goods. The relationships between such cultural provisioning by the mourners and skeletal factors such as biological sex and age will be investigated, in an attempt to explore the motivations behind such provisioning. The emphasis is on local ways of doing things, and the reasons behind these.

31

CHAPTERFouR: SEx, GENDER,AGE ANDGRAVE Gooos 4.1

1985), and Heslerton, with nearly two hundred (Powlesland in press). These two sites offer the opportunity to examine the relationships which exist between biological sex, age groupings, gender associations and the nature of grave good assemblages.

INTRODUCTION

A cemetery is the result of successive burials being made in the same area. As such, it cannot be analysed as an entity in its own right, without first looking at its constituent parts: the individual burials. Initially, this chapter will critically examine some of the basic assumptions traditionally used in analyses of Anglo-Saxon burials, such as the association of weapons with males and jewellery with females. This is clearly based on the idea that the 'social persona' of the deceased is directly reflected in the grave goods with which they were provisioned (see Chapter Three). Building on this critique, suggestions will be made as to the symbolic meanings of grave goods, and the roles which other social factors such as age and status had on the decisions of the mourners when they were deciding how to fwnish a corpse. This will include looking at the reasons why certain objects were seen as appropriate for inclusion in some graves and not others.

4.2

ENGENDERING ARCHAEOLOGY

The rich tradition of feminist debate which has arisen over the last twenty years has problematised the previously 'commonsense' ways in which sex and gender have been dealt with. Such critique developed first in sociology and social anthropology (see for example, Kessler and Mackenna 1978; Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; works cited in Conkey and Spector 1984). Archaeologists in Scandinavia began to take this critique on board in the mid 1970s (a notable event being the 'Were They All Men' conference which took place at Bergen in 1979), and their counterparts in Anglo-American prehistoric archaeology joined the debate in print in the early 1980s, with the Gender Archaeology session at the 1983 Theoretical Archaeology Group Meeting, Conkey and Spector's 1984 article and the gender issue of the Archaeological Review from Cambridge in 1988. There were three facets to this discussion: the position of women in the archaeological profession, the development of gender theory, and historical revision of the presentation of women in the past (Conkey and Spector 1984; Gilchrist 1991).

In the inhumation cemeteries of the fifth to seventh century in East Yorkshire, as in inhumation cemeteries in other parts of Anglo-Saxon England, the surviving goods which are often found associated with the burials consist mainly of decorative jewellery, dress-fastenings, weapons and other iron and bronze implements. In previous analyses of Anglo-Saxon mortuary practice, jewellery and ornaments have traditionally been attributed to female burials, and weapons and tools to male ones, and these two assemblages have usually been accepted as true indicators of biological sex (Evison 1987; Hirst 1985). Similar assumptions in other areas of archaeology are being increasingly challenged by those working within the critical framework provided by feminist .and gender approaches to archaeology and anthropology.

An important early stage in these discussions was the critique of the way women had been dealt with (or, rather, had not been dealt with at all) in archaeological interpretation (Bertelsen et al. 1987; Conkey and Spector 1984; Gero and Conkey 1991). This was a necessary first step in combating versions of the past which accepted modern day gender stereotypes as timeless, objective and natural (Conkey and Spector 1984), and it thus paved the way for archaeological interpretations which had been reworked in the light of feminist research (ibid: 28). Part of this project was 'finding' women in the past, specifically in those fields which had traditionally been seen as male preserves, such as hunting, technology and production. Challenging stereotypes of female behaviour was also an issue.

Until recently, however, such approaches have had little impact on the practice of Anglo-Saxon archaeology. This is especially interesting as studies of the Scandinavian Iron Age, the later part of which is the chronologically equivalent period on the other side of the North Sea, have been in the forefront of the development of feminist and gender archaeoiogies (e.g. Dommasnes 1982, 1987, 1991; Gibbs 1987; Hj0rungdal 1991, 1994; H0gest011986; Stalsberg 1984, 1987a, b). Suchdive.rgent interests obviously have very little to do with the nature of the archaeology being investigated, for both the Anglo-Saxon period and the later Scandinavian Iron Age deal with similar classes of evidence. The difference in interests must lie in the traditions of scholarship, rather than being inherent in the data itself, and is therefore open to question.

Toe emergence of such feminist critique coincided with that of 'post-processualism' - more a collection of different strands of self-critical archaeologies than a holistic entity. Perhaps exemplified best by the work of Hodder, Barrett, Shanks, Tuley and S0rensen, these approaches emphasise the symbolic and active nature of material culture, the importance of context, and the idea of individuals as active social agents (see Chapter Three). The agendas of feminist archaeology and postprocessualism highlighted the importance of self-critical reflection in archaeological enquiry, as both explored the influence of social and political factors on supposedly 'objective' investigation (Barrett 1988a; Hodder 1982a, 1986; Shanks and Tilley 1987). Although not identical in their objectives (see for example Englestad's criticisms of postprocessual archaeology ( 1991 a, b) ), dialectic between the two positions has led, in recent years, to a growing emphasis on the

The perspectives offered by gender archaeologies will be explored before moving on to look at problems inherent in skeletal sexing and ageing. The uses which have been made of sex, gender and age in Anglo-Saxon archaeology will be briefly reviewed before turning to the cemetery analysis itself. As stated in Chapter Three, only cemeteries with independent skeletal ageing and sexing by bone specialists can be used in this section. East Yorkshire is extremely unusual in having two such recently excavated sites: Sewerby with almost sixty inhumations (Hirst

32

archaeology of gender (i.e. on the articulation between males and females and the construction of masculinities and femininities) rather than on the feminist position of dealing with women alone. It was realised that the feminist "add woman and her perspectives" approach (Dommasnes 1992: 8), assigning women their own place in the archaeological record, merely served to obscure fundamental and problematic assumptions about men and women, gender and gender relations (Gero and Conkey 1991: 11). These assumptions have thus been subjected to a detailed critique which has included close examination of the relationships between sex, gender and society (Hj0rungdal 1994; Nordbladh and Yates 1990; S0rensen 1991, 1992). Several have made the point that human behaviour is not determined by biological sex (alone): "What gender is, what men and women are, what sorts of relations do or should obtain between them - all of these notions do not simply reflect or elaborate upon biological "givens", but are largely products of social and cultural processes" (Ortner and Whitehead 1981: 1). Gender is seen as something which is actively and continually created and reinforced, both by individuals and by societies (Moore 1986, 1988; S0rensen 1992: 32). It is not, therefore, something which is 'natural' or 'inevitable'. Rather, the images, attributes, activities and behaviours which are seen as appropriate for men and women are always historically and culturally specific (Moore 1988: 7). There is nothing inherently male or female: masculinities and femininities are simply different human possibilities which have emerged in individual situations (Gero and Conkey 1991: 9). Gender has been poetically described as "the impressive and baroque superstructure of social differentiation which culture erects on what it presumes to be the appropriate foundation of our relatively modest and clearly functional reproductive differences" (Harding 1982: 226). These reproductive differences have themselves been described as a cultural construct, for biological maleness and femaleness are not separate entities, but are rather two extremes on the same scale, determined by chromosomal combinations and hormonal proportions (Nordbladh and Yates 1990: 224-5). In fact, the external genitalia on which most sex distinctions are based are the ones which can be the most similar between the two sexes, and are most subject to hormonal-influenced change (ibid: 225). Thus, biological differences do not provide a universal basis for social definitions of gender (Moore 1988: 7). Anthropological work has even demonstrated that different societies can place variable emphasis on the impact of biology, with some claiming that distinctions between males and females are entirely biologically determined, and others giving supposed biological differences very little emphasis (Ortner and Whitehead 1981: 1).

character (Nordbladh and Yates 1990; S0rensen 1992: 34). Gender relations are present in almost every human society (Dommasnes 1992: 1), although the relative importance attached to those genders may vary. Gender must thus be a necessary part of any theory of social relations, for negotiation of gender relations is one of the dynamics reproducing and maintaining social systems (S0rensen 1992: 32). Gender is not just about women and their role in society, however. It must be recognised that masculinity is as cultural a construct as femininity (Dommasnes 1992: 12), and that it is the relationships between these concepts, and the way that they are articulated in opposition to each other which is important (S0rensen 1992: 36). The study of gender should concern itself with the way that these inter-relating notions are used strategically in different contexts (ibid.). This self-critical tradition does not produce radically different feminist versions of the past (ibid: 31), although it does reject entrenched nineteenth century gender roles (ibid: 32). It will hopefully, however, contribute to the development of a different archaeology: "one that is richer, humanised, and tuned to understanding how differences are not just socially constructed but historically contingent and changing" (Conkey 1993: 10). This engendered perspective (i.e. literally "produced by union of the sexes" (Conkey 1991: 30)) can contribute to the interpretation of Anglo-Saxon burials, by seeing gender as something: - which is not 'given', nor even necessarily rigidly tied to biological sex; - which is actively created, both by an individual and by a society; - which can change throughout an individual's lifetime; - which can vary from society to society and over time; - which is intimately involved in the construction and maintenance of social relations; - and as something which pertains to males as much as females. The possibility thus arises of interpretations of the past which are centred around people and variation in human behaviour, rather than being driven by present-day sexual stereotypes. The implications of this approach for Anglo-Saxon burial archaeology will be explored in the next section, following which the results of the analysis of burials from Sewerby and Heslerton will be presented and discussed. As a preliminary to this, methods of sexing and ageing skeletons will be reviewed.

4.3

SKELETAL DETERMINATION OF

SEXAND AGE

Skeletal sexing is carried out by observation of a number of different morphological features, notably those present on the cranium and pelvis (Mays 1998: 33). For most physical characteristics, adult humans share around 95% of the total range of variation (St Hoyme and Is~an 1989: 59), yet for a cemetery with excellent adult skeletal preservation as many as 98% of the burials will be sexed with a reasonable degree of certainty (Molleson and Cox 1993: 206) (children cannot be sexed with any accuracy, as their sexually dimorphic features do not diverge until puberty (El-Najjar and McWilliams 1978;

Gender can thus be seen to vary from society to society, as can be seen, for example, in the different ways that societies view the concept of 'mother', from the warm, caring image prevalent today, to the distant, authoritarian figure found in upper class Victorian England (Moore 1988: 25). Gender is also related to age, for both males and females within individual life-cycles go through stages which are differently associated with sexual 33

man, it is regarded reasonable here to assume that the grave goods are a true indication of sex". This view is, however, reliant on a bi-polar view of both sex and gender: there is no recognition that more than two categories of either may exist (contra Nordbladh and Yates 1990). lt also assumes a direct equation between sex (as a biological fact) and gender (as represented by the grave-goods). The power of this idea is such that, when the data disagrees , as in the cases above, the 'scientific ' findings are rejected in favour of the stereotype. Traditional attitudes are also reflected by the fact that skeletal analysis of the burials is rarely carried out or published: Henderson (1989) could only cite four excavations of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries where such a report had been produced (although this is rapidly becoming standard practice). These attitudes have resulted in stereotyped views of gender relations in Anglo-Saxon England, with it being assumed that the power in society was held by the weapon-wielding men, and that women wore jewellery which gave indications of their husband's or father ' s status or ethnicity (Arnold 1984 : 122-3, 161-2).

Krogman 1962; Stewart 1979), although perinatal skeletons do exhibit some dimorphism (Mays 1998: 38-9)). At sites with less than perfect skeletal preservation, this figure will be dramatically decreased (Henderson 1989: 79). Therefore, any definite sexings which can be made stand a high chance of being accurate. Estimation of age is far less accurate, as demonstrated by the Spitalfields Crypt excavations, where only 39% of the remains were aged correctly (independent tests could be run, as the age and sex of many of the interments were known from records and coffin plaques). Two percent of the interments were estimated as being older than they actually were, and a huge 58% as being (sometimes up to decades) younger (Molleson and Cox 1993: 167). These differences in accuracy are due to the skeletal elements made use of in ageing, in comparison with sexing. Whereas sexual dimorphism increases towards adulthood, and is virtually non-existent in infants and children, age estimation is relatively straightforward during the developmental phase , being based on bone size, stages of epiphyseal closure and dental eruption (Molleson 1981: 22; Is~an and Loth 1989: 23; Mays 1998: 42-9). Once adulthood is reached, however, it becomes far more difficult, as estimations must be based on a consensus of cranial suture closure, dental attrition and arthritic lipping, among others (see Mays 1998: 50-2 for a fuller discussion), rates of change of which all vary with genetics and environment (Molleson 1981: 22). Age categories of adults supplied by bone reports should therefore be viewed as approximate categories, rather than absolute chronological indicators.

It is possible that grave goods may not give a clear indication of the sex or gender of the person buried. The traditional linking of jewellery with women and weapons and tools with men can be traced back to its origins in mid-nineteenth century German/ Danish antiquarian circles (Hj0rungdal 1994: 144), and should thus be viewed as a nineteenth century construction which has been uncritically accepted by modern archaeologists. If the engendered perspective outlined above is taken, it becomes impossible to see such correlations as 'natural' and 'timeless' any longer. It is ridiculous to use grave-goods to 'sex' a body (Henderson 1989: 81). Rather, the relationship between gravegoods, gender and biological sex must be investigated, not assumed.

There have recently been suggestions that different ethnic populations can be identified on the basis of skeletal characteristics. For example, Harke ( 1990, 1992b) has claimed that male weapon burials are taller, on average, than their nonweapon counterparts, indicating that they are of 'Germanic ' and not native British origin. Such claims have yet to be substantiated, and the statistical significance of Harke's differences has been questioned in some areas (Kniisel pers. comm.). Until more advanced and reliable methods of determining such differences, such as DNA analysis (or possibly craniometry, as argued by Mays 1998: 101), have been fully developed, this is an unproductive line of pursuit, for it is heavily reliant on ethnic stereotypes and traditional historical frameworks .

4.4

A concomitant of the traditional view is that all adult burials can be neatly divided into males and females, leading to a conception of a society where all roles and relationships are determined by gender. Being female or male thus dominates over other social factors such as age, social position or ethnicity, for example. By looking anew at these categories, and questioning their all-encompassing nature, it may be possible to interpret Anglo-Saxon gender relations as something which is actively created by local communities employing material culture, rather than something which is 'natural' and thus inevitable. Viewing gender relations as contingent and subjective will allow us, hopefully , to reach a clearer understanding of what those relations were, and how large a part they played in structuring society.

SEX AND GENDER IN ANGLO-SAXON BURIALS

It is highly indicative of traditional attitudes towards sex and gender in Anglo-Saxon burial archaeology that a determination of gender based on associated grave goods is almost always preferred over biological sexing of the skeleton. For example, Hirst (1985: 33-4) states of the burials at Sewerby, East Yorkshire that "The sex determinations used here are based on an amalgamation of the biological and cultural data. Where these data disagree ...the cultural determination has usually been preferred". At the Buckland, Dover cemetery, Evison (1987: 123) concurred with this view: "When ...a skeleton is provided with grave goods exclusively attributable to one sex, e.g. brooches and bead s for a woman and a sword or spear for a

4.5

AGE IN ANGLO-SAXON

BURIALS

As has been pointed out above, ideas of one's social and personal roles and relations change with age, as do notions of ones sexuality and gender. These ideas also vary within and between societies. We cannot assume that twentieth century western attitudes towards people of different ages can be extrapolated back into the past . People in the fifth and sixth century AD may have had radically different conceptions of what it meant to be a child; when an infant became a recognisable person; 34

what status shouldbe accorded to elderlypeople; and at what age one became an adult member of society.Crawford (1991: 17) has demonstrated for the later Anglo-Saxonperiod that it was possible to be regarded as an adult, with full legal rights andresponsibilities,as young as ten yearsold,somethingwhich is very alien to our conceptions of childhood. We cannot, therefore, assumethat classifyingpeopleoverthe age of sixteen or eighteen as adultswill encompassthe realityof a past society. A feature of earlyAnglo-Saxon burials in East Yorkshireand elsewhere is that very few children are ever found. 'Thisis not, as was once thought, due to poorer preservation of young remains (Gordon and Buikstra 1981).Althoughthis may hold for soils with high acidity, it does not seem to be true at sites with better soil conditions (Mays 1998: 22). Results from the Spitalfields projectdemonstratedthat bonepreservationat that site was greatest in infants and actually decreased with age (Molleson and Cox 1993: 16). The real lack of infants in excavated burials must therefore be explainedin other ways, such as due to variations in burial rite (Crawford1991, 1993) or recovery methods(Mays 1998:22), or perhapsother,possibly more alien ideas (in view of the fact that infant bones have been recovered from rubbishdepositsat Heslerton(Powlesland 1997: 164)). Taking such implications on board may entail rethinking ourideas aboutthe importanceof infantsandchildren in a society, and the significance which may be attached to their death (Lucy 1994). By looking at the numbersof infantsandchildrenwho are given an archaeologically visible burial, and at the ways in which they were distinguishedwithin that burial, it may be possible to approach such an understanding. Looking at similar distinctions between adults of different age groups may also offer some insight into the effect of age on social positions and relations. The age categorieswhich willbe used in the analysis are reliant on those given in the bone reports from Sewerby and Heslerton. These are grouped as: Infant = 0-2 years Child = 2-7 years Youth = 7-12 years Adolescent = 12-17 years Young Adult = 17-25years Adult = 25-35 years Mature Adult = 35-45 years Old Adult = 45+ years In broader comparisons between age groups, these were amalgamated into just three age groups:(A) 0-12 years (B) 1225 years (C) 25+ years.

4.6

ANGW-SAXON CEMETERIES IN Y ORKSIDRE: MODERN EXCAVATIONS

The Anglo-Saxon cemeteries at West Heslerton (Powlesland in press) and Sewerby (Hirst 1985),both date from the midfifth to the early seventhcentury.Althoughneitherare complete (burials at Heslerton remain under a major road, and those at Sewerby under farm buildings),both excavationsare believed to form representative samples of the whole cemetery (Rahtz

pers. comm; Powleslandin press). Full descriptions of these two sites can be found in Appendix I.

4. 7

A™s AND METHODS

The association of jewellery and ornaments with biological females and weapons with biological males is an assumption which underpins much of the interpretation of Anglo-Saxon burials. It has alwaysbeen assumed that these goods are never found together,for in the traditional scheme of things a man could not be buriedwith femalegoods and vice versa, for these goods defined the very sex (i.e. gender) of the burial. A preliminary stage in the analysis is therefore to test whether these goods really did form part of discrete assemblages. Traditionalinterpretationsare also reliant on a bi-polar division of all adultburials into males and females on the basis of such goods.It is thereforeimportantto investigatewhether any other assemblagescan be seen to exist, and what proportion of the burials they form. Obviously,not all burials were buried with exactly the same combinationsand types of goods.Looking at the combinations of grave-goodsfound within assemblages may give a clearer picture of the decision-makingwhich went into the burial rite, especiallyof whichcombinationsof goodswere felt appropriate, and which were not. Differencesbetween the two cemeteries in this respectmay reflect independenttraditions of burial. The next stage of investigatingthe correlations of these goods with biologicalsexing can then be undertaken. By comparing the independentbiologicalsexing of a skeleton with the goods with which it was provisioned, it is possible to examine the traditionalassumptionsoutlined above. Likewise, comparing assemblageswith the biological age of a skeleton can throw some lighton the way that differentage groups could be treated in death (if, that is, they were treated as a coherent group at all). This stage of the analysis can determine whether some sectionsof a societywereoveror under-representedin the burial evidence,and thus point to the possibility of different ways of disposingof the dead. Methodsused in this analysisinclude spreadsheets, statistical comparisonsand graphicalrepresentation.The statistical test used throughoutthis thesis was a version of the chi-squared test, generatedwithinan Excelspreadsheet(Shennan 1988:78). This test gives a result betweenOand 1, where Oindicates that the patterning of the two variables is non-random, and 1 indicates that the patterning is random. This test does not determinewhetherone variablehas been determined by another, but only the likelihood of the patterning being generated by chance. When discussing results of this test, I will indicate whetherthe results are statisticallysignificant at the 10%, 5%, 1% or 0.1% level. Significanceat the 1% level, for example, meansthat the valuederivedfrom the calculationof chi-squared was less than 0.01, indicatingthat there is less than a one in a hundredchanceof the patterningbeingrandom).Althoughsome of the textfiguresshowpercentages,ratherthan actual numbers, this was merelya deviceto give a clearer idea of the important patterns.All testing was of course done on the actual numbers. In the next section results of this analysis will be presented,

35

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39

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40

and will be followed by discussion of their possible significance. The wide-ranging surveys of Brush ( 1993) and Harke ( 1989a) will be drawn upon here in comparisons with country-wide patterning of such features.

4.8

REsULTS

4.8.1 Do DIFFERENT ~EMBLAGES

EXIST?

Observation of the breakdown of both cemeteries by grave and assemblage constituents (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2) shows that the assemblages can be separated into four groups for the purposes of analysis: - those containing jewellery or ornamentation of some sort (notably brooches, bead strings, pendants, sleeve clasps and waist -ornaments such as girdle-hangers, latch-lifters or girdle-rings - see Fig. 4 .3a for illustration of types); - those containing weapons (at the least a spear, but sometimes also accompanied by a shield and rarely by a sword - see Fig. 4.3b); - those containing goods which do not fall into these previous two categories (including individual beads, knives, buckles or belt-fittings, vessels and animal bones - see Fig. 4.3c); - and those containing no surviving artefacts at all.

4.8.2

GRAVE-GOOD COMBINATIONS

The weapon assemblage at both sites was defined by the presence of a minimum of one spear. At Sewerby 40% (N=2/5) were also accompanied by a shield, as were 33% (N=8/24) at Heslerton.No swords were found in this assemblage at Sewerby, and just one was found at Heslerton (see Fig . 4.5). All the weapon burials at Sewerby were accompanied by knives and two (40%) also by buckles. At Heslerton 83% (N=20/24) were accompanied by a knife, and 58% (N=14/24) by at least one buckle. No other types of artefact were found with weapon burials at Sewerby, but at Heslerton a few contained tweezers or an awl. At neither site were various components of the other goods assemblage, such as pottery vessels or sherds, or small numbers of beads, found to accompany weapon burials (see Figure 4.5).

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any precise methcxl, and, in some cases, had been interred in a confused manner, with the head bent on the chest, and the knees drawn up. With most of them were found either weapons of iron, or ornaments of the person ... Several vases of coarse earthenware, of a common Anglo-Saxon type, some of them described as containing charcoal and bone ash, were also found" (from Akerman 1855:. 13).

Toe cemetery at Garton Station (OS Ref. SE982578) was first located and photographed from the air in the summer of 1984. Located at the east end of a gravel valley (known as Garton and Wetwang Slack), the site was extremely unusual in being centred around an Iron Age square barrow cemetery (Stead 1991: 17). This site was close to that at Garton Slack I. It was investigated during 1985 and 1986, when a total of 3800 square metres were stripped and excavated (ibid.). There were at least thirteen square barrows or enclosures, and four round ones. Five of the square enclosures or barrows contained Anglian burials, either centrally, or in the surrounding ditch (see Figure A.20) . In two cases they were preceded by Iron Age burials , but the other three seemed to contain no previous burials. Other Anglian burials were found outside the enclosures . The excavator was of the opinion that all the earthworks from this cemetery were of Iron Age date (Stead 1991: 24) .

In 1849 Dr Tournam and members of the York Antiquarian Club levelled the rest of the mound, finding graves 1 to 8. "In each case the skeletons lay at a depth of little more than two feet below the surface, and were uniformly cove.redby a stratum of stiff clayey soil, contrasting strongly with the very fine rolled chalk rubble and yellow sand of which the natural subsoil in this locality consists, and in very shallow graves or rather hollows in which the bodies appear to have been laid" (Mortimer 1905: 287 -9). Mortimer re-opened this mound in 1871, finding twelve more inhumations , of which 11 were Anglo-Saxon , and one cremation (see Fig. A.17 - in the analysis these graves have been renumbered G9 (the primary burial) to G20). Of these nineteen recorded Anglo-Saxon inhumations , twelve contained jewellery , one a weapon , and three each contained other goods assemblages and had no surviving assemblage (see Fig. A.3).

A minimum of 43 individuals were found in 35 graves. Of these 38 were well preserved enough to be included in the analysis . The five sets of remains which were excluded were all of children or infants buried with adults whose remains were too disturbed or ill-preserved to provide sufficient data. Of these 38 burials, seven were accompanied by jewellery, six by weapons and 22 by other goods assemblages. Just three burials had no surviving assemblage (see Fig. A.3). Again, the only brooch type found was the annular, and bead strings, dress pins, knives and buckles predominated (see Fig. A.21). No sleeve clasps were found. The most common goods found in the other goods burials were knives, buckles, wood vessels and animal bones, although small numbers of beads, tweezers and pottery were also found (see Fig. A.22). The weapon burials contained a more extensive range of goods than is usually found (see Fig. A.23). Predominant were spears, knives, buckles and animal bones, although a relatively high proportion of swords were also found. Details of ageing and sexing of the burials were not available at the time of writing.

The jewellery assemblage resembled that at Kelleythorpe, except that latch-lifters were found but not girdle-hangers (the opposite was true at Kelleythorpe), and that this was the only one of Mortimer's or Greenwell's sites to be recorded as containing burials with sleeve clasps (see Fig. A.18) . Also, no animal bones were recorded from this site. Toe other goods burials contained combinations of knives, buckles and pottery (see Fig. A.19). The single weapon burial was accompanied by a knife and a spearhead (although other weapon burials were apparently found in 1845).

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