Why is sutton hoo important

It reminds us that East Anglia was the western shore of a Germanic culture that spread around the North Sea. The replica helmet at Sutton Hoo features the kind of exquisite detail that would have been seen in the real thing. The helmet can be interpreted as war gear, as a status symbol, as a clue to some of the beliefs of the Anglo-Saxons and as a triumph of craftsmanship.

The people buried at Sutton Hoo were not only closely connected to their Scandinavian neighbours, but clearly engaged in travel and trade across huge distances. Garnets that decorate many of the treasures most likely originated in Sri Lanka and there were also items from the Byzantine Empire, from Egypt and from all across Europe. The dating of the coins help us locate the burial to around the year AD, a time of political and religious change across England.

Some of the silver bowls found in the chamber display cross-shaped decoration, possibly suggesting a Christian origin and a pair of silver spoons bear the names 'Saulos' and 'Paulos', which would appear to be a reference to the Christian story of the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus. The burial of a great man in a ship, surround by his regalia, is clearly a pre-Christian ritual - burial practices would change enormously after the conversion to Christianity.

The arguably Christian imagery on the treasures tells a different story and it would appear that the burial at Sutton Hoo took place at a crucial time of fundamental change in early England, from belief in the old gods to a new faith. Between , archaeologists returned to Sutton Hoo to try and answer some key questions posed by the excavation and subsequent analysis.

Grohskopf, Bernice. The treasure of Sutton Hoo; ship-burial for an Anglo-Saxon king. New York: Atheneum. G75 ROBA. Hills, C. Robert Bjork and John D. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, H ROBA. Kendall, Calvin B. Wells, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, V69 ROBA. Lapidge, Michael. Oxford: Blackwell, Lutovsky, M. Mitchell, Bruce. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Szarmach, Paul E. Medieval England: An Encyclopedia. Within months, Brown began uncovering the outline of a massive, foot-long ship that likely once held the remains of King Raedwald of East Anglia, who is believed to have died sometime around the year It had been lugged on land to Sutton Hoo as part of a ship burial, a funerary rite in which a leader is laid to rest alongside his belongings in a vessel.

But inside the largest mound were extraordinary objects that hinted at something much greater. And then there was the rich cultural admixture that accounted for all the objects. Sources for them ranged as wide as Merovingian France and Syria; some artifacts had traveled thousands of miles from their origin before reaching their final destination at Sutton Hoo.

Among them was a belt buckle with a triple-lock mechanism, its surface adorned with semi-abstract imagery featuring snakes slithering beneath each other. There were gold coins that had been minted in the Aquitaine region of France, and they were contained inside a purse with an ornate lid featuring wolf imagery rendered in reddish garnet.

And there was a shield with animal-like forms formed out of gold carved with a level of detail that appears nearly impossible to re-create by hand. But no object found at the burial has been as beloved as a helmet, its intimidating features marked out by ridging denoting facial hair. Who else but a king would be buried with such finery?

But as Professor James Campbell of Oxford has argued, to assume we have a royal burial is to ignore the fact that the tomb is almost entirely without context. It is something of a minor miracle that the spoils of Sutton Hoo remained undisturbed until the s.

The largest burial mounds must always have been the most alluring for entrepreneurial grave robbers and, consequently, we should expect that these obvious, unguarded burials were interfered with at some point in the intervening centuries. The Anglo-Saxons themselves were not innocent of the crime — in Beowulf , the dragon who kills the eponymous hero is disturbed from his tumulus by a thief.

This is to say that we cannot know exactly how prevalent burials like Sutton Hoo once were. It may be that there was a time when they were not that unusual. We do not know, and have no way of knowing, how much treasure there was in seventh-century England.

There may have been a great many men who had become rich from conquest and protection racketeering. There may even have been many who had access to examples of such craftsmanship whoever made the exquisite shoulder-clasps and belt was evidently not doing it for the first time. And so Sutton Hoo also acts as a reminder of how much we do not know about Anglo-Saxon history, about how we must think before we make even the shallowest assumptive leap. While the Anglo-Saxons have left us some manuscripts, some coins, the occasional church that survived the great Norman renovations, a post-Conquest tapestry, and the clutter of archaeology, compared to all subsequent eras, there is not much to see.

Consequently, the splendour of Sutton Hoo was immediately destined for iconic status and publishers have been consistently keen as we have here to use the helmet as a cover illustration. This one relic from Anglo-Saxon England has, in some ways, come to define the whole period. As a reminder of the centrality of militarism to the age this is fitting but it has, perhaps, also done something to harden in the public imagination the idea that the Anglo-Saxons were nothing more than noble warriors.

This is unfortunate because we now understand a great deal about the complexities and sophistication of late Anglo-Saxon government and know that, by the eighth century at the very latest, they were much more than barbarian champions of military households. We know this largely because of the work of archaeologists.

Over the past 50 years our understanding of the Anglo-Saxon economy has accelerated beyond all expectation and, as it has, we have become vastly more aware of the government machinery which exploited and regulated it.

Huge numbers of coins have been exhumed by metal detectorists showing how standardised royal coinage was circulating in Britain by the late eighth century, and how, by the mid-tenth century, there was a currency of perhaps several million coins, regularly recalled and recoined — presumably to tax, and assure quality.