On Saturday I attended, for the first time, one of Dr. Sam Newton’s study days at Sutton Hoo. The official theme was Old English poetry but we ended up ranging quite widely over the history and cultural patrimony of the Kingdom of East Anglia. ‘Wuffing Education,’ under whose auspices the study days take place, has a distinct tinge of East Anglian nationalism to it. For instance, Sam Newton suggested that the Sutton Hoo burial ground ought to be accorded the same significance within England’s national patrimony as the hogen at Uppsala are in Swedish national consciousness. The only reason they so not receive such recognition is because England is a federation of kingdoms, each with its own history, and because the level of destruction wrought by the Vikings ensured that the historical narrative of the Kingdom of Wessex was the one that gained the upper hand.
Among the interesting suggestions made by Sam Newton was that the Prior’s Door at Ely (pictured above) is older than imagined. It is usually dated to the Norman rebuilding of the monastic church in the 1160s but the similarity of the iconography of the Christ in Majesty in the tympanum to the illuminations on Edgar’s charter to Winchester Cathedral is striking. Although I am by no means a geologist, I would judge the stone of the tympanum different from the stone of the surrounding arch. If this arch is 1160s (and one would not have expected a 10th century arch to have escaped the attention of generations of visitors to the Cathedral) then the fact that the tympanum is an older one ‘pasted in’ (as it were) may have eluded antiquaries. Identification of the stone and the quarries of origin might be one way to get a partial answer to the question. The tympanum is a kind of yellow sandstone of which one doesn’t see a lot in Ely.
Another interesting insight was into the Textus Roffensis, St. Ethelbert of Kent’s original law code written pre-604. The point was made that this code was not only the first in England to be written down, but also the first attempt to incorporate the Church and its values into English law. It represents the decisive replacement of heroic values with those of a bureaucratic magistracy for the first time. Furthermore, unlike in Francia where there was at least a partial survival of Roman administrative structures, the Church was forced to fit into a completely un-Romanised context. It occurred to me that a study of the position of the Church in early England might inform our view of James II’s attempt to break the power of ‘established’ religion in the 1680s and replace it with a new and tolerant ecclesiastical polity – but maybe that is pushing the links between my disparate interests too far.
The mixture of Christian and pagan items in the burials at Sutton Hoo and Prittlewell is also significant here – the fact that these kings were buried with all their goods does not necessarily indicate that they were pagans who just wanted Christian items because they were attractive, foreign and prestigious. These kings may well have been Christian – but the heroic culture in which they lived obliged them, in order to avoid giving scandal to a very conservative aristocracy and populace, to adhere to established burial customs. These kings had not yet reconstructed their royal ideologies in Roman terms. And perhaps it is here, too, that we can find an answer to Sam Newton’s question about the significance of the Uppsala mounds to Sweden compared to the significance of Sutton Hoo to England – the Swedish kings did not reconstruct themselves as thoroughly as the English kings, and thus Uppsala has not been entirely left behind by time as Sutton Hoo has.
On the way there were some interesting remarks on etymology and an introduction to the Snape ship burial – which I must confess I had never heard of but which sounds fascinating – as well as an intriguing speculation about the ‘Celtic’ bowl in the Sutton Hoo burial that does not seem to have been followed up. The origin of the bowl is interesting in its own right – my own theory is that it might be East Anglian, originating from a British community in South Gyrwa (i.e. Cratendune) – but be that as it may, the fish in the centre of the bowl is a salmon and has an unusually high iron content, feeding speculation that it might have been a compass. Orthodoxy has it that compasses were known only in China at that time – but orthodoxy also has it that the Anglo-Saxons had no knowledge of magnification and optics, which seems impossible given the competence of the glass-cutters who created the Sutton Hoo purse lid and other items.
Unfortunately I shan’t be able to attend Sam Newton’s study day on St. Edmund on 17th November, but I did speak to him briefly about Edmund and he expressed doubts concerning Edmund’s martyrdom altogether. I must say that the martyrdom narrative (in any version) does have gaps in it. What if Edmund died in battle? A death in battle against even a pagan army would, in Anglo-Saxon ethics, have been considered fair and square, and it is unlikely the king could have been considered a martyr if this was the accepted account. Yes, Sigeberht was killed in battle – but he was a monk when this happened and an unwilling participant. The notion of the set piece martyrdom was prevalent in the Saxon church and it is not impossible that Edmund’s story was amended accordingly – although, perhaps, somewhat heretical to suggest this. However, as the patron not only of East Anglian independence but of English resistance to the Danes (and indeed any foreign invaders) it would surely do Edmund’s reputation no harm to have him dying in battle rather than as a sacrificial victim? Edmund suffers somewhat in the shadow of Alfred the Great – Alfred knew that Edmund was the ’sacred’ symbol of the English struggle (hence his promotion of the St. Edmund memorial coinage in Kent) whilst he was its best political hope – yet Alfred seems now to be better remembered than Edmund.
