Offa and the Mercian Wars (10 page)

The first of these discoveries was made in the kingdom of Raedwald of the East Angles, whose victory at the River Idle had been a catalyst for the Mercian Wars. The barrows or burial mounds which stood on a windswept rise overlooking the River Deben, at Sutton Hoo on the Suffolk coast, had been recognised for what they are as long ago as the sixteenth century, and sporadic attempts had been made ever since to excavate them, or rather to dig them up in the hunt for buried treasure. However, the treasure seekers had missed the greatest prize, as became apparent in 1938 – 9 when the landowner, Mrs Edith Pretty, commissioned a local archaeologist to excavate them scientifically. In May 1939 the biggest barrow, which became known as Mound One, proved to contain the remains of a wooden ship, underneath which was an intact burial chamber. The sandy soil was very acidic and little organic material had survived – at first there appeared to be no sign of a body, although traces of phosphate residues have since been found which indicate that human remains had been interred there (Carver).

The items which were found, however, were enough to revolutionise the study of the period. As Professor Martin Carver put it, ‘Every Dark Age object that had been imagined, and a few that had not, seemed to be represented.' Another seventeen barrows have since been excavated, but Mound One remains the most spectacular, the site associated in the popular imagination with the words ‘Sutton Hoo'. The ship survived only as rusted rivets and an impression in the sand, but it appeared to have been a fully seaworthy vessel, about ninety feet long and carrying a crew of forty oarsmen. Other finds included cauldrons, lamps, drinking horns, gold coins and jewellery, some coming from as far afield as Constantinople. The deceased had also been buried with his complete war panoply, comprising a coat of mail, a sword, shield, spears, gold- and garnet-decorated shoulder clasps and fittings for belts and scabbards, as well as, of course, the famous helmet. The latter, as restored at the British Museum with its full face mask and elaborate tinned bronze decoration, has become the best-known image of the era, instantly recognisable worldwide as a symbol of Anglo-Saxon wealth and power.

Also in the tomb were some objects whose function was far from obvious. One, a long whetstone decorated with bronze fittings, has become popularly known as the ‘sceptre', and is certainly impressive enough to have been a symbol of rank. It does not appear to have actually been used for sharpening weapons, but the symbolism of a war leader having such a thing on show in his hall, ready for emergencies, seems obvious. Even more mysterious is the iron ‘standard'. As restored, this is basically an iron rod just over four feet in height, with a cross-shaped piece of metal on the top and a larger grid just below it. The other end has a point with two scrolls above it, obviously designed to be placed either in the ground or in some sort of socket. The piece has been variously interpreted as a standard, a rack for holding torches, or even as a scalp-pole on which a pagan king might display the trophies of his dead enemies. More prosaically it looks rather like a hat-stand, and it is quite possible that that is what it was. The Sutton Hoo helmet, with its intimidating face mask, may well have been as iconic a symbol of its owner in his lifetime as it is today, and it is surely more likely to have been displayed on a prominent stand in his hall, out of the way of damp, vermin and accidental damage, than to have been simply hung on the wall or kept out of sight in a box.

Whatever their purpose, items such as these, and the general richness of the grave, led immediately to speculation that the deceased had been a king, possibly one eminent enough to have been recorded in historical sources. It was known from Bede that the district of Sutton Hoo had once been part of the kingdom of East Anglia, and the style of the coins and other items suggested a likely date in the early seventh century AD. The tomb also revealed an odd mix of Christian and pagan influences which pointed to a period when the kingdom was in the process of conversion. Britain's leading expert on the Anglo-Saxons, H. M. Chadwick, visited the site in August 1939 and immediately identified it as belonging to Raedwald, who died around 625, and is known from Bede's account to have been ambivalent about Christianity. This identification has been generally accepted ever since, although the site's most recent excavator, Professor Carver, has pointed out that there is no definite proof that the body in Mound One was Raedwald, or even a king at all as we understand the term.

If it was Raedwald, he was not a big man physically: the remnant of one of his leather shoes has been measured as a British size seven (Carver). But whoever he was, he provides by far the best surviving example of the equipment of an English warlord of the early seventh century. Perhaps his near-contemporaries in landlocked Mercia would not have had access to some of his more exotic possessions, nor have been buried with a ship, but if we want to imagine how Penda, or even Offa, would have looked when they fought at the head of their armies, the image of the ‘Sutton Hoo Man' is as close as we can get.

At the time of the discovery the legal position of the finds was complicated. Basically, a coroner's court had to decide whether any coins or other precious metals which were excavated had been buried permanently, or whether those who had concealed them intended to retrieve them later. In the latter case the treasure belonged to the Crown, probably because the presumption was that they had been hidden for the purpose of evading taxes (Carver). On the other hand, if the hoard was intended to remain in the ground, it was the property of the landowner. The Suffolk coroner was convinced by the argument that there had once been a body in Mound One, and that the items had been interred as grave goods. Mrs Pretty therefore became the owner of this enormously valuable treasure, which she generously donated to the British Museum, where it is now on display.

Until 2009 the finds from Sutton Hoo were unrivalled as the iconic example of Anglo-Saxon military splendour. What has since become known as the Staffordshire Hoard was in some ways even more spectacular, and certainly more unexpected. It was unearthed in south Staffordshire in July 2009 by Terry Herbert, an experienced member of the metal-detecting fraternity. Professional archaeologists are often unhappy about the idea of amateurs roaming the countryside with metal detectors, and some users have in the past given the hobby a bad name. Valuable sites have been disturbed, finds of historical interest have been sold secretly before archaeologists have had a chance to study them, and some of those that have come to the notice of the profession have been hastily dug up by untrained people, so that important information about their context has been lost. On the other hand there is now a lot of material available for study, especially small coin finds, which, without the metal detectors, would probably never have come to light.

Mr Herbert's response to his discovery was exemplary, and must surely help to improve the reputation of the hobby among the professionals as well as setting an example to its practitioners. It helped that he was acting entirely legally, as he had written permission for his investigations from the farmer who owned the field. He immediately informed the finds liaison officer for Staffordshire, who organised an excavation with the aid of the museums in Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent. It was not long before the extraordinary nature of Mr Herbert's discovery became apparent, and by September portions of the hoard were on view at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The West Midlands is not a region with a wealth of spectacular archaeological sites, and perhaps for this reason the find caught the imagination of the public in a city whose history is all too often perceived as beginning with the Industrial Revolution. Enormous queues formed in all weathers to see the exhibits, the museum had to extend its opening hours to cope, and a successful campaign was launched to raise the money needed to compensate the finders and keep the hoard in the Midlands. The towns of Stafford, Walsall, Lichfield and Tamworth, as well as Birmingham, all put in claims to display the treasure, in most cases based on its supposed connection with local celebrities such as Offa (see, for example, the Tamworth Herald of 20 January 2011, ‘Mercian Gold Comes Home'). In the meantime it was taken to London to be investigated and restored at the British Museum. At the time of writing a selection of items is on show at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which, together with a site in Stafford, will be the hoard's eventual home.

The Treasure Act of 1996 no longer takes into account the motivation of the people who originally buried the items, which is perhaps fortunate, because a coroner would find little evidence on which to base a ruling about the intentions of whoever concealed this hoard. It is highly unusual in a number of ways. The site where it was found is on high ground south-west of Lichfield, on the edge of what in Anglo-Saxon times would have been a belt of hilly and heath-covered country running from Cannock Chase to the Birmingham Plateau. The immediate area has been farmed since the later Middle Ages, but there seem to be no Anglo-Saxon burial sites or other signs of occupation, and it was described in Domesday Book as ‘waste'. The obvious inference is that whoever buried the treasure in such a spot intended to hide it, not so much from Vikings or other marauders as from the inhabitants of the Trent Valley below.

The composition of the hoard is unlike anything found elsewhere. Bags or chests of gold and silver coins were sometimes hidden near settlements for safekeeping, especially in the Viking era, and before their conversion to Christianity the English were in the habit of burying extensive collections of grave goods – Sutton Hoo is the most spectacular example – with the bodies of their leaders. But the Staffordshire Hoard contains no coins, and in fact almost nothing at all of a civilian nature apart from the remains of four or five Christian crosses, and a few pins, buckles and similar small pieces of uncertain function which may be fastenings for armour or other military equipment. Otherwise it consists mainly of fittings from sword hilts, and pieces of at least one helmet.

The sword fittings have been prised off the weapons or their scabbards, sometimes being damaged in the process, and the crosses have been deliberately bent or folded to make them easier to carry. The bulk of the metal – including the helmet fragments – is gold or silver; in fact the total amount of gold is around five kilograms, which far exceeds any other finds in England, including at Sutton Hoo. Many of the items are decorated with garnet – probably imported from Central Europe and which must in itself have been an expensive material – which is also cut to shape and set with superb craftsmanship. Some of this work is so intricate that Birmingham Museum has deemed it necessary to display the stones under a magnifying glass in order for visitors to appreciate it. The whole collection was originally buried in a leather bag, but at some point before its discovery a plough seems to have ripped open the bag and scattered its contents across a portion of the field. One can only sympathise with the obscure ploughman who so nearly unearthed what would have been a treasure beyond his wildest dreams!

Scholars will be spending many more years studying, restoring and interpreting all this material, and it might one day be possible to explain the circumstances in which it was hidden, but in the meantime we can make some inferences which are of interest for our subject. The exact dating of the hoard is still controversial, but the style of the decorated objects points to the seventh century, with most scholars favouring the period between 650 and 700 (Leahy and Bland). Potentially the most useful item for dating purposes is a strip of gold bearing a Biblical quotation in Latin, although no definitive conclusion on it seems to have yet been reached.

The find can hardly represent grave goods, either interred where they were found or looted and reburied by grave robbers, because so many of the non-military items characteristically found in rich graves are missing. For the same reason, it is not likely to be an unsorted collection of loot hurriedly gathered up by a raiding army or stripped from the bodies of the enemy after a battle. At least some of the men who carried such richly decorated swords must surely also have worn the heavy gold buckles, for example, which are found in graves at Sutton Hoo and elsewhere. These were valuable objects, and much easier to remove from corpses than pieces which were riveted to sword hilts, but none was found with the Staffordshire Hoard.

Another consideration arguing against it being the spoils of a single raid or battle is that we have no historical record of an event which could account for it. The collection represents at the very least around eighty or ninety expensive gold- and garnet-decorated swords, weapons which seem from experience at other sites to have been restricted to the wealthiest and highest-ranking warriors. If so many of a kingdom's leading men had been slain in one battle, alongside a proportionate number of their less well-armed followers, it would represent a disaster that would surely have shaken any Anglo-Saxon kingdom to its core. Apart from the attack on the Lichfield area mentioned in the ‘Marwnad Cynddylan', however, we have no record of a major battle fought in this district. In fact the period when the hoard was probably buried was one in which Mercia was in the ascendancy over its neighbours, and this core area of the kingdom was relatively untouched by warfare.

On balance the most plausible theory regarding the hoard's origin is that put forward by Professor Nicholas Brooks, who believes that kings of this period would have kept a store of prestigious war gear for issue to warriors who joined their service, and perhaps also as a means to reward brave deeds and loyal service by their existing followers. Many of these items could have been donated by vassals as tribute or ‘heriot', a kind of death duty paid by a man's heirs in exchange for permission to inherit his property. Others might well have been acquired as loot: Beowulf describes how, after Ongentheow's death in battle, his mail shirt, sword hilt and helmet were collected and taken to Hygelac, the victor. It seems very likely that among the treasure amassed by a successful king there would have been a selection of gold and silver pieces specifically selected for recycling into new weapons, the original blades having been discarded because they were damaged, or of inferior quality, or perhaps for superstitious reasons.

The man who amassed this hoard must then have been a successful war leader, based in Mercia, who had won numerous battles in his career – enough to have run up a score of nearly a hundred dead enemies of the highest rank. Although not a Christian – the irreverent way in which the crosses were treated suggests they were thought of only as bullion – he had obviously included Christian armies among his victims. The Biblical inscription referred to above is a quotation from the Book of Numbers, and reads, in the words of the King James translation: ‘Rise up lord, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee.' We can imagine it being intended as a desperate prayer (not, evidently, answered in this case) for deliverance from a heathen oppressor. There is one obvious candidate: Penda. How he came to lose this treasure can only be speculation, but it might have been stolen during the chaos following his death at the Winwaed, then buried by a thief who did not live to retrieve it. Alternatively it could have been hidden from the occupying Northumbrians in the same period, then left forgotten in its remote location when those responsible failed to return from the war which restored Mercia's independence. Whatever the route by which it came down to us, it is likely to remain the definitive evidence of the splendour of Mercia's first great king.