The Dig: how Sutton Hoo cast light on the not-so-Dark Ages
Historian Tom Holland picks through the truth, myth and mystery of Britain in the two centuries after the Romans left
A year after the events portrayed in the Netflix film The Dig – about the 1939 discovery of an Anglo-Saxon ship burial at the Suffolk site of Sutton Hoo – Winston Churchill used a telling phrase in one of his most celebrated speeches. The Second World War that had been brewing as the excavations were taking place had come to threaten Britain, in the summer of 1940, with invasion. Defeat, Churchill declared, would see the whole world “sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age”.
At the back of his mind, as he gave this warning, was the fate of Britain in the two centuries that had followed the end of Roman rule in the island. Civilisation had collapsed. Towns had been abandoned. Germanic conquerors had put the natives to the sword. According to 1066 And All That, “the brutal Saxon invaders drove the Britons westward into Wales and compelled them to become Welsh.” Published eight years before excavations began at Sutton Hoo, it was, of course, a parody; but a pitch-perfect one, even so.
Was this narrative actually true? The image of post-Roman Britain as a sump of barbarism and backwardness rested less on the accumulation of measurable evidence than on the almost complete absence of it. There were very few contemporary sources. The narratives that did attempt to explain how Roman Britain had become Anglo-Saxon England originated long after the events they described.
The first and most influential, a history by a Northumbrian monk named Bede, had been written in the early 8th century, and was shaped by an understanding of his own people as instruments of divine purpose. As the Israelites had crossed the desert to the Promised Land, so had the Angles and Saxons crossed the grey northern sea to Britain. The natives, judged and founded wanting by God, had been deprived of their inheritance. The Angles and Saxons, despite being pagans, had been granted the Britons’ lands.
Then, in the year 597, a band of monks sent by the Pope had arrived in Kent. Gradually, over the decades that followed, a range of Anglian and Saxon kings had been brought to convert. By AD 730, when Bede came to write his history, the triumph of the Church appeared complete. England had been rendered Christian.
How might the ship burial found at Sutton Hoo relate to Bede’s narrative? In 1940, as German bombers were bringing fire and ruin to the cities of Britain, the first scholarly attempt was made to answer this question. “Nothing has yet been found which can produce a decisive identification of the person buried,” wrote HM Chadwick, the Cambridge professor of Anglo-Saxon. Nevertheless, he suggested, there were clues.
Bede, although a Northumbrian, had not neglected to mention the kings of East Anglia in his history. One in particular was portrayed as a man of suggestive achievement. Rædwald, the king of the East Angles, had been baptised in Kent shortly after the arrival there of the papal mission. Returning to Sussex, he had hedged his bets by raising one altar to Christ and another to his ancestral gods. Bede, although indignant at this, could not deny that Rædwald had reaped great success over the course of his reign.
By 617, after a great victory over the Northumbrians beside the River Idle in Lincolnshire, he had come to rule as the most powerful man in Britain. “All probability,” Chadwick concluded, in his study of who might have been buried at Sutton Hoo, “is in favour of the great and wealthy high-king Rædwald, who seems to have died about 624-5.”
Even today – although Chadwick’s identification is broadly accepted – decisive proof remains lacking. To that extent, darkness can be reckoned still to lie over the contours of the age. Few scholars today, however, would feel comfortable using the term ‘Dark Age’.
The stark narrative of migration and displacement told by Bede has increasingly been replaced by an altogether more nuanced understanding of what may have been happening in the six centuries that followed the collapse of Roman Britain. It is a fragmented, complex picture, in which direct migration seems to have been minimal, and identities were potentially multiple. If the evidence for what happened is often conflicting, then that is almost certainly because there was no single template, no single story to tell.
What, then, of the story that might be told of Sutton Hoo? As Chadwick had recognised, the ambivalences that shaded Bede’s portrait of Rædwald – the Christian convert who maintained an altar to pagan gods – are evident there as well. The burial of a king in a treasure-laden ship was a custom with deep roots in the pagan past; yet the king at Sutton Hoo was buried with a pair of spoons marked with the name of St Paul. A beautifully decorated bronze bowl seems to have come from one of the Welsh-speaking regions of Britain; a silver dish bears the stamp of an emperor in far-off Constantinople.
What would these various treasures have signified to the man with whom they were buried? It is hard to know for sure. Perhaps the eclecticism was precisely the point. Rendlesham, four miles upstream from Sutton Hoo, and described by Bede as “a kingly town”, seems to have been, in the late Roman period, a base for mercenaries – or perhaps for pirates. A century after Rædwald, one of his heirs claimed to be descended from both Woden and Julius Caesar. Identity, among the East Angles, seems to have been a thing of experimentation.
In The Dig, continuities between the great ship burial and those living in a time of looming war are subtly yet unmistakably drawn. A landowner lays flowers before the grave of her husband; a pilot, crashing into the river, is drowned in his Spitfire.
Today, in the very different Britain of 2021, the figure of the man buried in Mound One at Sutton Hoo offers us a mirror as well. We too, after all, exist in a post-imperial order. We too are torn between the traditional and the novel, between the insular and the European. We too live amid a dizzying range of cultural, political, and religious identities. Shadowy and indistinct the parallels may be; but these are only the more haunting for being so ghostly.
History is now and Sutton Hoo.
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