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The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial. VIII. Who Was He?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

H. Munro Chadwick
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Extract

I WAS unfortunately not able to be present at the inquest held on 14 August, but I understand that no satisfactory evidence of identity was offered. Indeed the prevalent view now seems to be that the tomb never contained a body—that it was constructed as a cenotaph.

For cenotaphs in the Anglo-Saxon period I do not know of any good evidence. But we can hardly say with certainty that any of the cemeteries previously known were royal—apart from St. Augustine’s, Canterbury. It is not impossible therefore that a cenotaph may have been constructed for a king who lost his life at sea or on some distant expedition, from which his body could not be brought home.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 14 , Issue 53 , March 1940 , pp. 76 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1940

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References

* This is the view that is, and always has been, held by all those who took part in the excavation ; there has been no change of view. The idea that a body was buried in the ship originated in the imagination of an uninformed newspaper writer. It would be a perfectly reasonable one if it could be supported by any evidence.—O.G.S.C.

1 An instance (from Kent) is cited by Baldwin Brown, The Arts in Early England, IV, 720; but the evidence is hardly convincing. Mr Lethbridge tells me that he does not know of any examples; likewise also Mr Phillips.

2 I wish to take this opportunity of expressing my grateful thanks to Mr C. W. Phillips for showing me the site and supplying me with detailed information about the excavation from the beginning.

3 Published in Sweet, The Oldest English Texts, p. 167 ff (this list on p. 171). The text is illegible in some places, but can be restored by the help of MS C.C.C.C. 183.

4 Cf. Baldwin Brown, Arts in Early England, IV, 764 f; Chadwick, Heroic Age, p. 97 ff.

5 The Saxon Chronicle (ann. 827), translating this passage, applies to the high-king the term Bretwalda (in the oldest text) or Brytenwalda. The latter term seems to mean ‘ruler of Britain’, the former ‘ruler of the Britons’ (as in the next following sentence in Bede’s narrative).

6 Unfortunately the meaning of this word seems to be quite ambiguous; cf. Plummer Baedae Op. Hist., II, 48.

7 Cf. Plummer, Baedae Opera Historica, II, 106.

8 Cf. Bede, H.E. III, 7; Saxon Chronicle, ann. 645, 646.

9 All his daughters became nuns, and three of them saints, while his son-in-law, Erconberht, king of Kent, was the first English king to enforce the renunciation and destruction of idols and the observance of Lent.

10 Examples may be found in Lindenschmit’s Handbuch, pp. 100 ff.

11 Kershaw, Anglo-Saxon and Norse Poems, p. 25.

12 For early churchyards see Baldwin Brown, op. cit. 1, 260 ff. But there is much more evidence than is indicated there. The case of Burwell is illuminating. So also is the cemetery at Saffron Walden, which was misunderstood by Baldwin Brown. He overestimated the break in the continuity of life caused by the English invasion. The character of the loca sancta (ib. 253) is clear from the case of Hoddom; and numerous other churches, at least in the north and west, doubtless had a similar origin.

13 Other Northumbrian royalties were buried in the abbey of Whitby (H.E. III, 24).

14 I do not know of any evidence that his father, Childeric, was ever converted. But it was in the cemetery of a church in Tournai that his grave was found in 1653.

15 It may be observed that the (Continental) Old Saxons after their conquest by Charlemagne, in 785, were required to bury Christians in cemeteries of the church, and not in ‘barrows of the heathen’. Cf. Baldwin Brown, op.cit. 1, 260f.

16 This period was a great time for craftsmen who were in the service of kings. St. Eligius, bishop of Noyon, had been goldsmith to king Dagobert I (622-638).

17 Cf. Beowulf, 2369 ff; Paulus Diaconus, Hist. Langobard II, 29.

18 The reader may now be referred to Mr Crawford’s summary (pp. 64-8) of the Coins found at Sutton Hoo, which I had not read when this was written.