Archaeology in Britain, 5th to 11th Cent. (Medieval Studies)

Introduction

The extent and effects of population movements dominate the study of the 5th and 6th centuries, and the Viking raids and settlement renew the theme of migration for the 9th to 11th. The ways the end of Roman administration led to social and economic change, the degree to which the empire’s cultural impact continued, how religious practices varied, and the nature of exchange mechanisms are dominant issues (The European Perspective). As in much of Europe, the early part of the period is protohistoric, with little or no direct documentary evidence. Its archaeology is the study of bodies (Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries), buildings (Rural Settlement, Agriculture, and Food), and artifacts (Artifacts); of farming systems, settlements, and settlement patterns (Rural Settlement, Agriculture, and Food); of social distinctions; of long-distance and regional networks and the reemergence of towns and coinage (Towns, Trade, and Transport); and of burial customs and other expressions of belief (Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries; Other Manifestations of Religions and Identities). It focuses now on how people achieved their sense of cultural identity through belonging to family, tribe, region, kingdom, and nation-state and in their gender, place in a hierarchy, dependency upon others for service or protection, and control of exploitation of resources.

General Overviews

A few publishing houses produce books on archaeology aimed at a general audience, as the subject continues to have public interest—as the queues outside Birmingham Museum to see the newly discovered 7th-century Staffordshire Hoard in October 2009 testified. Some of the most popular books are spin-offs from television programs, as archaeology can be given wide appeal. The Oxford University Press series Medieval History and Archaeology 2003– is an outlet for more academic syntheses. Excavation reports are the staple of archaeological research, and many professional fieldwork units such as Wessex Archaeology produce their own monographs. An important monograph series published by the Society for Medieval Archaeology includes excavation reports, conference proceedings, and syntheses; various other societies have series that are not constrained in their period interests but occasionally include work on medieval archaeology; and British Archaeological Reports has increasingly become the outlet for theses. The Society for Medieval Archaeology website has links into a number of more specialized ones. Reenactment is popular, and groups with websites that can be useful sources of information include Regia Anglorum.

British Archaeological Reports.
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Founded by three enthusiasts who had joined together to carry out excavation at a Roman villa site in Oxfordshire and who realized that there were no reasonably priced outlets for much valuable academic research. There are now two series, British (in blue covers) and international (red). Printing standards have improved since the early years.
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Medieval History and Archaeology. 2003–. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Publication series from the Oxford University Press, edited by John Blair and Helena Hamerow in the early 21st century. The series brings together archaeologists and historians; early medieval titles include those by Andrew Reynolds and Helena Hamerow.
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Regia Anglorum.
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Reenactment has become a popular hobby, and various groups hold meetings and give displays. Fighting, cooking, jewelry making, and weaving are favorite activities. The website of this group is a useful source of practical ideas and advice.
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Society for Medieval Archaeology.
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As well as an annual journal, this society produces an occasional monograph series, with thirty volumes issued in the early 21st century. Content is not confined to the early Middle Ages, but several are either on or include the Anglo-Saxon period, notably Reflections: 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology, 1957–2007, edited by Roberta Gilchrist and Andrew Reynolds (Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009), from which several papers are cited in this bibliography. Overall, it gives a good idea of how the discipline has developed in Britain and overseas since the society was founded in the mid-20th century. The society’s website offers access to its newsletter, details of forthcoming conferences, and the like.
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Staffordshire Hoard.
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Worldwide interest was sparked when it was announced in September 2009 that a metal-detector user had discovered a collection of gold, silver, and gilt copper-alloy objects, some set with red garnets, others embossed with intricate designs reminiscent of the Sutton Hoo helmet and the Book of Durrow, both dating from the 7th century. The hoard is extraordinary for its quantity but also because every identifiable object is from a weapon except for two crosses and a Christian inscription. The website, which has many excellent photographs, is maintained by the Portable Antiquities Scheme, based at the British Museum.
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Journals

Journals that have a remit to include papers on early medieval archaeology include some, such as Early Medieval Europe, that are in a format too small for primary material involving publication of plan drawings, and most of their material is therefore historical, textual, or synthetic. In contrast, the A4 format of the occasional (though in practice at least biennial) Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History rarely has purely historical papers. Medieval Archaeology publishes papers on the whole of the Middle Ages in Britain and, like an increasing number of journals, has online access for institutional and individual subscribers. For the North, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland carries medieval as well as prehistoric papers, as does Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies for the West. Papers on medieval topics also feature in multiperiod journals, such as Archaeological Journal or Internet Archaeology. The last is produced by the Council for British Archaeology, which is also responsible for the invaluable British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography. Most British counties have a proud record of local studies, so quite important work may appear in annual journals ranging from Cornwall to Fifeshire, though this is decreasingly the case as university research rankings absurdly rank such journals as less prestigious.

Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History.
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Founded to be an interdisciplinary outlet, it has much more archaeology in it because the page format suits plans and drawings. Volume 16 (2009), however, is a collection of art-historical papers.
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Archaeological Journal.
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Published by the Royal Archaeological Institute, this annual journal is like several in that it carries papers relating to all periods. One relevant to the early Middle Ages is the report on excavation of a late Anglo-Saxon site with a structure that, unusually for a rural settlement, had a cellar: Gabor Thomas, “The Symbolic Lives of Late Anglo-Saxon Settlements: A Cellared Structure and Iron Hoard from Bishopstone, East Sussex,” Archaeological Journal 165 (2008): 334–398. It includes a section by Patrick Ottaway on a mixed group of twenty-five iron objects deliberately buried inside the cellar.
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British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography.
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This is now an online publication maintained by the Council for British Archaeology. It has abstracts of all excavation and other published reports.
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Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies.
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A long tradition lies behind this annual journal, which has different sections for literature, archaeology, and epigraphy. Although its focus is on Welsh studies, other parts of the Celtic world are not excluded.
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Early Medieval Europe.
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This journal has an international range and sometimes carries papers by or of interest to archaeologists. Its review section is also useful; volume 174 (November 2009), for instance, includes reviews of three of the works cited in this bibliography entry.
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Internet Archaeology.
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Published by the Council for British Archaeology for the British Academy, this periodical is available online by subscription. It is a medium for all material that benefits from electronic facilities and is particularly suitable for computer simulation and the application of other technologies. Excavation reports include one on the Anglo-Saxon burh (fortified town) at Cricklade, Wiltshire, by Jeremy Haslam (volume 14 [March 2004]).
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Medieval Archaeology.
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Published by the Society for Medieval Archaeology, this is the leading annual journal for all medieval studies involving material culture in its widest sense, carrying articles, notes, and reviews.
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Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
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Annual periodical published by Scotland’s premier archaeological and historical society, it features excavation and other reports.
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The European Perspective

Although Britannia was part of the Roman Empire, Britain as a whole was not, and the extent to which “Romanization” took place both inside and outside the frontiers is a debate affecting medievalists who have to take the varying experiences that people had into consideration of the extent to which there was a “legacy of Rome” affecting cultural attitudes. Although links with Gaul and the Mediterranean remained, they were met by new ones with Germania and Scandinavia; much of the debate within early medieval studies concerns where the balance between those influences and contacts lies at different times and in different regions.

After Rome

To see how Britain fits into studies of Europe generally in the early Middle Ages, some older works remain useful (Dixon 1976, Wilson 1980), not least because their pictures display the archaeological material, unlike some of the subsequently published broad-brush overviews by historians of the immediate post-Roman period that only have a few maps. Ward-Perkins 2006 is a racy exception, familiar with pots as well as texts and using line drawings and diagrams as well as maps, showing graphically the differing rapidity of change in different parts of the empire, with Britain “last-in, first-out.” One archaeologist has achieved a similar span (Randsborg 1991). Interdisciplinary collaboration is expressed in some expensive multiauthored volumes resulting from a series of European-wide conferences that included consideration of how anthropology can be used to “model” language change or how people’s social place alters with their age (Ausenda 1995), the alternatives to violence as a means of regulating disputes (Halsall 1998), and the ways that caused “tribes” to become “peoples” (Corradini, et al. 2003).

Ausenda, Giorgio, ed. After Empire: Towards an Ethnology of Europe’s Barbarians. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1995.
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Essays in this volume explore the place of family and lineage in post-Roman societies and how artifacts express people’s ideas as well as their contacts. Many refer to observations of tribal modes in the modern world to show how ceremonies and rituals operated and may serve as analogies for earlier social behavior.
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Corradini, Richard, Max Diesenburger, and Helmut Reimitz, eds. The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages: Texts, Resources, and Artefacts. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2003.
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A number of essays on how laws, language, religion, and objects shaped new identities or confirmed existing ones for various social groups in Europe. Lust for gold is well brought out, as is the importance of feasting.
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Dixon, Philip. Barbarian Europe: The Making of the Past. London: Elsevier Phaidon, 1976.
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A series of maps remains invaluable for those who need to be reminded where the Ostrogoths had reached by February 527 or where the Alamanni lived. Excellent choice of pictures, not flattered in color reproduction but useful reminders of a wide range of subjects.
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Halsall, Guy, ed. Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West. Rochester, NY: Boydell, 1998.
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Archaeology comes into play because of weapons and their symbolic significance as well as their practical use. Gold could buy off a feud, but would its payment merely stir up resentment and store up trouble for the future?
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Randsborg, Klaus. The First Millennium A.D. in Europe and the Mediterranean. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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Reviews a range of themes from Syria to Sweden—climate, settlements, towns, exchange, and ideologies. This might be called a “systems approach,” assessing, for instance, the differences between regional and long-distance contacts and trade, but in its final chapter is an early introduction of “post-processualism” with its consideration of “mentality.”
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Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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An analytical diatribe against modern tendencies to underestimate the speed with which the Roman Empire effectively ended and to overestimate the good manners of those who swamped it. Very funny and very perceptive.
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Wilson, David M., ed. The Northern World. New York: Abrams, 1980.
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Large-format and with numerous illustrations, this volume has contributions by authors who are specialists in particular tribes and areas—H. Ament on the Germanic tribes’ ranges from modern France to North Germany; J. Herrmann remains perhaps the best short introduction to the culture of the Slavs to the east; and E. Roesdahl takes Scandinavia up to the end of the 8th century, where the Viking age starts.
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Carolingian and Viking

For the later part of the period, Graham-Campbell 2007, a multiauthored volume, at last provides a comprehensive thematic European overview. The ever-popular Vikings are probably best introduced by Roesdahl 1992, with pictorially more glamorous treatment by Graham-Campbell 1980.

Graham-Campbell, James, ed. The Viking World. London: Francis-Lincoln, 1980.
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Notable for stunning pictures, many in color, both photographs and reconstruction drawings and paintings. Authoritative commentary texts, mostly by the editor, but with distinguished contributions; that by Seán McGrail remains the best short introduction to the famous ships.
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Graham-Campbell, James, ed., with Magdalena Valor. The Archaeology of Medieval Europe. Vol. 1, Eighth to Twelfth Centuries. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2007.
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An international compendium ranging from one side of Europe to the other. Not for reading from cover to cover but to be used whenever an up-to-date, pan-European perspective on towns, trade, buildings, settlements, and other topics is needed.
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Roesdahl, Else. The Vikings. London: Penguin, 1992.
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Survey of all aspects of the eye-catching Scandinavians and their effect upon those whom they raided—a few other recent authors seem to have preferred to see them as well-behaved visitors.
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England

The first modern archaeological summary of the Anglo-Saxons was Wilson 1960 in the series Ancient Peoples and Places; a combination of Welch 1992 and Richards 1991 would now be a good basic introduction, the latter augmented by Reynolds 1999. The first three centuries should then be pursued in Arnold 1997, which is an investigation of how elite-dominated territories developed. The thematic compendium Wilson 1976 remains a source of substantial information. The maps in Hill 1981 are a pleasure to use.

Arnold, Christopher J. An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. 2d ed. London: Routledge, 1997.
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A much more balanced and informative book than the first (1988) edition. The author takes a systems-based approach, assessing the processes that led to the emergence of hierarchical societies and political rather than tribal units.
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Hill, David. An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, 700–1066. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981.
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Not only maps but flowcharts of kings, kingdoms, and bishoprics. A visual summary of almost everything known about the geography of Anglo-Saxon England, from the geology to the mineral resources. Detailed maps of some areas augment those that show the paths of the Viking armies and the itineraries of the kings. Coin distributions are about the only maps that are now out-of-date, though the ranking of the mints is probably still the same despite subsequent finds.
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Reynolds, Andrew. Later Anglo-Saxon England: Life and Landscape. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 1999.
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Good general survey, balanced toward southern England in contrast to Richards 1991. Particularly interesting for the discussion of how the landscape was shaped to emphasize royal justice and retribution.
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Richards, Julian D. Viking Age England. London: Batsford/English Heritage, 1991.
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The title reflects the interest in the Scandinavian impact on England and is therefore more concerned about the Danelaw than the South. Also useful for consideration of the Isle of Man.
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Welch, Martin G. Anglo-Saxon England. English Heritage. London: Batsford, 1992.
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Well-illustrated, reliable introduction, aging but still useful as a starting point on a number of themes.
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Wilson, David M. The Anglo-Saxons. Ancient Peoples and Places. London: Thames and Hudson, 1960.
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The first modern survey, brief, and inevitably now dated, but an important and popular milestone in the history of the development of the discipline.
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Wilson, David M., ed. The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England. London: Methuen, 1976.
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Ten survey chapters on all the principal themes—except burial evidence. John Hurst’s survey of pottery is perhaps the most useful, but all contain insights.
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Wales and Scotland

For the non-Anglo-Saxon areas, the widest span is Laing 2006; the archaeology of Wales is introduced by Arnold and Davies 2000 and that of Scotland by Foster 1996. The impact of the Vikings on Scotland in and after the 8th century, as raiders and settlers, is reviewed by Graham-Campbell and Batey 1998 and that on Wales by Redknap 2000. How the various peoples and areas varied, vied with each other, and yet had more similarities than they might have cared to admit is considered by Hines 2000; other discussion about relations between and recognition of Britons and English are considered in various sections of this entry (for example, Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries).

Arnold, Christopher J., and Jeffrey L. Davies. Roman and Early Medieval Wales. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2000.
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Straightforward account of the sites and artifacts, including the Christian memorial stones that betoken literate clerical communities amidst the hill forts and small farms.
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Foster, Sally M. Picts, Gaels, and Scots: Early Historic Scotland. Edinburgh: Historic Scotland, 1996.
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Clear introduction to the complexities of the different cultures that eventually coalesced into the kingdom. One in a useful series published by the Scottish equivalent of English Heritage and Wales’s Cadw.
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Graham-Campbell, James, and Colleen E. Batey. Vikings in Scotland: An Archaeological Survey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
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The first author has studied the many hoards containing coins, rings, and ingots and their contribution to creating a “bullion economy”; the second has conducted several excavations. They are therefore specialists bringing together different perspectives and a wide range of information—burials, settlements, jewelry, the economy.
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Hines, John. “Welsh and English: Mutual Origins in Post-Roman Britain.” Studia Celtica 34 (2000): 81–104.
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An author confident with both linguistics and objects here writes on how population groups use artifacts as a means of creating identity that shared language also develops. The later 6th-century—before Saint Augustine—was already seeing Mediterranean influence starting to create an English culture that transcended earlier groupings or emerging political kingdoms, while the British in Wales also used language and images to create a sense of the Cymry.
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Laing, Lloyd R. The Archaeology of Celtic Britain and Ireland, c. AD 400–1200. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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A much better book than the original 1975 version, this covers the same geographical spread as Hines 2000 but focuses on the material culture that underpins study of the non-Anglo-Saxon world.
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Redknap, Mark. The Vikings in Wales: An Archaeological Quest. Cardiff: National Museum of Wales, 2000.
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Well-illustrated short account, especially interesting for late 20th-century work on a site in Anglesey and for reconsideration of arm-ring hoards and stray finds, which are well illustrated.
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Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries

Anglo-Saxon archaeology was founded upon the study of burials: the urns, barrows, and objects that came from graves. A good introduction is Lucy 2000. Large numbers of excavation reports were published to high standards the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with analyses of skeletons, objects, and their positions in graves; dating problems; and the wider geographical and social pattern into which it all fits. A good “model” is Malim and Hines 1998, which brings together the range of expertise needed for a comprehensive report (the state-funded English Heritage makes this possible not only by paying for many of the analyses but also by subsidizing the cost of publication). From such work derive studies of various aspects of mortuary ritual and what burial signified, of gender and biological sex, of artifact typologies, of regional comparisons, or of dating problems (Penn and Brugmann 2007 is especially thoughtful on this issue). Useful multiauthored books that give an idea of the wide range of topics to be considered are Lucy and Reynolds 2002 and Semple and Williams 2007; in both are essays on how social and tribal identities are constructed, which may have little to do with genes. More specifically thematic is Williams 2003, in which papers address how memory is created by the meanings of objects and the choice of burial place.

Lucy, Sam. The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death: Burial Rites in Early England. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2000.
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An accessible statement of how cemeteries have been studied in the past, what they contain, how they vary, and where they are in relation to contemporary settlements or to places used in the past. Includes many very useful distribution maps of different types of brooch and other artifacts.
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Lucy, Sam, and Andrew Reynolds, eds. Burial in Early England and Wales. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 17. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2002.
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This volume of essays seeks to break down any barriers between consideration of burials in different periods by having contributions ranging from cremations (Howard Williams) through the conversion period (Helen Geake) and into Christian liturgical and penitential instruction (Helen Gittos, Victoria Thompson), interspersed with Viking incursions (Julian Richards).
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Malim, Tim, and John Hines. The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), Cambridgeshire. Council for British Archaeology Research Report 112. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 1998.
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An experienced field archaeologist and a leading Anglo-Saxon scholar report on a relatively large cemetery, of which much had already been destroyed before excavation, so that the 115 graves may only have been about half the original number. As some graves contained more than one body, some 300 people may have been buried altogether in 100 to 150 years after c. 500. That indicates a living population of fifty to sixty-five at any one time. Specialists report on human bones, including a probable case of leprosy (C. Duhig), copper-alloy and iron metallurgy (C. Mortimer, B. Gilmour, and C. Salter), and textile residues (E. Crowfoot).
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Penn, Kenneth, and Birte Brugmann with Karen Høilund Nielsen. Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Inhumation Burial: Morning Thorpe, Spong Hill, Bergh Apton, and Westgarth Gardens. East Anglian Archaeology 119. Dereham, UK: Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, 2007.
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Reanalysis of mostly 1970s excavations using a computer program to explore correspondence between types of object, weapon sizes, and genders in the hope of achieving a seriation that could be linked to chronology, taken further by bringing in grave sizes. Despite being geographically close, all four cemeteries had different periods of expansion, though overall trends can be seen, such as younger people having fewer grave goods; the early 6th-century graves having more objects in them but of lower quality; and the emergence of a few distinctive, elite burials in the 7th century, suggesting a changing social hierarchy.
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Semple, Sarah, and Howard Williams, eds. Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History. Vol. 14, Early Medieval Mortuary Practices. Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2007.
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Contains several papers on ethnicity and identity (for example, Heinrich Härke). Williams shows how a seemingly minor suite of toilet items suggests the importance of appearance, especially of hair. Chris Fern reviews the inclusion of horse bones and harness as a status indication. “Pagan” furnished-burial cemeteries are not the only focus, as the essays in the second half move forward from the early “pagan” furnished burials into the 7th-century “final phase” of sparsely furnished graves (Nick Stoodley). Christian-period cemeteries without associated churches (Dawn Hadley) and how urban and other spaces were managed for burial, with much more reuse of graves than before (Annia Cherryson), are other topics.
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Williams, Howard, ed. Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past Societies. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2003.
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Essays include one by H. Eckardt and the editor on how reuse of objects made in the past, often from the Roman period, was not merely random collection for melting down as scrap metal but in burial contexts resulted from deliberate choice and respect, for example, even base-metal Roman coins carried a stamp of authority.
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Origins, Genes, and Isotopes

Whereas the acid sand of Sutton Hoo allowed only the survival of skeuomorphs, darkened shadow outlines of bodies, at other sites rotting flesh may leave no trace, but bones may be in good condition. Older work considered that it was possible to tell migrant Germans from indigenous Britons by such genetic criteria as skull shapes, but that has long been discredited (Fetten 2002). Genetic differences can account for observable differences, such as the ages at which children’s teeth erupt, but analysis of this has shown no variation between Britons and Anglo-Saxons (Gowland 2007). Modern DNA analyses have a better scientific basis, but even when DNA can be extracted, it is not yet sufficiently distinctive for certainty that a Celt is not a Frisian (Hills 2009). Work on stable isotopes is another innovation (Budd, et al. 2004). Strontium is absorbed from drinking water into children’s tooth enamel, so if most of the water has been drawn from wells and springs, it will carry a geological signature. Carbon derived from meat and dairy products and nitrogen from sea fish continue to be absorbed into bone throughout life—so migration may be shown if strontium in his or her tooth enamel reveals someone’s place of upbringing, carbon and nitrogen in his or her bone collagen where he or she lived in his or her later years. Unfortunately drinking water in some parts of Europe may not be all that different from that in others, and diet differences have to be quite extreme for a clear distinction between fish and nonfish eaters to be made, so such analyses are rarely definitive (Montgomery, et al. 2005). The extent to which migration involved large numbers, or a few elite warriors who successfully imposed themselves upon a larger native population, therefore remains a prime area of discussion involving historians and linguists as well as archaeologists (Higham 2007). How far should Saint Bede be believed (Parfitt and Brugmann 1997)?

Budd, Paul, Andrew Millard, Carolyn Chenery, Sam Lucy, and Charlotte Roberts. “Investigating Population Movement by Stable Isotope Analysis: A Report from Britain.” Antiquity 78 (2004): 127–141.
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Accessible explanation of this new technique, which can be applied to animals as well as to humans. Early Anglo-Saxon pigs from West Heslerton, Yorkshire, had amounts of strontium in their teeth that varied as much as in humans—but whereas humans may travel long distances, pigs very rarely do so, not least because they are mostly killed when they reach maturity, in or before their third year. For the later period, analysis of some skeletons from Repton, Derbyshire, also had mixed results, but it is encouraging that a male found with a gold ring adjacent to the church and already interpreted as a “Viking” had isotopes that signal an origin in the Baltic area.
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Fetten, F. “Archaeology and Anthropology in Germany before 1945.” In Archaeology, Ideology, and Society: The German Experience, 2d ed. Edited by Heinrich Härke, 143–182. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 2002.
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Interesting exposition of how dolicocephalous people (that is, with long heads) were once regarded as adventurous and therefore dominant over the bracycephalous people, who were conservative but for some strange reason politically democratic.
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Gowland, Rebecca. “Beyond Ethnicity: Symbols of Social Identity from the Fourth to Sixth Centuries in England.” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 14 (2007): 56–65.
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Comparison of a late Romano-British and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery showed that tooth eruption could not separate the occupants into different genetic groups. The “Anglo-Saxons” were a little taller but within a parameter so small that it is more likely to have been caused by health and diet than by genes.
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Higham, Nicholas J., ed. Britons in Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2007.
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Some years ago Higham reinvigorated the migration debate by suggesting that 5th-century changes could be explained as largely the result of a few successful males turning booty raids into conquest. The essays include a paper by Gale Owen-Crocker that brings textiles into the debate—she sees evidence of weaving methods, presumably practiced by women, showing continuity from Romano-British techniques.
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Hills, Catherine. “Anglo-Saxon DNA?” In Mortuary Practices and Social Identities in the Middle Ages: Essays in Burial Archaeology in Honour of Heinrich Härke. Edited by Duncan Sayer and Howard Williams, 123–140. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2009.
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The author became famous for her presentation on television of the Blood of the British series in the 1980s, but her approach is much cooler than that title would suggest, and here she casts a mordant eye over early 21st-century enthusiasm for identifying migrants from DNA extracted from both buried and living populations. The former may not show sufficient variation between North European groups of people, and the latter are subject to too much intermangling (not the author’s word) over the 20th and 21st centuries for any but the most isolated communities to have preserved genetic purity.
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Montgomery, J., J. A. Evans, Dominic Powlesland, and Charlotte A. Roberts. “Continuity or Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England? Isotope Evidence for Mobility, Subsistence Practice, and Status at West Heslerton.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 126 (2005): 123–138.
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Analysis of a Yorkshire cemetery in which it was hoped to distinguish between native Britons and immigrant “Anglians” but without starting with some skeletons known to be natives and others known to be Anglians and seeing if consistent differences in strontium and oxygen isotopes were observed in those. As it is, the observed differences could be explained by differences in childhood nursing, diet, or even soil conditions. An earlier summary of the results suggesting that half the people had been raised in the Pennines and had moved eastward was discounted.
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Parfitt, Keith, and Birte Brugmann. The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, Deal, Kent. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monographs, Vol. 14. Leeds, UK: Maney, 1997.
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Particularly useful excavation report not only for its analyses of artifacts and of the traces of disease and stress on the human bones but also for a considered discussion of the identity expressed by the people of Kent, who according to Saint Bede should have been Jutes. The objects that show links to Scandinavia most closely are gold bracteates, but no single grave contains things that are only otherwise found in Denmark, being a mixture that show links to various other parts of England and the Continent. Among the bracteates are designs linked to Scandinavian images of gods: were the Kentish elites signaling that they claimed descent from Jutish ancestors, whatever the reality?
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Ages and Health

Roberts 2009 is a brief introduction to the range of information that bones and teeth can provide. Information about human conditions can even be derived from cremations, although they are very time-consuming to analyze (McKinley 1994). People of all ages were cremated; perplexingly, few inhumation cemeteries contain babies or infants in the ratios to children, juveniles, and adults that would be expected from modern third-world populations; Great Chesterford, Essex, is an exception (Waldron 1994). As height can be affected by nutrition, it is one clue to the adequacy of a diet that worn-down teeth show to have been coarse. Traces of rickets in adult bones result from vitamin C deficiency in childhood but could be survived, while vitamin D deficiency caused scurvy, which was usually a killer—but does not show directly in surviving bones (Waldron 2006). Tuberculosis may take its victim before the bone is affected, but survivors may have developed Schmorl’s nodes, when bone preservation is good. Harris lines can show that sometimes food was plentiful, sometimes scarce. Leprosy is also sometimes seen—though it is not always clear that it would have been seen in life in less-developed cases. Hurried or multiple burials may have been because of the need to dispose of infected bodies quickly, but rapid death does not show on bones; the plague may have had devastating effects (Maddicott 1997).

Maddicott, John R. “Plague in Seventh-Century England.” Past and Present 156 (1997): 7–54.
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Argues that the documentary sources should be taken seriously and not as gross exaggerations when they speak of plague killing kings and churchmen in the 7th century; if the disease also killed up to half the working population, as plague was to do in 1348–1350, it might account for many of the settlement abandonments of the time. Dates from sites like Mucking and the peopling of the trading sites argue against sudden calamity in the 660s and 670s, however, so the recorded outbreaks then may have been the last episodes of “Justinian’s plague,” which ravaged the Mediterranean in the 540s.
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McKinley, Jacqueline I. The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham. Pt. 8, The Cremations. East Anglian Archaeology 69. Dereham, Norfolk, UK: Norfolk Archaeological Unit, Norfolk Museums Service, 1994.
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The classic analysis of a collection of more than two thousand burial urns, each containing highly fragmented bone from which enough recognizable bits were extracted for useful analyses of age, sex, and even some pathological conditions to be undertaken.
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Roberts, Charlotte A. “Health and Welfare in Medieval England: The Human Skeletal Remains Contextualized.” In Reflections: 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology, 1957–2007. Edited by Roberta Gilchrist and Andrew Reynolds, 307–325. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 30. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009.
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Useful short paper summarizing work by Roberts and others on the extent to which nutrition and living conditions may be visible in human bones, arguing that early medieval people generally suffered less from such problems as sinusitis and tuberculosis, the former because of outdoor living, the latter because of uncrowded conditions.
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Waldron, Tony. “The Human Remains.” In An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Great Chesterford, Essex. CBA Research Report 91. Edited by Vera I. Evison, 52–66. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology Research, 1994.
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With fifty babies stillborn or dead by the age of twelve months, this cemetery had the sorts of numbers that seem likely to be representative in a population of 167 that otherwise included twenty-one who died before their tenth birthdays but only two between then and age fifteen. Sixteen died between ages fifteen and twenty-five, seventeen in their next decade, twenty-five between ages thirty-five and forty-five, only fourteen surviving any longer, so half the people died before reaching adulthood. Women were likely to die before men, the reason graphically shown by the five unborn fetuses found inside their mothers. Fully grown men may have been slightly shorter on average than in the early 21st century, but women were almost the same.
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Waldron, Tony. “Nutrition and the Skeleton.” In Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition. Edited by Christopher M. Woolgar, Dale Serjeantson, and Tony Waldron, 254–266. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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An essay that is not confined to the Anglo-Saxon period outlines some of the problems that arise from inadequate or unbalanced diet. It shows that a child’s growth is likely to be in spurts, so a period of undernourishment or other deprivation may be compensated for later. It also explains that iron deficiency should not be assumed from the presence of cribra orbitalia pitting in the mouth.
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Lifestyles and Modes of Death from Burial Evidence

Well-preserved bones reveal various conditions. Osteoporosis develops slowly and bends the spine; it is seen in most older Anglo-Saxon skeletons, betokening hard physical work. Bone fractures are quite common, usually healed, and probably mostly the results of accidents; direct evidence of sword or other weapon cuts is seen on very occasional skulls (Manchester 1990), but a spear thrust may damage tissue rather than bone, and that number may be underestimated: septicemia would have made many flesh wounds ultimately fatal. Nevertheless, the image of societies in constant warfare and feud is not supported by the osteology, and therefore the extent to which weapons in graves betoken involvement in such practice has to be doubted (Härke 1990). Some analyses remain controversial: was a sprawling, facedown woman buried alive to atone for what she had done to the younger woman below her in the grave (Hirst 1993)? Doubts exist about the ability to recognize rape from bone evidence, though it is suggested as the explanation of another prone burial (Wells 2003). The weird positions of some of the Sutton Hoo body shadows showed that human sacrifice may have been practiced in exceptional places during the 7th century and later, but the dating depends heavily upon radiocarbon (Carver 2005, pp. 315–359). In the Christian period judicial execution by hanging took place at a number of sites on the edges of territories, an indication that royal control was replacing feuding as a means of taking revenge (Reynolds 2009). A few isolated burials are known, which could be of people excluded because of their origins, behavior, or modes of death (McKinley 2003).

Carver, Martin. Sutton Hoo: A Seventh-Century Princely Burial Ground and its Context. Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London 69. London: British Museum Press, 2005.
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The report on excavations conducted in the 1980s, which discovered among much else two groups of burials unaccompanied by objects other than wooden beams that could not be identified but which to judge from the contortions of many of the bodies were instruments of torture or parts of (to modern eyes) macabre displays.
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Härke, Heinrich. “Warrior Graves? The Background of the Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite.” Past and Present 126 (1990): 22–43.
DOI: 10.1093/past/126.1.22Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Published in a journal that spurs debate and is read by most historians, this article is the best known of its author’s many contributions to burial analysis, in this instance challenging the traditional assumption that anyone with a weapon was a fighter and suggesting instead that it marked both status and a phase in life.
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Hirst, Susan M. “Death and the Archaeologist.” In Search of Cult: Archaeological Investigations in Honour of Philip Rahtz. Edited by Martin Carver, 41–43. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1993.
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The author here defends her original interpretation as a revenge killing of a unique grave in a cemetery at Sewerby, Yorkshire, that had a woman’s skeleton prone and with arms and legs askew a few inches above the coffin of a younger woman, whose burial appeared entirely orthodox.
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Manchester, Keith. “Resurrecting the Dead: The Potential of Palaeopathology.” In Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: A Reappraisal. Edited by Edmund Southworth, 87–96. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1990.
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Not for the squeamish. Illustrates what fatal and merely unpleasant damage can be caused to the human body that its bones may still reveal a thousand years and more later. Sword cuts and leprosy particularly draw the attention, though it has to be remembered that even the former are quite few.
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McKinley, Jacqueline I. “A Wiltshire ‘Bog Body’?: Discussion of a Fifth/Sixth-Century AD Burial in the Woodford Valley.” Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society Magazine 96 (2003): 7–18.
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A woman aged twenty to twenty-five buried by herself near a river was covered by timber planks preserved by waterlogging. But for radiocarbon dating she would probably have been ascribed to the Iron Age. Her location is unique in Anglo-Saxon England and illustrates the difficulties of interpreting the exceptional.
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Reynolds, Andrew. Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Every unusual burial, from people in early cemeteries interred in the same grave as others to those clearly executed by hanging and kept a long way from Christian churchyards, is discussed in an attempt to distinguish what can be recognized as really significant in showing ostracism and exclusion and which burials may look strange to their excavators but for which there may be an explanation other than that they were of people abhorred by those who disposed of them.
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Wells, Calvin. “The Inhumations.” In The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Worthy Park, Kingsworthy, near Winchester, Hampshire. Monograph 59. Edited by Sonia C. Hawkes with Guy Grainger, 153–182. Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2003.
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Posthumous publication of research that includes the study of a young female buried prone rather than in the orthodox supine position. Although not excluded from the cemetery and her contemporaries, she was buried in a way that suggested her difference, and the author thought that she might have been punished for having been raped.
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Christian Burial Practice in England

That Saint Augustine’s mission did not instantly end the Anglo-Saxon custom of grave-good burial and the abandonment of cemeteries where pagan rites had been practiced is well shown by Evison 1987—yet many did become disused around the early 7th century in areas that had not yet accepted the Augustinian mission. Newly established cemeteries of the 7th and 8th centuries are now called “final phase” and usually contain some graves with goods—but fewer and generally simpler; the practice of furnished burial effectively faded out in the early 8th century. Churchyard burial did not immediately follow (Blair 2005), nor did people altogether stop putting objects in graves as tokens and amulets (Astill 2009, Hadley 2009). An excavation report on a Somerset cemetery expresses the transitions made from the 4th to the 8th centuries (Rahtz, et al. 2000).

Astill, Grenville. “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: How Should Post–AD 700 Burials Be Interpreted?” In Mortuary Practices and Social Identities in the Middle Ages. Edited by Duncan Sayer and Howard Williams, 222–235. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2009.
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Reviews the evidence for “field cemeteries” in southern England and argues that a steady progression to churchyard burial as parishes and manors developed cannot be seen but that there may be a relationship with new field and settlement systems.
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Blair, John. The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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Authoritative book by a scholar who had previously written many articles on such themes as cemeteries and the hierarchy of churches. As well as cathedrals and formal abbeys were many “minsters,” subject to royal and other lay patronage, serving large areas, perhaps often coterminous with the boundaries of territories from which the founders derived their food renders and tribute. The elites might be buried in them, but for several centuries field cemeteries where there might not even be a chapel sufficed for nearly everyone else. Churchyard burial gradually became the norm as large estates were divided and owners wanted their own churches. Consequently “minster” territories were subdivided. The picture is made more complex by cult places, chapels without burial rights, and occasional Christianization of a pagan site.
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Evison, Vera I. Dover: The Buckland Anglo-Saxon Cemetery. Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England Archaeological Report. London, English Heritage: 1987.
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Report by a distinguished scholar on her excavations in advance of development—subsequent housing has produced more graves, so that some of the groupings need revision. What stands out, however, is that a cemetery that came into use toward the end of the 5th century was still in use after c. 700 and that a few graves still had objects placed in them, though the sequence shows that ideas changed about what was appropriate to deposit; all this in Kent, the first kingdom nominally Christianized in c. 600.
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Hadley, Dawn M. “Burial, Belief, and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England.” In Reflections: 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology, 1957–2007. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 30. Edited by Roberta Gilchrist and Andrew Reynolds, 465–484. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009.
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Survey of the surprisingly large number of objects placed—not simply included by accident—in graves of the Christian period. They were not relics of paganism, hidden from the priest’s view, but symbolic. Many seem to express ideas about protection, but others may have had such close personal association with the deceased that they were buried together. Rituals show beliefs about protection of the body, such as placing stones round its head, or its purification and humility, the best interpretation of the ashes found in a number of graves.
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Rahtz, Philip, Susan Hirst, and Susan M. Wright. Cannington Cemetery: Excavations 1962–1963 of Prehistoric, Roman, Post-Roman, and Later Features at Cannington Park Quarry, near Bridgewater, Somerset. Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies Britannia Monograph 17. London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 2000.
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Unusual opportunity to investigate over four hundred graves spanning the late Roman to mid-Anglo-Saxon periods—the latter term used advisedly, since by then the Wessex kings had taken control of west Somerset and the effect can be seen in a few burials with knives and other small goods. The original focus of the cemetery was probably a mound on the summit of the hill; whether originally Christian and the degree to which pre-Christian rituals may have been retained are issues discussed, as are other temple/cult sites.
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Churches and Burials in Wales, Scotland, and the Southwest

In the West people either remained Christian if their forefathers had already adopted the new religion in the 4th century or took it up as an expression of difference from those to their east: their churches and cemeteries are reviewed in Edwards 2009. In Cornwall and west Devon (Turner 2006), in Wales, and in modern southwest Scotland are inscribed stones with complex Latin texts that show a high level of education; their origins may lie in the 4th century and land claims but became used for personal memorials (Higgitt, et al. 2001, Longden 2003, Petts 2009). In the North Christianity branched out from Iona to make inroads among the Picts, whose symbol stones seem to have started as markers of land and family and became parts of Christian culture and burial practice (Driscoll 2000, Fraser 2008).

Driscoll, Stephen T. “Christian Monumental Sculpture and Ethnic Expression in Early Scotland.” In Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain. Edited by William O. Frazer and Andrew Tyrrell, 233–252. London: Leicester University Press, 2000.
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Considers how churches became foci for political power displays, becoming more important than petty kingdoms partly because the church sought permanent ownership and encouraged hereditary lordship to promote stability.
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Edwards, Nancy, ed. The Archaeology of the Early Celtic Churches. Proceedings of a Conference on the Archaeology of the Early Medieval Celtic Churches, September 2004. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 29. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009.
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The editor has been responsible for earlier conference volumes that still contain much useful information as well as contributions of her own. This volume of essays focuses strongly on Wales but also covers southwestern (modern) England and Ireland with a little treatment of Scotland. The plural in the title is important—there was no “Celtic church” institution as there was a “Roman.”
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Fraser, Iain, ed. The Pictish Symbol Stones of Scotland. Edinburgh: Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of Scotland, 2008.
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Brief introduction to the incised and carved stone sculptures with a history of their study and a bibliography. Occasional discoveries are still made, e.g., that a stone at Newton, Aberdeenshire, with an ogham inscription also has a Pictish mirror symbol. The catalogue has descriptions and very fine images.
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Higgitt, John, Katherine Forsyth, and David N. Parsons, eds. Roman, Runes, and Ogham: Medieval Inscriptions in the Insular World. Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas, 2001.
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Various authors discuss the inscribed stones; were they introduced from Gaul, as Jeremy Knight suggests? Not if their language is Hisperic (Mark Handley). Their scripts change from capitals to cursives but not necessarily because of handwriting in manuscripts (Carlo Tedeschi). Gender imbalance is shown in the heavy bias to male memorials and to the exclusion of women from church foundation claims and from any of the genealogical information (Elisabeth Okasha).
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Longden, G. “Iconoclasm, Belief, and Memory in Early Medieval Wales.” In Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past Societies. Edited by Howard Williams, 171–192. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2003.
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Suggests that the early Christian inscribed stones were as much for land claims as to act as memorials. This explains why many were reworked, to express new ownership.
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Petts, David. “Variation in the British Burial Rite.” In Mortuary Practices and Social Identities in the Middle Ages. Edited by Duncan Sayer and Howard Williams, 222–235. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2009.
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Uncertainty over the original locations of inscribed stones in Wales questions their association with graves and churches, and boundary associations suggest that they should also be seen as making landholding claims (as Longden 2003), the equivalent of charters, which superseded them. Proceeds to review stone and timber cists and cemetery plans.
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Turner, Sam. Making a Christian Landscape: The Countryside in Early Medieval Cornwall, Devon, and Wessex. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2006.
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Contextualizes the churches and inscribed stones in the southwest in relation to settlements such as the Cornish “rounds” and Wiltshire stream valleys, land ownership, and the conquests of the West Saxon kings. Offers no explanation for the British stones in east Dorset at Wareham, fifty miles away from any others.
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Other Manifestations of Religions and Identities

Although Christianity may have survived within eastern England, its practice is increasingly invisible as burial modes developed principally in Scandinavian and Germanic traditions. What rituals other than burial took place is hard to establish until churches began to be built. In the West, where Christianity flourished, church buildings seem to have been small, often single cells like many in Ireland, and no standing structure has survived.

Non-Christian and Anti-Christian

The range of beliefs held in early Anglo-Saxon England and how they may be recognized in items that have no obvious practical function has been explored by Meaney 1981, and Blair 1995 has shown that a single posthole may be all the surviving evidence for a totem pole, perhaps surmounted with an animal’s head, around which ceremonies took place. He argues that many of these were within settlements and that only a few purpose-built structures outside those may have existed. This gets support from an unexpected quarter, the infills of the “sunken-featured buildings,” which Hamerow 2006 shows often not to have been casual rubbish deposits but to have included things placed carefully in them. Animism could mean that worship of Thor, Woden, and the rest was restricted to an elite who could relate to their heroic stories and recognize their images and symbols, which appear on gold bracteates (Gaimster 1992) and (one or two) sword pommels; animals devolved from classical art may have assumed mythic roles associated with these gods (Dickinson 2005). Localized cults and earth gods would have appealed to a lower social stratum more concerned that their crops should grow, something that Saint Bede hinted at when he mentioned Eostre; unfortunately elves have disappeared, leaving us no trace of themselves. How much can be inferred about belief from all the different types of objects in graves is arguable, but vessels and bits of animals may derive from ideas about shared meals, a clue to feasting rituals (Lee 2007).

Blair, John. “Anglo-Saxon Pagan Shrines and Their Prototypes.” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 8 (1995): 1–28.
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A consideration of the limited evidence from place-names and church writers about the locations where pre-Christian worship might have taken place. Then suggests that some separate buildings in settlements should be considered as shrines, but so might annexes to houses with isolated postholes for totem poles or trees. As there was no single religion, there would have been no single practice; furthermore, increasing knowledge of Continental Christian practice may have led to increasing use of fixed places of worship by heathens.
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Dickinson, Tania. “Symbols of Protection: The Significance of Animal-Ornamented Shields in Early Anglo-Saxon England.” Medieval Archaeology 49 (2005): 109–163.
DOI: 10.1179/007660905x54062Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shields are nearly always found in the graves of adult males, which suggests that youths “came of age” at seventeen or eighteen years old. They all have iron shield bosses and grips, but a few have copper-alloy outlines of creatures nailed to the front. These were not just ornamental but symbolized the shield’s protective role and its ability to give success in battle: the creatures include pike, which preys on other fish; hawk-like raptors that swoop down on other birds and animals; and “dragons” like the one that guarded its treasure from Beowulf. They may relate to saga stories about Woden.
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Gaimster, Märit. “Scandinavian Gold Bracteates in Britain: Money and Media in the Dark Ages.” Medieval Archaeology 36 (1992): 1–28.
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Thin gold discs worn as pendants are embossed with designs that can be traced back to Roman coinage and emperors’ heads but transmogrified into images of Woden, the earth serpent, and other images recognizable in sagas known in Scandinavia, where most of them are found. They are also not uncommon in Kent and part of the archaeological evidence for a strong Scandinavian link, albeit not specifically a Jutish one.
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Hamerow, Helena. “‘Special Deposits’ in Anglo-Saxon Settlements.” Medieval Archaeology 50 (2006): 1–30.
DOI: 10.1179/174581706x124211Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
More than forty sunken-featured buildings are shown to have had human and animal remains in their infills that were carefully placed, not merely accidentally included when rubbish was shoveled in. Large pieces of pottery and some other objects also seem to be “special,” as they are more complete or rarer than would be expected from casual inclusions. A few beads and other dress items, and concentrations of loom weights, may indicate a female focus.
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Lee, Christina. Feasting the Dead: Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon Burial Rituals. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2007.
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A funeral feast is a means of reestablishing family and social bonds after their disruption by a death. The dead person may share in this feast by having foodstuffs, cups, drinking horns, or whole or broken pots included in his or her grave. This book seeks to tease out how animal bones and large sherds may be as much of a clue to such rituals as the more obvious glass cups.
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Meaney, Audrey L. Anglo-Saxon Amulets and Curing Stones. British Archaeological Reports British Series 96. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1981.
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This contribution took Anglo-Saxon cemetery studies into a new dimension by showing how many things in the graves could not be given a simple functionalist explanation. Although crystal balls in a few women’s graves obviously had some special meanings, many lesser things were also shown as likely to have been associated with healing or divination.
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Christian Symbols, Buildings, and Their Furnishings

The symbols that denoted the protection of Woden and other gods became in some cases symbols of Christianity; creatures are part of God’s creation, and “dragons” could represent the Devil and all his works (Webster 2003). Since Thomas Rickman established that some standing buildings preserved at least some pre-Norman elements, churches and chapels have been studied by archaeologists and architectural historians. The best chronological review of the aboveground data is Fernie 1983, the most complete gazetteer and presentation of stylistic detail is Taylor and Taylor 1965–1978, and structural analysis is best presented by Rodwell 1981. One volume on sculpture will serve for many (Cramp 2005–2006), while an early 21st-century discovery shows both remarkable quality and how works were painted (Rodwell, et al. 2008). Anglo-Saxon cross-shafts might be both memorials and aids for preaching and contemplation (Ó Carragáin 1999). Excavations include the elucidation of quite small timber buildings at the Hartlepool double house (Daniels and Loveluck 2007) as well as the stone structures at the Wearmouth and Jarrow male abbeys (Cramp 2005–2006).

Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture.
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This massive work is an entire gazetteer of Anglo-Saxon carved stonework. The coordination of the whole enterprise has been by Rosemary Cramp; in all volumes the stone of each sculpture is identified by a geologist, any inscriptions are elucidated, photographs of each face are presented, and its place in art history and its context as a religious icon are explored by the author.
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Cramp, Rosemary. Wearmouth and Jarrow Monastic Sites. 2 vols. Swindon, UK: English Heritage, 2005–2006.
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Report on excavations and analyses of two Northumbrian monasteries founded by the same nobleman in the Roman style, with mortared masonry not only for the churches but other buildings, such as the library in which Saint Bede worked. Although not built around a cloister, these buildings were formally aligned, unlike those in most early church institutions. The colored glass shows how the most important windows would have been a source of wonder.
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Daniels, Robin, and Christopher Loveluck, eds. Anglo-Saxon Hartlepool and the Foundations of Anglo-Saxon Christianity: An Archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon Monastery. Tees Archaeology Monograph Series 3. Hartlepool, UK: Tees Archaeology, 2007.
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Opportunistic excavations during redevelopment combined with some targeted work and a review of reports of previous discoveries make this investigation of a male and female 7th-century and later monastery a good example of what can be teased out about slab-lined graves, timber buildings, memorial stones, living conditions, and artifacts, including pieces of very fine molds for casting delicate ornaments for books or other fittings.
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Fernie, Eric. The Architecture of the Anglo-Saxons. London: Batsford, 1983.
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Still the best comprehensive chronological survey showing the different influences that came to bear on the Anglo-Saxon Church and the needs that its buildings had to perform, from Saint Augustine’s Italian-style work at Canterbury to the effect of the Norman Conquest.
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Ó Carragáin, Éamonn. “The Necessary Distance: Imitatio Romae and the Ruthwell Cross.” In Northumbria’s Golden Age. Edited by Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills, 191–203. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999.
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Perhaps the most accessible distillation of a fine scholar’s long and penetrating consideration of the stone cross-shafts at Bewcastle and Ruthwell, which have some similar scenes carved on them as well as various inscriptions. Both need to be seen in liturgical terms, as illustrations of biblical texts that would have been the readings at Easter services, the holiest in the Church calendar. They were aids to contemplation by deeply learned clerics.
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Rodwell, Warwick. The Archaeology of the English Church: The Study of Historic Churches and Churchyards. London: Batsford, 1981.
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With fine draftsmanship, shows how a building should be analyzed and how the results of excavation can be integrated with the study of a standing structure. The author makes good use of his experience of excavating churches such as Barton-on-Humber and Wells.
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Rodwell, Warwick, Jane Hawkes, Emily Howe, and Rosemary Cramp. “The Lichfield Angel: A Spectacular Anglo-Saxon Painted Panel.” Antiquaries Journal 88 (2008): 48–108.
DOI: 10.1017/S0003581500001359Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An extraordinary discovery within the cathedral, a well-preserved, possibly 8th-century carved panel. It shows an angel, almost certainly an archangel at the Annunciation; Mary probably figured on another piece of what seems to have been a coped box mounted against a wall. At the end of the 10th century, to judge from coins found nearby, it was placed facedown in a pit next to what appears to have been a shrine, thus preserving some of the red, white, yellow, and black paint; a detached gold flake shows that there was gilding, probably at least on the halo.
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Taylor, Harold M., and Joan Taylor. Anglo-Saxon Architecture. 3 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1965–1978.
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Although some of the entries in the two gazetteer volumes include buildings that later writers would date differently, the first two volumes remain the first place to look for full and accurate description and discussion of all standing ecclesiastical Anglo-Saxon buildings. The third volume analyzes every detail, from plans to window styles.
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Webster, Leslie. “Encrypted Visions: Style and Sense in Anglo-Saxon Minor Art, AD 400–490.” In Anglo-Saxon Styles. Edited by Catherine E. Karkov and George Hardin Brown, 11–30. Albany: State University of New York, 2003.
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Shows how Christian teaching used Germanic “visual cues” to preach a new sense of world order, though one in which some ambiguities remained. Latin texts took on the protective role that boars and similar fierce animals had played, and style II animals passed from metalwork into manuscripts.
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Scandinavians

Another group that can be expected to have used material culture to express its difference is the Vikings (Hadley 2008). In burial practice, however, this did not last long: Richards 2004 presents his work at the 9th-century cremation cemetery at Ingleby, Derbyshire, and the implications for Repton, not far away (Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle 2001). Redmond 2007 reviews the North of England. Distinctive material, such as oval brooches for women, are still few, though metal detecting has added one or two, as also of Thor’s hammers. Far more prolific are brooches, strap ends, and other small items given stylistic names like Jellinge that may share Scandinavian elements with English ones; the extent to which they are demonstrative of large-scale immigration or show a few urban craft workers selling cheap goods to country people who came in to market their produce are opposing interpretations (for example, Leahy 2007, Hadley 2001). The degree to which crosses and hogback grave covers indicate Viking leaders integrating with Christianity is a live issue, as is the extent to which sculpture reflects political change (Stocker and Everson 2001; for Anglo-Scandinavian towns, see Towns, Trade, and Transport.)

Biddle, Martin, and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle. “Repton and the ‘Great Heathen Army,’ 873–874.” In Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21–30 August 1997. Edited by James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch, and David N. Parsons, 45–96. Oxford: Oxbow, 2001.
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Excavations around the Anglo-Saxon church and royal shrine revealed male burials (see Hadley 2008), coins that prove use by the “great army” in 873–874, and a V-shaped ditch that it had dug to create a camp. Also elucidated was a mound that covered a stone building that had become a burial place with an extraordinary array of human bones from more than 250 people around a central male. Whether they are sacrifices, battle victims, or plague deaths remains disputed.
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Hadley, Dawn M. “In Search of the Vikings: The Problems and Possibilities of Interdisciplinary Approaches.” In Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21–30 August 1997. Edited by James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch, and David N. Parsons, 13–30. Oxford: Oxbow, 2001.
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The difference, if any, between the Danelaw and the South of England has to be discussed in terms of place-names, dialects, estate ownership, and social terminology as well as of archaeology. This essay is a good short introduction (the volume contains other useful papers) to objects, burials, sculptures, and churches. Scandinavians moved in as aristocrats but rapidly fused with local practice; intensive settlement cannot be deduced from artifacts, as a range of choice was available.
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Hadley, Dawn M. “Warriors, Heroes, and Companions: Negotiating Masculinity in Viking-Age England.” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 15 (2008): 270–284.
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Scandinavians buried in England in the second half of the 9th century and in the 10th century were given rites that at first might include cremation but which rapidly became undifferentiated from natives, except that the memorial sculptures were more likely to have warrior, masculine themes. Isotopes indicate a Scandinavian origin for two later 9th-century male burials at Repton church; the older man had been castrated and was restituted by giving him a sword, a Thor’s hammer, and a boar’s tusk.
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Leahy, Kevin. The Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Lindsey. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2007.
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The author was one of the first archaeologists to appreciate the importance of metal-detected finds for showing the extraordinary quantities of things being found of many different types and periods. He argues that the legions of “tatty little brooches” of the late 9th to the 11th centuries were not local copies of better items but are so common also in Denmark that they must be part of a shared culture. That does not mean that all the things were imported—a die has been found, so some at least were manufactured in England—but only someone with a Scandinavian background would have accepted them. Lead weights and Arabic coins also suggest more than trade links with Scandinavia.
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Redmond, Angela Z. Viking Burial in the North of England. British Archaeological Reports British Series 429. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2007.
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Originating as a PhD thesis, this volume is useful for presenting a statement about more than just the burial evidence, summarizing work on rural settlements such as Simy Folds, County Durham—which shows no direct Scandinavian influence—in contrast to York, which certainly does in soapstone, an influx of amber, and burials. It also presents a record of the newly discovered silver hoard from near Harrogate, Yorkshire, and discusses the different views now taken about the extent and nature of Scandinavian settlement and contact.
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Richards, Julian. “Excavations at the Viking Barrow Cemetery at Heath Wood, Ingleby, Derbyshire.” Antiquaries Journal 84 (2004): 23–116.
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On a ridge above the River Trent, fifty-nine barrows cover cremation burials ascribed to a faction of the “great army” that used nearby Repton in 873–874 and assumed control of the area in 877. Some rituals were the same as those at Repton, even though the main disposal method, burning the corpse, was very different—and seemingly neither practiced nor adopted elsewhere. The same author’s work at rural Cottam approaches the Scandinavian settlement issue from a different angle.
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Stocker, David, and Paul Everson. “Five Towns Funerals: Decoding Diversity in Danelaw Stone Sculpture.” In Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21–30 August 1997. Edited by James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch, and David N. Parsons, 223–243. Oxford: Oxbow, 2001.
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Based on their work on the Lincolnshire volume of the British Academy’s sculpture corpus, the authors argue that the large number of 10th-century grave covers shows earlier use of small local churches in the Danelaw than in Wessex. A change to flat stones carved in Ancaster stone with interlace indicates that the influence of York ceased as a result of the conquest of Lincolnshire by the Wessex king in the 940s; the aristocrats around Lincoln were replaced by a new elite, whereas elsewhere they were allowed to remain because they had not owed the same allegiance to York.
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Rural Settlement, Agriculture, and Food

Although the Domesday Book shows that by the 11th century a substantial proportion of the population lived in towns—10 percent may be a slightly low estimate—the great majority of the rest were agricultural producers in the countryside. What they produced depended on a range of factors: their subsistence needs; the pressures on them to produce surpluses either to provide as renders to their lords or to convert into cash to pay a money rent; what they could grow or breed within the constraints of soils, weather, fertilizers, and labor availability; what transport was available to move produce away to lords’ centers or to market and to bring in commodities to reduce the extent of their self-sufficiency; and the diversion of their time and resources from work in the fields.

The Environment and Production

The effects of climate change on the modern world are much debated and are no less hard to identify and assess for relatively short time spans, such as the early Middle Ages. Ice cores show a “cold” period from c. 400, but it may not have reduced the length of the growing season in temperate Europe by enough to make any but the most marginal land unsuitable for crops (Dark 2000). Sea-level rise probably made islands of the Scillies and swamped pastureland on both sides of the Severn estuary, but its effect on the east side of the island is less clear; the tidal part of the Thames does not seem to have risen until the 10th and 11th centuries, as the breakdown of human input into maintaining seawalls and keeping artificial and other outlets flowing may have been the reason for earlier flooding in the Wash. More cataclysmic events are advocated by Baillie 1999. Less dramatic evidence comes from environmental evidence, such as pollen, seeds and grains, and animal bones. An increase in grass pollen suggests post-Roman reduction in arable and emphasis on pasture, but although dendrochronology shows trees being left to grow rather than cut down or pollarded, wholesale abandonment of farmland is not indicated by large-scale woodland regeneration (Rackham 1994, Bell 1989). One important aspect of agricultural production is the need to maintain fertility of fields; this could only mean household waste spread from middens or animal dung. To a degree, the former can be identified through scatters of pottery (Jones and Page 2006). Evidence of increased cereal output can be deduced from the use of mills (Rahtz and Meeson 1992), but farmers would not have had the capacity to overcome the effects of soil conditions (Williamson 2003).

Baillie, Michael. Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters with Comets. London: Batsford, 1999.
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Having given up on volcanic eruption as the reason for a sudden reduction in the width of northern Irish tree rings in the 530s, the author shifted to comet impact as the explanation. This would have affected Britain as well, but no one has yet claimed to recognize it, and such graphs as have been published do not suggest it. In other words, changes in cultivation were more likely caused by population than climatic factors.
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Bell, Martin. “Environmental Archaeology as an Index of Continuity and Change in the Medieval Landscape.” In The Rural Settlements of Medieval England. Edited by Michael Aston, David Austin, and Christopher Dyer, 85–109. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
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Still a useful summary from a wide range of different post-Roman areas, including the probable use of heavier clay soils for cereal production in the Midlands after the early part of the period. But cereals were grown in a wide range of conditions, including the uplands of Wales and the Southwest.
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Dark, Petra. The Environment of Britain in the First Millennium A.D. London: Duckworth, 2000.
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Very useful synthesis of evidence from ice cores and peat bogs of palynological change and of dendrochronology—in theory, a tree grows a narrow ring in a year that lacks water. These do not lend support to the idea that volcanic eruption causing acid rain had a huge impact, but a comet impact in the 540s might have.
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Jones, Richard, and Mark Page. Medieval Villages in an English Landscape: Beginnings and Ends. Macclesfield, UK: Windgather, 2006.
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Summary of an important field project in Whittlewood Forest on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire seeking to explain the evolution of a predominantly wood-pasture landscape. The extent to which manuring focused on the infield area around small settlements and farms is an aspect of the balance that the farmers sought to maintain.
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Rackham, James, ed. Environment and Economy in Anglo-Saxon England. Council for British Archaeology Research Report 89. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 1994.
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Valuable collection of essays, including Martin Carver on the balance between subsistence and production for tribute and tax and for the market and Oliver Rackham on the importance of a supply of woodland for a well-balanced estate. Dendrochronology shows that trees were much more likely to be left to grow after the 4th century rather than regularly coppiced, which may show both reduced demand and reduced management. Reduced manpower and demand may also have caused the broad swing in East Anglia from Roman arable to Anglo-Saxon pasture. In the same area, pigs, sheep, and cattle varied in ratios at different sites, seemingly according to different local demands. (For other contributions on foodstuffs, see Food and Drink.)
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Rahtz, Philip, and Robert Meeson. An Anglo-Saxon Watermill at Tamworth. Council for British Archaeology Research Report 83. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 1992.
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Investment in mills is worthwhile if enough grain is produced locally and a regular supply to be ground can be guaranteed; the water flow has to be controlled also, both in the physical sense to direct a stream onto the wheel and in the legal sense so that no one can divert the stream or object to its channeling. A royal center to which food renders were brought provided ideal circumstances. A horizontal wheel provided fairly low power, but the mid-9th-century dendrochronology dates obtained show that the king’s agent was confident that expenditure was worthwhile, despite the turmoil of the times.
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Williamson, Tom. Shaping Medieval Landscapes: Settlement, Society, Environment. Macclesfield, UK: Windgather, 2003.
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Although the title does not say so, this book is really about eastern central England, in which nucleated villages and large blocs of open fields generally did not develop—yet it included much of the wealthiest land in the country. It is excellent on what this means in terms of the wood-pasture, greens, small fields, and droveways that characterized most of it and is practical in its emphasis on drainage and soil conditions, of which farmers would have been intensely aware.
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Agriculture and Fields

The field systems that were needed for various exploitation regimes are a source of debate: with many Romano-British sites abandoned and villas ruinous, what authority remained to insist at least upon ownership of the land? Most people in the 5th and 6th centuries were living in hamlets and farms, usually new settlements that probably had intensively used infield around them, a system hard to identify as so much was reorganized in the middle and late parts of the period. The reasons for and the dates of the introduction of open fields and the nucleation of villages in much of the Midlands and South are as problematic as why other areas retained dispersed settlements and smaller blocs of fields, even if they were in strips (Rippon, et al. 2006). Many of the welter of landscape studies published in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are reacting to Roberts and Wrathmell 2000 and Roberts and Wrathmell 2002 and their argument for “provinces.” Some titles suggest an overall view but actually focus on the regions best known to their authors (for example, Rippon 2008); alternatively, they are multiauthor works that also tend to leave gaps, excellent as they may be for the regions covered (for example, Gardiner and Rippon 2007). That is one reason for starting with Taylor 1983. As the Midlands seems to have been where the new system of open fields divided into furlongs and strips began, the fieldwork around Raunds, Northamptonshire (Parry 2006), has extra importance. Another form of evidence for increased cereal production and for the importance of estate centers as collection points comes from investment in mills. The Southwest and its transition from British to English culture, including the disuse of the traditional “rounds,” is discussed by Turner 2006.

Gardiner, Mark, and Stephen Rippon. Medieval Landscapes. Macclesfield, UK: Windgather, 2007.
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Several of the essays are on townscapes, so “Regional Perspectives” is the relevant section, with summaries by various authors of their previous work. A paper by Edward Martin on East Anglia breaks new ground by using geographical information systems and historic landscape characterization, and Mark Gardiner examines the link among later Saxon villages, churches, and manor houses, showing that it is not as pervasive as sometimes assumed.
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Parry, Stephen. Raunds Area Survey: An Archaeological Study of the Landscape of Raunds, Northamptonshire, 1985–1994. Oxford: Oxbow, 2006.
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Intensive field walking to collect broken potsherds located where early Anglo-Saxon occupation might be found; trial excavations then showed that the scatters usually marked where buildings of some sort had been, with a density of over twenty sites in an area of four square miles, mostly within three hundred meters of a stream or river. None of the early sites has late Saxon pottery, unlike four present-day villages and three hamlets, which mostly have some earlier pottery also; no wholesale replanning with new occupation sites seems therefore to have gone into the nucleation process. The establishment of open fields might not have been complete until the 11th century, although elsewhere in the Midlands 8th- and 9th-century dates have been proposed.
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Rippon, Stephen. Beyond the Medieval Village: The Diversification of Landscape Character in Southern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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Deconstruction of the title is needed, as it means that the book is about the areas largely beyond those in which nucleated villages are found and “southern Britain” is not a sop to Cornish nationalism, but necessary because south Wales is included; the study stretches across to include Essex but says little otherwise about the Southeast. It is good on the wetlands of the Severn estuary as well as Devon and stresses the importance of lordship in the late Saxon period as a major factor in causing differences between contiguous estates.
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Rippon, Stephen J., R. M. Fyfe, and A. G. Brown. “Beyond Villages and Open Fields: The Origins and Development of a Historic Landscape Characterised by Dispersed Settlement in South-West England.” Medieval Archaeology 50 (2006): 31–70.
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Good methodological study using pollen cores, 19th-century maps, and field observation to show that in Devon the post-Roman farming system changed without Anglo-Saxon intervention into a landscape of unenclosed farmsteads and small hamlets, exploiting infield-outfield “convertible” husbandry combined with small enclosed fields. Cereal production increased thereafter, and some hamlets developed areas of open fields in strips but which did not extend up to their boundaries as in the Midlands.
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Roberts, Brian K., and Stuart Wrathmell. An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England. London: English Heritage, 2000
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This large-format volume contains various maps that set out to show the distribution of different field and land-use patterns in medieval England as they may be deduced from postmedieval evidence.
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Roberts, Brian K., and Stuart Wrathmell, eds. Region and Place: A Study of English Rural Settlement. London: English Heritage, 2002.
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The commentary volume for Roberts and Wrathmell 2000. The controversial methodology involved plotting settlements from the 19th-century first edition of the Ordnance Survey maps and reading them backward to argue for medieval patterns. Identifies a number of “provinces” and “subprovinces” based on the extent of nucleation deduced.
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Taylor, Christopher. Village and Farmstead: A History of Rural Settlement in England. London: George Philip, 1983.
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A masterly summary by a scholar whose contributions to medieval landscape studies have been many. Starts before and ends after the Middle Ages, but that is apposite since in no other branch of archaeology is a continuum so important; yet change occurs despite the dictates of geology, topography, and climate. Demonstrates how the unaltering English village is a myth, with some excellent plans. All these topics remain in debate.
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Turner, Sam. Making a Christian Landscape: The Countryside in Early Medieval Cornwall, Devon, and Wessex. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2006.
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Useful assessment of early 21st-century understanding of the Southwest, where practices that had survived the Roman period seem to have passed away in the 8th and 9th centuries, reorganized by alien kings and an institutional Church but perhaps in Cornwall by powerful lords even before the interference of Wessex. Unenclosed farms, different arrangements of fields, and limited introduction of open fields are key evidence.
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Settlements and Buildings

Questions about changing field systems and village nucleation are tied up with another: why were so many sites in use in the 5th to the 7th centuries not in use in the 8th to the 9th? Why did some mid-Anglo-Saxon sites fall into disuse? Hamerow 2002 reviews the English evidence against the Continental background. Sunken-featured buildings were an innovation, which Tipper 2004 argues to have been floored over. They are also found overseas but probably not in the British areas. In the far southwest round buildings remained until the 6th–7th centuries (Quinnell 2004). In Wales (Edwards 1997) and Scotland, early medieval farms have been much less explored than hill forts. Reverting to the Anglo-Saxons, Reynolds 2003 compares a wide range of sites to show how they became compartmentalized over time. An outstanding excavation report for the early period is Hey 2004. A later set of complexities is shown by another (Loveluck 2007), and Richards 1999 investigates something that he hopes is more ordinary.

Edwards, Nancy, ed. Landscape and Settlement in Medieval Wales. Oxbow Monograph Series 91. Oxford: Oxbow 1997.
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Increasingly ruinous Roman towns and forts, hill forts, church sites, and landing places are better known to archaeology than hut groups, where artifacts are few. As in England, reorganization may have been an 8th- through the 10th-century process, at least on ecclesiastical estates. Transhumance was probably widely practiced, so some upland huts may have been for summer use—but the reverse, that the lower land was reserved for summer occupation, has also to be considered.
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Hamerow, Helena. Early Medieval Settlements: The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe 400–900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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Site evidence reviewed across areas that were mainly outside the Roman Empire and that developed some house types that did not migrate, such as the aisled long house, and others that did, such as sunken-featured buildings and ground-level rectangular structures built of stout posts. What they were used for is another matter: which were work sheds, houses, animal shelters, grain stores? Without surviving floor levels, even the locations of fires and hearths is impossible to say, and whether any, most, or all of the sunken-featured buildings had plank floors across the hollows is argued over from vestigial evidence.
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Hey, Gillian. Yarnton: Saxon and Medieval Settlement and Landscape. Thames Valley Landscapes Monograph 20. Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2004.
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Investigation of a four-hectare area of easily drained sand and gravel just above a river floodplain. Although Anglo-Saxon occupation was within Romano-British ditched enclosures and Roman graves were left undisturbed, no direct “continuity” of occupation had occurred. Building on grazing land probably started in the late 5th century; some cereals were grown nearby. Well spread out and unconstrained by property divisions, the buildings became larger over time. Greater formality came in the later 7th century, with ditched enclosures. Cereal grains from species more suitable for heavier clays indicate exploitation of distant fields, but processing and storage still took place at the site. Abandonment was perhaps as late as the early 11th century, under Eynsham Abbey’s ownership; the present-day church and village may then have been made the focus for settlement. Changes in cemetery locations echo this pattern.
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Loveluck, Christopher. Rural Settlement, Lifestyles, and Social Change in the Later First Millennium AD: Anglo-Saxon Flixborough in Its Wider Context. Oxford: Oxbow, 2007.
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This fourth volume on the results from an excavation just south of the Humber estuary summarizes its six phases from the early 7th century to the 10th, though some earlier objects suggest that occupation untrammeled by property divisions could have taken place. Early plots were reorganized. Do a few graves and a range of seemingly wealthy objects, some with inscriptions, indicate a church community, or was this site exceptional only because a hollow was used for dumping rubbish, including thousands of animal bones, so that it is the preservation of quantity, not of quality, that is exceptional? In the later 9th century and the 10th century, occupation seems to have been more ordinary, with a more restricted range of contacts.
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Quinnell, Henrietta. Trethurgy: Excavations at Trethurgy Round, St. Austell: Community and Status in Roman and Post-Roman Cornwall. Truro, UK: Cornwall County Council, 2004.
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An important excavation report showing how little impact Roman rule had on the culture of the far Southwest, where circular enclosures continued to surround oval and round buildings without interruption until the 6th century. What is interpreted as a shrine was downgraded to a stock fold in the 8th century. In the 5th and 6th centuries the site was wealthy enough to receive imported pottery and glass from the Mediterranean.
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Reynolds, Andrew. “Boundaries and Settlements in Late Sixth to Eleventh Century England.” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 12 (2003): 98–136.
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Argues that redating of certain types of artifacts, such as Ipswich ware pottery, means that several sites had longer time spans than originally envisaged, so the shifting to new sites was a long-term process. Mid-Saxon ditches indicate increasing use of enclosures, separating property and perhaps implying a weakening of kin-sharing communality in favor of a lord who lived in a separate enclosure partly off a bond labor force working on his farm and partly off tenants’ rents, presaging the emergence of the medieval manor in the late Saxon period.
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Richards, Julian. “Cottam: An Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian Settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds.” Archaeological Journal 156 (1999): 1–110.
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The problem of Scandinavian settlement’s archaeological manifestation was addressed by this fieldwork. Metal detection by an enthusiast who meticulously recorded exactly where his finds had come from made it possible to pinpoint where to excavate. The quantity of metalwork that he recovered contrasted with the amount found in excavating the mid-Anglo-Saxon site, raising issues of typicality. That site was replaced by a prominent 10th-century enclosure two hundred meters away, to be seen as part of a developing manorial economy, though only used briefly.
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Tipper, Jess. The Grubenhaus in Anglo-Saxon England: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Evidence from a Most Distinctive Building Type. Yedingham, UK: Landscape Research Centre, 2004.
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Discussion of the distinctive sunken-featured buildings—a few Roman ones are larger, and they become infrequent during and after the 8th century; late-Anglo-Saxon urban cellars are different. Did many or most have a planked floor across the rectangular hollow, and what were their uses? The study uses unpublished evidence from West Heslerton, Yorkshire, to argue that many were for grain storage.
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Food and Drink

What people ate and drank is a factor both of available resources and of demand for what is seen as enhancing status. The balance between consumption of wild and domestic animals is studied from bones, the different ratios from different types of sites revealing the development of aristocratic hunting in the mid- and late-Anglo-Saxon periods as well as shifts in the ages before domestic stock were slaughtered (Sykes 2009). Wheat, barley, oats, and rye were all grown, as were peas and beans, though exactly which product was used for what is not clear—wheat presumably only for bread but barley for both bread and ale, while oats and rye may have been for porridge and stews as well as for animal fodder—horses in particular were kept in increasing numbers and needed oats. A growing urban market meant that food had to be supplied—whether this was already a commercial, market-led opportunity in the 8th century or whether the new wics (trading centers) relied on what they were sent by local lords remains an issue (Rackham 1994). The Domesday Book reveals that Yarmouth was already a major supplier of herring to the country, but cod were also caught, and fishing seems to have become more commercial generally; isotopic analysis gives this a new dimension (Barrett, et al. 2004). Much documentary evidence also exists about food and drink (Banham 2004).

Banham, Debby. Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2004.
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A short summary of the range of evidence, including archaeological, about foodstuffs and their preparation.
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Barrett, James H., Alison M. Locker, and Callum M. Roberts. “‘Dark Age Economics’ Revisited: The English Fish Bone Evidence AD 600–1600.” Antiquity, 78 (2004): 618–636.
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Saint Wilfrid found the 7th-century South Saxons starving, so he taught them to fish. Incredibly to modern eyes, people really are known to ignore marine resources even when the land fails to sustain them, so the story may not be entirely mythical. Certainly isotopic analysis suggests strongly that fish was not eaten to any extent on the Orkney Islands until the 9th century, when settlement by Scandinavians changed lifestyles. Fishing thereafter may have developed from a self-sufficiency strategy into a commercial proposition, taking salted and smoked cod to York and other new towns.
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Rackham, James, ed. Environment and Economy in Anglo-Saxon England. Council for British Archaeology Research Report 89. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 1994.
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Essays focusing on the environment in this useful volume have been discussed elsewhere in this entry. More specifically directed to the consumption aspect are Lisa Moffett and Gill Campbell on cereals (used for bread), ale, stews, porridge, animal food, and straw for thatch and bedding. London’s development from the second half of the 7th century provided a market and stimulated farms around its perimeter (James Rackham)—or were the wics (trading centers) supplied from the surpluses of food renders collected at estate centers, as Terry O’Connor favors for York? At Hamwic, Saxon Southampton, the fare lacked variety and came mostly from older animals (Jennifer Bourdillon).
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Sykes, Naomi. “Animals: The Bones of Medieval Society.” In Reflections: 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology, 1957–2007. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 30. Edited by Roberta Gilchrist and Andrew Reynolds, 347–362. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009.
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Brief summary of the role that archaeozoology has to play not just in showing what species were being reared but the way different ratios of bones at different types of site reflect not only agricultural practice but also ideas of what was appropriate to consume. Venison eating becomes more evident on elite sites; sheep and cattle were increasingly allowed to grow older, the former for their wool, the latter for their calves and traction power, and both for their milk.
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Defense and the Social Hierarchy

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle often reads like a litany of raids and wars. Successful kings had to defend their territories and take tribute from others. The kingdoms that emerged in the 7th century became more organized, though most were unable to resist being overwhelmed by the Vikings. Archaeologically recognizable defenses are earth bank and ditch constructions, basically either enclosures, including forts where a ditch across a promontory would suffice rather than a complete circuit, or long linear frontier markers.

Forts and Enclosures

Reuse of hill forts, or creation of new ones, is well attested from Somerset to Scotland, presumably as power bases (Alcock 1995, Laing 2006). A few in eastern Britain could have been used, but the evidence is vestigial at best. The grandest elite site, Yeavering, in Northumberland, is described by Saint Bede as used by King Edwin, but the buildings there, which include a large hall and what seems to have been a tiered timber structure for assemblies, were not surrounded by a defensive ditch and bank. Either the occupants relied on retreating up to the overlooking hill fort in extremis or they used the unditched enclosure that looks more like a cattle corral—or the king’s reputation alone was enough to scare away raiders (Frodsham and O’Brien 2005). Alternatively, chieftains in the East preferred the use of Roman forts, be it on Hadrian’s Wall or the south coast at Portchester or small Roman towns that had defenses; Catterick provides an example (Wilson, et al. 1996). Response to Viking raids led to new measures to create tight-knit enclosures, some being Roman towns and forts restored, others new (Hill and Rumble 1996). Ascribing traces of earth banks and ditches to specific events and people is rarely beyond challenge, however (Bassett 2008). Private enclosures such as at Cottam (Richards 1999) may not have been intended as serious defenses; they are hard to see as “castles” like those built after the Norman Conquest.

Alcock, Leslie. Cadbury Castle, Somerset: The Early Medieval Archaeology. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995.
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An Iron Age hill fort probably replaced the town of Ilchester as the focal point for at least south Somerset, showing a post-Roman chieftain’s ability to take control and his perception of the need for a visible presence, perhaps for status, perhaps to deter Irish raiders. He built a wood-laced unmortared stone rampart wall around the summit with a timber gateway. Imported pottery suggests that wine was received, so presumably entertainment reinforced his position with social bonds. Subsequently, the hill fort was brought back into temporary use against Viking raids and later acquired its Arthurian connection, probably because the stream running past it is the Camel, a name easily associated with “Camelot” for a site close to Glastonbury.
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Bassett, Stephen. “The Middle and Late Anglo-Saxon Defences of Western Mercian Towns.” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 15 (2008): 180–239.
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Even the author admits that this is heavy going, but occasionally painstaking analysis of the details of reports of excavations and observations are needed, and in this case it shows the considerable problems of dating various ditch and earthwork defenses around Tamworth and other sites and thus of not overconfidently ascribing them to particular historical incidents that happen to have been recorded. Most had timber fronts to their banks before stone walls replaced them.
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Frodsham, Paul, and Colm O’Brien, eds. Yeavering: People, Power, and Place. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2005.
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Although the original excavation report by Brian Hope-Taylor was a classic, some of the record seems dubious—a tiny gold coin left in the section, for instance. The essays in this book look at the wider context, notably the lesser buildings, a small prehistoric henge, a standing stone, and metalworking evidence all within five hundred meters of the hall, with consequences for understanding the range of functions and the reasons for the choice of site.
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Hill, David, and Alexander R. Rumble, eds. The Defence of Wessex: The Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996.
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The only English king, Alfred, to avoid Viking extermination in the 860s and 870s is said by his biographer to have built fortresses, and another document lists the places where they may have been located. This book looks at each one and has chapters displaying the lure of associating documents with sites, particularly as one version of the document (it may have been updated more than once) gives a formula that allows lengths to be worked out; Winchester’s assessment fits its Roman walls to within 1 percent, while others take a bit of special pleading.
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Laing, Lloyd R. The Archaeology of Celtic Britain and Ireland, c. AD 400–1200. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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Short descriptions of and full references for a range of hill forts that have been excavated, such as Dunadd and Mote of Mark, are in this updated version of an earlier work of the same title.
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Malcolm, Gordon, and David Bowsher. Middle Saxon London: Excavations at the Royal Opera House 1989–99. Museum of London Archaeology Service Monograph Series 15. London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2003.
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Excavation of a substantial part of the wic (trading center) included a substantial ditch, presumably originally with an equally substantial bank, which disrupted the existing streets and houses and was almost certainly a mid-9th-century defended enclosure, though whether built by or against the Vikings remains uncertain.
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Richards, Julian. “Cottam: An Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian Settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds.” Archaeological Journal 156 (1999): 1–110.
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This excavation included that of a 10th-century enclosure in an area not previously used for occupation that probably represents the beginnings of a manorial center. Its ditch does not seem to have been substantial enough for serious defense but would have been enough to deter thieves and wandering cattle and to proclaim the power of its owner to control his estate and tenantry.
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Wilson, Peter R., P. Cardwell, R. J. Cramp, J. Evans, R. H. Taylor-Wilson, A. Thompson, and J. S. Wacher. “Early Anglian Catterick and Catraeth.” Medieval Archaeology 40 (1996): 1–60.
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A scatter of 5th- and 6th-century burials and buildings inside and around the small Roman main-road town of Caractonium gives credence to Saint Bede’s record of it as the Cataracta, which was a royal vill (an estate center), when visited by an early 7th-century priest. Extra spice is given by the possibility that it could also be the site of the famous defeat at Catraeth lamented in a Celtic poem as a great coalition of British against English; a raid down the old Roman road may have drawn them to disaster when they found defenses barring their way.
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Linear Boundaries

Lengths of earth banks and ditches may be prehistoric, and the Romans used them for Hadrian’s Wall. Separating Dorset from Wiltshire is Bokerley Dyke, late Roman in origin and blocking a Roman road, which seems to have been reshaped in the post-Roman period, probably by a British authority in the West against Anglo-Saxons establishing themselves around Salisbury (Bowen 1990). Rather similar are the Cambridgeshire Dykes (Malim 1996). West Wansdyke, south of Bath in Somerset, seems likely to have been another, though its precise political role is perhaps too easily assumed to be associated with a battle recorded as taking place in 577, which might have established a new power to the north. It raises the issue of reuse of hill forts, as it runs between some, so they may have been where garrisons sheltered; no kingdom would have had the manpower for more than patrols and perhaps guards at the road crossing points (Erskine 2007). That East Wansdyke is not part of the same frontier despite being more or less aligned with it is considered by Reynolds and Langlands 2006, which sees it as a contemporary of King Offa of Mercia (Hill and Worthington 2003). The Vikings rode around any such obstacles if they could not merely storm through them, so they were soon forgotten.

Bowen, H. C. The Archaeology of Bokerley Dyke. Edited by Bruce N. Eagles. London: Stationery Office, 1990.
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First investigated archaeologically by General Augustus Pitt-Rivers and then by Philip Rahtz, this defensive system has had attention also from survey work, which is presented in this volume, with excellent plans and photographs. Modern boundary changes make it seem to be a Dorset-Hampshire frontier, but more probably its post-Roman use was by Britons against Anglo-Saxons. It may have been quite effective until the 7th century, when Anglo-Saxon burial influence can be seen to its south, and it would have become redundant once the West Saxon kings took control.
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Erskine, Jonathan G. P. “The West Wansdyke: An Appraisal of the Dating, Dimensions, and Construction Techniques in the Light of Excavated Evidence.” Archaeological Journal 164 (2007): 80–108.
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Geophysical survey and excavation of several sections through the sinuous, linear, partly surviving bank and ditch clarify its route and scale. Pollen shows that it cut across arable fields at least in one part, which may suggest something done in a hurry without regard to niceties, but apart from Roman pottery in the ditch, which proves little, no dating evidence was obtained. The work involved was considerable—a ditch up to three meters deep and five meters wide implies a bank of similar scale, and extra work is implied by the possibility of a limestone facing to the bank.
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Hill, David, and Margaret Worthington. Offa’s Dyke: History and Guide. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2003.
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Tries to do too much in a short book but useful as a summary of the authors’ long-term research project involving excavating and observing sections through the great linear earthwork that was ascribed to King Offa of Mercia (757–796) by the end of the 9th century. Nothing was found to contradict this, but nor was it substantiated. The 9th-century statement may exaggerate, however, as it suggests that the dyke ran from sea to sea, echoing Hadrian’s Wall, but in fact the short length of bank along the River Wye may not be part of the same construction.
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Malim, Tim. “New Evidence of the Cambridgeshire Dykes and Worsted Street Roman Road.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 85 (1996): 27–112.
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Three more or less parallel ditches and banks aligned northeast/southeast seem to protect northern Cambridgeshire and East Anglia. Although one has a 5th-century radiocarbon date and they interrupt the passage of a Roman road, they could nevertheless have a prehistoric origin, since the kingdom of the Iron Age Iceni would have needed to defend itself much as did the Anglo-Saxons in Norfolk. As political circumstances changed, so did the role of the dykes, becoming liminal places appropriate for executions and gallows.
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Malim, Timothy, and Laurence Hayes. “The Date and Nature of Wat’s Dyke: A Reassessment in the Light of Recent Investigations at Gobowen, Shropshire.” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 15 (2008): 147–179.
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Notable for a new and a promising dating method, optically stimulated luminescence for sediments. A date range of 742–1002 is too wide for certain attribution of a particular bank to a particular ruler, and this one does not exclude a date earlier than King Offa of Mercia to its west but is a pointer toward a later one. As it seems more clearly defensive, being in short lengths linking forts, it may have been built in the 9th century against the resurgent Welsh.
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Reynolds, Andrew, and Alex Langlands. “Social Identities on the Macro Scale: A Maximum View of Wansdyke.” In People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300–1300. Edited by Wendy Davies, Guy Halsall, and Andrew Reynolds, 13–44. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006.
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A linear earthwork originally investigated by General Augustus Pitt-Rivers, the East Wansdyke does not incorporate hill forts along its length so may not be the same in date or purpose as West Wansdyke. That it could be as late as the 8th century, and a frontier between Wessex and Mercia would make it a contemporary of King Offa’s work against the Welsh.
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Towns, Trade, and Transport

The administrative network established in Roman Britain was based on a hierarchy of civitates (settlements) and small towns, walled and unwalled, linked by metaled roads. The extent to which that system might have survived and the way an urban, money-using economy was reinstituted are parts of the investigation of economic and social change throughout the early Middle Ages.

Towns, Ports, and Cities

Reasons for the decline in the use of the Roman towns for urban purposes and the subsequent abandonment of a few is debated between those who see them as already practically desolate by c. 400 and those who think that the buildup inside them of “dark earth” layers and a scatter of finds shows that some people still used them and that they may have been assembly places and Christian cult sites (Henig 2007). The reappearance in England of places large enough to be called towns in the second half of the 7th century has been brought into sharp new focus by late 20th- and early 21st-century discoveries (Scull 2009). Their craft activities and overseas trade in the 8th century have been illuminated by excavation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries; four are certain: London (Malcolm and Bowsher 2003), York, Southampton, and Ipswich; a few others, such as Norwich, are possible (Hill and Cowie 2001). All were places where ships could be beached and unloaded and had Continental counterparts (Verhaege 2005). The extent to which the wics (trading centers) relied on their immediate hinterlands for food and whether demand from them changed local agricultural practices from subsistence tribute to include production for the market varies partly because of their different settings (Cowie and Blackmore 2008). Ninth-century decline has been highlighted by the discovery of the enclosure within Lundenwic, after which the commercial focus moved to within the walls of the old Roman city, as it did in York. London’s regeneration may have been slower than that of York; and despite its royal and Church presence, even Winchester may not have developed much of a market before the late 10th century (Astill 2006). Schofield and Vince 2003 is a sound guide to these developments.

Astill, Grenville. “Community Identity and the Later Anglo-Saxon Town: The Case of Southern England.” In People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300–1300. Edited by Wendy Davies, Guy Halsall, and Andrew Reynolds, 233–254. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006.
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Essay by an author well known for penetrating observations about urbanism and its regeneration. Reviews towns’ emergence from overridingly defensive places into economic and craft centers from the later 10th century as part of a system that benefited lords more than peasants, who if they lived north of the Thames went into towns for judicial purposes but if in the South still had to go to traditional meeting places and probably many smaller markets as well. Consequently York, Lincoln, and others probably developed more rapidly than Winchester or London, as the Danelaw had many fewer surviving antecedent structures still in place.
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Cowie, Robert, and Lyn Blackmore. Early and Middle Saxon Rural Settlement in the London Region. Museum of London Archaeological Service Monograph 41. London: Museum of London Archaeological Service, 2008.
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Exemplary study of how a large number of relatively small excavations and observations, mainly made during rebuilding, can produce coherent information about settlement development, especially significant because the sites both predate and are concurrent with the growth of the wic (trading center). Textile production may have fed into commercial exchange, and fish traps suggest exploitation of a food resource on a larger scale than subsistence would require.
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Henig, Martin. “‘And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times’: Christian Churches and Pagan Shrines in South-East Britain.” In Ritual Landscapes of Roman South-East Britain. Edited by David Rudling, 189–204. King’s Lynn, UK: Heritage Marketing, 2007.
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Although it is generally agreed that Roman walled towns lost their market and production roles in the 5th century if not before, many retained some sort of function as assembly places, royal centers, and perhaps as cult sites. Evidence of the survival of Christianity is exiguous, but the transition of Verulamium into St. Albans provides a possible model and would explain why, for instance, the baths at Bath continued to be visited and became the site of a 7th-century church.
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Hill, David, and Robert Cowie, eds. Wics: The Early Medieval Trading Centres of Northern Europe. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic, 2001.
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Many fairly short contributions by authors who have worked on various different aspects of the middle Anglo-Saxon trading places with gazetteers of the evidence for (and against) them. Terry O’Connor on the systems underlying their meat supplies and Lyn Blackmore on the pottery used in them are useful summaries.
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Malcolm, Gordon, and David Bowsher. Middle Saxon London: Excavations at the Royal Opera House 1989–99. Museum of London Archaeological Service Monograph 15. London: Museum of London Archaeological Service, 2003.
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Only in the mid-1980s was it realized that the emporium referred to by Saint Bede was not within the walled Roman city where St. Paul’s had been established but along the open shoreline to the west. Despite some rich 7th-century graves (see Scull 2009), the area that developed into the trading place known as Lundenwic had a working population involved in various crafts and internal and overseas trade in the 8th and 9th centuries. They lived in daub-walled buildings, whitewashed and substantial enough but not grand, along graveled streets that were probably planned on a grid with side alleys and backyards. The site may have already been operating on a reduced scale before the intrusion within part of it of a defensive ditched enclosure at some time in the 9th century; whether built by or against Viking raiders is not proven.
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Schofield, John, and Alan Vince. Medieval Towns: The Archaeology of British Towns in Their European Setting. 2d ed. London: Continuum, 2003.
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This book was first published in 1994, but the pace of excavation reporting meant that within a decade it had substantial changes for its second edition. Provides thematic treatment of urbanism and how it is revealed in the archaeological record.
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Scull, Christopher. Early Medieval (Late 5th–Early 8th Centuries AD) Cemeteries at Boss Hall and Buttermarket, Ipswich, Suffolk. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 27. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009.
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Three kilometers northwest of the center of modern Ipswich, the grave of a woman buried with a gold-and-garnet composite disk brooch, gold pendants, and a coin datable to the very end of the 7th century was inserted into a cemetery abandoned around a hundred years previously. Ipswich developed into one of the middle Anglo-Saxon trading places; on its northern fringe a 7th-century cemetery contained other people of wealth and distinction, some with clear signs of overseas connections. Were they reeves and their families, sent in to oversee the creation of the wic (trading center) to ensure its control in the king’s interest? With Lundenwic and Southampton (Hamwic) also producing rich graves and early reports hinting at some at York (Eoforwic), the author opens a whole new discussion about the foundation and the intended roles of these places.
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Verhaege, Franz. “Urban Developments in the Age of Charlemagne.” In Charlemagne: Empire and Society. Edited by Joanna Storey, 259–287. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005.
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More than just a summary of Carolingia, this shows how the English wic (trading center) sites fit into a North European context, with comparable sites from the mouth of the Seine to Ribe and Haithabu in Denmark. Kings and churches probably had roles in their foundations and control as well as merchants, among whom the Frisians were prominent. These trading places had production roles, though no more than did estate and church centers. Disruption by Viking raids could be made good, though relocation and new building types began to make the 10th-century towns recognizably different, with new ports such as Antwerp emerging.
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Beach Markets and “Prolific”/“Productive” Sites

Luxury goods are likely to have been brought into Britain and carried around it as a means of creating social networks and boosting the power of elites by enabling them to vaunt their advantages; terms such as “embedded” systems were introduced into the archaeologist’s lexicon by Hodges 1982. In the West, remarkably, contacts were renewed with the Mediterranean in the second half of the 5th century, evidenced primarily by glass and pottery (Campbell 2007). Barter is less socially embedded and is more likely to involve usable commodities than luxuries; pottery from Leicestershire could be an early example (Williams and Vince 1997). There were, however, places where goods were landed that are hard to trace archaeologically if they were only used for a few weeks a year; lost cargoes, for instance in South Devon, may be a clue to such beach markets, where people congregated to exchange that year’s production (Turner and Gerrard 2004, Gardiner, et al. 2001). Inland a spate of sites has been found, mostly by metal detection of coins and metal objects; no Anglo-Saxon term seems to exist for them, and they are referred to unsatisfactorily as “productive” or “prolific” because a lot comes from them. Some have been excavated and shown to have had settlement of some sort, but others have not produced building remains and may have been seasonal fairs. A few started in the 7th century, most are 8th or 9th, and most ceased use by the 10th, replaced by towns (Pestell and Ulmschneider 2003).

Campbell, Ewan. Continental and Mediterranean Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, AD 400–800. Research Report 157. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 2007.
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Authoritative presentation and critique of all the archaeological evidence for contacts first with the Mediterranean, c. 450–c. 550, and subsequently with Gaul. Except in Cornwall, the material nearly all comes from elite and church sites. Although a case has been made that these resulted from Byzantine attempts to reestablish political ties with Britain, the more likely explanation is trade for metals, leather, and slaves in return for wine, olive oil, dyes, and perhaps salt.
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Gardiner, Mark, Richard Cross, Nigel MacPherson-Grant, Ian Riddler, Lyn Blackmore, Derek Chick, Sheila Hamilton-Dyer, Emily Murray, and David Weir. “Continental Trade and Non-Urban Ports in Mid-Saxon England: Excavations at Sandtun, West Hythe, Kent.” Archaeological Journal 158 (2001): 161–290.
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Kent was receiving gold and other things from Francia, but where were the goods landing? Something must have gone out in exchange, yet there is no large wic (trading center) in the kingdom—Fordwich outside Canterbury may have been one, but it has not been proven to have been of any size. Finds in the dunes at Sandtun spread across a wide area, but without streets and buildings it is not directly comparable to Hamwic and others, and seasonal fishing may have been as important to it as overseas trade.
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Hodges, Richard. Dark Age Economics: Origins of Towns and Trade, AD 600–1000. London: Duckworth, 1982.
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This study remains influential, as it introduced new terminology and offered to put archaeological rather than documentary evidence at the center of explanation. It places Hamwic and others into a fresh perspective but rather ignores the role of the Church and assumes that imported goods went to kings for redistribution—but they may actually have been at least as interested in the toll income that they could derive from the merchants’ ships. Whether most of the wics (trading centers) had a serious productive as well as a trading role is also still debatable.
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Pestell, Tim, and Katharina Ulmschneider, eds. Markets in Early Medieval Europe: Trading and “Productive” Sites, 650–850. Macclesfield, UK: Windgather, 2003.
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Brings together both data from and interpretations of metal detecting and the discoveries of middle Anglo-Saxon places at which large numbers of coins and metal artifacts are being found; some are church sites, but some do not seem to be. There are more in Norfolk and Suffolk than other counties—Kent having only one. There have been studies of particular counties subsequently, but this award-winning book is where to start.
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Turner, Sam, and Sandy Gerrard. “Imported and Local Pottery from Mothecombe: Some New Finds amongst Old Material at Totnes Museum.” Devon Archaeological Society Proceedings 62 (2004): 171–175.
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South Devon’s estuaries are well sheltered, and they have provided evidence of trading among their sand dunes; tin ingots were the first clue to the possibility of such sites. It is likely that many other counties had such places, but if they were used only briefly each year, substantial building would not have taken place, and rubbish would not have accumulated. Other counties are likely to have had similar sites, mostly washed away.
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Williams, David, and Alan Vince. “The Characterization and Interpretation of Early to Middle Saxon Granitic Tempered Pottery in England.” Medieval Archaeology 41 (1997): 214–220.
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Clay containing a distinctive mineral that in England is found only in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire, was used for pot making from the 5th until around the 8th century, for cremation urns as well as for kitchenware. Although most frequent within a fifty kilometer radius of the production area, some seems to have traveled over one hundred kilometers, for instance, to London. Why did it travel so far? It is hard to see it as prestigious, sought after by elites; much of the local distribution could be explained by family contacts, but the longer distances seem likely to have involved more impersonal transactions—why was the pottery worth transporting such a long way, and for what was it exchanged?
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Coins

For a Europe-wide perspective on coins up to the end of the 10th century, Grierson and Blackburn 1986 remains authoritative, though written before the main flood of metal-detected finds. The Festschrift for Marion Archibald is particularly, though certainly not solely, useful for the essays on the 5th to 7th centuries (Cook and Williams 2006). Another leading numismatist takes up the story of minting and coin distribution in England (Metcalf 1992–1993); the story is pursued in essays in Abramson 2008. For the following centuries, there are two syntheses (Metcalf 1998a, Metcalf 1998b), with Graham-Campbell 2001 a helpful introduction to the effects that Scandinavian control brought to the Danelaw.

Abramson, Tony, ed. Two Decades of Discovery. Studies in Early Medieval Coinage 1. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2008.
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A range of papers explores new discoveries and interpretations of the late 7th- and 8th-century silver sceattas (pennies). Michael Metcalf surveys the scene since 1994 and what more can be said about minting in various kingdoms. Ian Wood and Anna Gannon both consider the coins’ Christian and other iconographies, a topic on which the latter has written an important book, showing how Mediterranean ideas rather than Germanic ones can be seen. Richard Hodges defends his views on the role of the wic (trading center) sites against attack by new data.
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Cook, Barrie, and Gareth Williams, eds. Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c. AD 500–1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2006.
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Once it was no longer imported, the Roman copper-alloy coinage would quickly have fallen into disuse, having little intrinsic value and no authority underlying it to ensure its acceptance (Sam Moorhead). Silver siliquae were still valuable and may have been clipped to keep enough in circulation—though why would anyone accept something so obviously not worth its face value?—and gold solidi, unclipped, were worth their weight in troubled times. A hoard found at Patching, Sussex, in 1997, had solidi minted after c. 470, but unlike earlier “Romano-British” hoards that often had plate as well, Patching had two gold rings and other objects, a sign of different approaches to treasure (Richard Abdy, Richard Abdy and Gareth Williams). On later coinage, the late Elizabeth Pirie contributed a paper on her lifetime study; the sceattas (pennies) of later 8th-century Northumbria and its 9th-century stycas were effectively the first post-Roman base-metal coins in England.
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Graham-Campbell, James. “The Dual Economy of the Danelaw.” British Numismatic Journal 71 (2001): 50–59.
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A short essay on the role of bullion as augmenting minted coins in northern and eastern England, with ingots, rings, and Arabic dirhams as well as Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian coins being found, suggesting that at least into the 920s weights of precious metals were used for trade and other payments.
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Grierson, Philip, and Mark Blackburn. Medieval European Coinage. Vol. 1, The Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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Magisterial sweep across the early medieval coinages of Europe from Italy westward. Although silver and copper alloy were still minted in Italy, most areas could only sustain a very fitful output of gold. Silver for coins in northern Europe was revived in the later 7th century, as gold supplies dwindled.
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Metcalf, D. M. Thrymsas and Sceattas in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Vols. 1–3. London: Royal Numismatic Society and Ashmolean Museum, 1992–1993.
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Much more than a museum catalogue, these volumes have drawings and photographs of just about every type of coin and maps of their distributions, from the 7th-century gold thrymsas to the late 7th- and 8th-century silver sceattas (pennies). The author’s long-held maximalist view of the number of coins in circulation, based on the possible production from each different die, is now supported by the increasing number of metal-detected finds. Even thrymsas circulated as currency, not just as prestigious ornaments, although many were indeed worn as jewelry, unlike the much more numerous sceattas, only a few of which are in graves. Sceattas facilitated trade between strangers at the wics (trading centers) and “prolific” sites. Doubts remain over whether they ceased to be minted before broader-flan pennies appeared and what any hiatus would imply for trade fluctuations.
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Metcalf, D. M. An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Coin Finds c. 973–1066. Oxford: Royal Numismatic Society and Ashmolean Museum, 1998a.
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Leaving the rest of the 10th century to its fate, the author resumes his story at the time that coins first uniformly had their mint names struck on them. This allows higher precision to be accorded to discussions of circulation from known centers, the number of moneyers and dies per mint, and because of regular issuing of new types, dates. As in all his previous work, the author’s maps allow the distribution data to be seen.
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Metcalf, D. M. “The Monetary Economy of Ninth-Century England South of the Humber: A Topographical Analysis.” In Kings, Currency, and Alliances: History and Coinage of Southern England in the Ninth Century. Edited by Mark A. S. Blackburn and David N. Dumville, 167–197. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1998b.
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Broad-flan silver pennies show trade continuing in the wics (trading centers) and at the “prolific sites” in much the same areas as the earlier sceattas (pennies), though if fewer discoveries do not merely reflect fewer losses because the coins were easier to handle, a falloff can be seen, particularly after the mid-9th century. King Alfred had enough bullion to raise the silver content in the alloys back up to a respectable level.
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Materials and Indigenous Production

Various metals were available in early medieval Britain, but gold and silver may have been too difficult to extract and were imported, like garnets and other gemstones. Iron ore in gravels, ferruginous stone, and bogs is widely found but often difficult to separate from whatever it is trapped with; Haslam 1998 is a good account of smelting ovens. Lead became more in demand as church use proliferated, but extraction sites are known from documents, not archaeology, though rich burials in the Peak District may have benefited from it (Loveluck 1995). Tin is known from a few ingots at beach markets. Pewter, an alloy of the two, became common for trinkets in the urban markets of the late Saxon period (Egan 2009). Salt was produced in post-Roman Droitwich (Hurst 1997), but extraction from seawater is known only from documents (Keen 1988). Quarried stone became widely used in the later part of the period, most earlier churches relying on Roman ruins (Parsons 1991, Eaton 2000). (Timber, animal products, and glassmaking are reviewed in Artifacts.)

Eaton, Tim. Plundering the Past: Roman Stonework in Medieval Britain. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2000.
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With a few exceptions, churches were built using stone and brick gathered from Roman structures until the 10th century. This was not only because it was economic or the skill to open new quarries was unknown but because the Roman past carried overtones of awe and authority.
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Egan, Geoff. “Material Concerns: Non-Ceramic Finds c. 1050–1500.” In Reflections: 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology, 1957–2007. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 30. Edited by Roberta Gilchrist and Andrew Reynolds, 289–303. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009.
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Mainly about the Norman and later periods but starts with pewter trinkets in London, such as the Cheapside hoard of brooches and beads.
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Haslam, Jeremy. “A Middle Saxon Iron Smelting Site at Ramsbury, Wiltshire.” Medieval Archaeology 42 (1998): 1–68.
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Although there is plenty of evidence of early Anglo-Saxon iron smithing, the smelting of ore into the raw iron supplied to the craft workers is confined to sites in Essex and Dorset in the early 21st century. A burgeoning in the middle period is witnessed by several sites, of which the complex close to a major church, suggesting an estate center, at Ramsbury is the most complete. The ovens were mostly straightforward bowl furnaces, but at least one had an outlet to let the slag run out, enabling more continuous production. Shaft furnaces seem to have developed further in the late Saxon period at other sites.
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Hurst, J. D., ed. A Multi-Period Salt Production Site at Droitwich: Excavations at Upwich. Research Report 107. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 1997.
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It was not certain that salt production continued after the Roman period at the brine springs in Worcestershire, but excavations of lead vats and boiling troughs, with early Anglo-Saxon radiocarbon dates, suggest that there was no major disruption, although volumes may have reduced. Documentary evidence shows distribution to the shire center and thereafter along various saltways.
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Keen, Laurence. “Coastal Salt Production in Norman England.” Anglo-Norman Studies 11 (1988): 133–179.
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Charters reveal south and east coast salt production as early as the 7th century, but any remains have been lost to later workings and the tides.
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Loveluck, Christopher P. “Acculturation, Migration, and Exchange: The Formation of an Anglo-Saxon Society in the English Peak District, AD 400–700.” In Europe between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. British Archaeological Reports International Series 617. Edited by John Bintliff and Helena Hamerow, 84–98. Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1995.
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Gold necklaces and stone carvings indicate wealth in the Derbyshire Peak District in the 7th and 8th centuries, and control of lead supplies by the local elite seems the likely explanation. Documents show that lead was in demand.
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Parsons, David, ed. Stone Quarrying and Building in England, AD 43–1525. Chichester, UK: Phillimore, 1991.
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Different authors extol the virtues of limestone, flint, and other British materials. The editor’s brief summary of Anglo-Saxon use is a basic starting point, now augmented by work on sculpture as well as building. Published in association with the Royal Archaeological Institute.
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Transport

Distribution of artifacts, from great square-headed brooches to Charnwood Forest pottery, shows use of internal transport systems, though the degree to which any single route, be it prehistoric track or paved Roman road, sea or waterway, is hard to ascertain (Huggett 1988). Anglian use of Catterick was probably because of its place on a Roman road, and the Staffordshire hoard was found within a stone’s throw of another. When bridges collapsed, the roads were often diverted to a ford away from the narrow crossing point that bridge builders would select, but place-names reveal how many there were (Harrison 2004). The assumption that ridgeway routes provided long-distance contacts has been called into question (Harrison 2003). Use of stirrups in the late part of the period shows that riding was an everyday activity (Williams 1997), though cart use remains immeasurable. Use of waterways, on the other hand, has probably been underestimated (Blair 2007). Slow-moving rivers and creeks could be used for punting quite heavy loads, and for coastal and estuary work the heavy-keeled Graveney boat was solid enough for loads of a few tons—and perhaps to cross the Channel if reasonable weather was expected (Marsden 1997). Distribution of stone from quarries provides valuable information for the later period (Parsons 1991).

Blair, John, ed. Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007.
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This contribution to the Medieval History and Archaeology series considers the evidence for transport by river and artificial channels, some of which are likely to be Anglo-Saxon. Although much of the evidence is documentary, the editor shows how stone and pottery distributions indicate the primacy of waterways. On his map, he usefully puts the evidence for the transport of salt from Droitwich, which was certainly using carts and pack animals though it was loaded onto boats at rivers.
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Harrison, David. The Bridges of Medieval England: Transport and Society 400–1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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London Bridge has been shown to use timbers felled between 987 and 1032, but archaeological evidence of other Anglo-Saxon bridges is practically nil, and the word bryg usually means “causeway” leading to a ford. Although most known bridges can be shown to be Norman or later, Anglo-Saxon travelers had plenty of viable fords to use. At Rochester, maintenance of a timber bridge was a communal responsibility, so other places may have had the same duties.
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Harrison, S. “The Icknield Way: Some Queries.” Archaeological Journal 160 (2003): 1–22.
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Earlier scholars assumed that this route was prehistoric and had been a means of penetration inland from the east coast by raiders and settlers. This paper questions whether it existed in a continuous form.
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Huggett, Jeremy W. “Imported Grave Goods and the Early Anglo-Saxon Economy.” Medieval Archaeology 32 (1988): 63–98.
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Distribution maps of 5th- to 7th-century artifacts reflect their different values but also show that goods, albeit light ones, were traveling over long distances. Amber beads were getting from the east coast into the south Midlands and beyond, for instance, and must have been taken overland.
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Marsden, Peter. English Heritage Book of Ships and Shipwrecks. London: Batsford, 1997.
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Although this covers the whole Middle Ages, it is a useful brief introduction to such matters as how to propel a flat-bottomed punt and how much load the Graveney boat could have carried. It also summarizes evidence from scattered finds of rudders, grappling irons, and the like. References for these, shipbuilding, the racehorse vessel at Sutton Hoo, and Viking ships are included.
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Parsons, David, ed. Stone Quarrying and Building in England, AD 43–1525. Chichester, UK: Phillimore, 1991.
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It is one thing to quarry stone or to remove it from ruins, quite another to transport it to where it is required. Carts must have been used, and the amount of stone carried overland is considerable. Longer journeys could be made more easily by water, which benefited the quarries at Barnack, Northamptonshire, close to a network of fenland rivers. Published in association with the Royal Archaeological Institute.
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Williams, David. Late Saxon Stirrup-Strap Mounts: A Classification and Catalogue. Research Report 111. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 1997.
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Realization that a 10th- and 11th-century artifact was neither rare nor used for the esoteric purpose of bookbinding but for joining stirrups to their straps has shown that many more people were riding horses than previously appreciated. Metal-detectorist finds continue to add to a large corpus; typically for the late period, they were not made of precious metal but show considerable skill in the casting of copper alloy.
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Artifacts

Lucy 2000 is a comprehensive short guide to the early period’s artifacts, Hinton 2005 takes a longer time span, and Leahy 2003 summarizes production methods. The catalogues published to accompany three great exhibitions held at the British Museum provide the best idea of the range of high-class 7th-century and later material available in post-Roman Britain, from gold and silver jewelry and coins to manuscripts and sculpture (Backhouse, et al. 1984, Webster and Backhouse 1991, Youngs 1989). The first two centuries of the period have not been favored with an exhibition, and the Ashmolean Museum’s two catalogues serve instead; they lack the sumptuous color pictures of the British Museum’s but are more inclusive, allowing in a few pots (MacGregor 1997, MacGregor and Bolick 1993).

Backhouse, Janet, Derek H. Turner, and Leslie Webster, eds. The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art, 966–1066. London: British Museum, 1984.
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From the silver, gold, and niello of the 9th-century “Trewhiddle style” to the beginnings of the Romanesque, this catalogue set a high standard for its successors both in choice and quality of illustrations and in the learned commentaries. The period included the late 10th-century monastic Reform movement, which led to the production of gold-enhanced gospel and prayer books, with major centers at Winchester and Canterbury.
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Hinton, David A. Gold and Gilt, Pots and Pins: Possessions and People in Medieval Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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One of the Medieval History and Archaeology series, dealing with things used in Britain as a whole, not only during the Anglo-Saxon period.
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Leahy, Kevin. Anglo-Saxon Crafts. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2003.
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A practical guide to the various manufacturing techniques for all the raw materials available to the Anglo-Saxons, from timber to metal, clay, textiles, and leather. Very useful line drawings, particularly for those who find it difficult to think in three dimensions about molds and so on.
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Lucy, Sam. The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death: Burial Rites in Early England. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2000.
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As well as discussion of graves, this book contains a useful introduction to the different types of artifact found in some of them and their distributions and possible affiliations.
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MacGregor, Arthur. A Summary Catalogue of the Continental Archaeological Collections (Roman Iron Age, Migration Period, Early Medieval). British Archaeological Reports International Series 674. Oxford: Archaeopress, 1997.
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No museum can have an entirely representative collection, particularly of overseas material, but the Ashmolean has more than most, and because this catalogue shows things of varying quality it is a good way of seeing what is and is not paralleled in Britain. It ranges from Scandinavia to Italy with a good selection of objects from France.
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MacGregor, Arthur, and Ellen Bolick. A Summary Catalogue of the Anglo-Saxon Collections (Non-Ferrous Metals). British Archaeological Reports International Series 230. Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1993.
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A good assemblage of 5th- to 7th-century grave finds to read after Lucy 2000. Each artifact type is introduced with a clear explanation. Although not totally comprehensive, the museum is strong in Kentish- and East Anglian– as well as Oxford-area material. It is a pity that there was no follow-up volume with ironwork and pottery, since that would have taken the examples beyond the graves and into the settlements.
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Webster, Leslie, and Janet Backhouse, eds. The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600–900. London: British Museum, 1991.
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From the gold and garnets of Sutton Hoo to the gold, enamel, and rock crystal of the Alfred Jewel, with authoritative essays and catalogue entries. This was the first outing for such pieces as York’s Coppergate helmet, proudly placed on the cover, or the six brooches from Pentney, Norfolk. Held in the early 21st century, the exhibition would have to include many other new discoveries, such as the Staffordshire hoard, but it is arguable whether these random finds add greatly to understanding of the history or art styles of their time. This catalogue’s particular contribution was to bring out the high quality of work done in Mercia in the 8th century.
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Youngs, Susan, ed. “The Work of Angels”: Masterpieces of Celtic Metalwork, 6th–9th Centuries AD. London: British Museum, 1989.
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This exhibition was generously supported by the National Museum of Ireland as well as the National Museums of Scotland and the British Museum, so it brought together for the first time a full array of material from both sides of the North Sea, allowing similarities and contrasts to be seen—and really seen, because of the superb quality of the photographs and drawings. Also welcome was a clear technical account of manufacturing processes by Paul Craddock.
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Finding and Recording

The earliest discoveries of Anglo-Saxon artifacts were made by chance, such as that of the Alfred Jewel in 1693 by a now anonymous laborer. Barrow opening then revealed graves, including some that were not recognized as Anglo-Saxon; only during the 19th century did work start to become a bit more systematic (Southworth 1990). Artifacts from graves are varied; excavations of settlement sites provide a range of information for the whole period, both rural and urban (Biddle 1990, Rogers 1993). In the late 20th and early 21st centuries the growth of the metal-detecting hobby produced many things that might otherwise not have been recovered, such as the Staffordshire hoard, and not only have new sites been identified but for the mid-Anglo-Saxon period a whole new class of site has been discovered: the little-understood “prolific” (or “productive”) places where quantities of coins and other metal items have been found, though not always fully reported (Pestell and Ulmschneider 2003). A measure of the increase is that in 1980 only one object comparable to the Alfred Jewel had been discovered; in the early 21st century there are at least another four, only one of which is from an excavation, the rest all from metal detection (Hinton 2008).

Biddle, Martin, ed. Object and Economy in Medieval Winchester. 2 vols. Winchester Studies 7. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
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Multiauthor, sumptuously produced volumes resulting from the internationally famous excavations that set new standards for large-scale urban and church archaeology. The range of sites is reflected in the range of finds, from the highest ecclesiastical art to the meanest tin chain link. The former are mostly late Anglo-Saxon, as are some of the most eye-catching secular objects, but the coverage extends into the Norman period and beyond.
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Hinton, David A. The Alfred Jewel. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2008.
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Describes the most famous individual Anglo-Saxon object, discusses the interpretations that arise from its gold-letter Old English inscription “Alfred ordered me to be made” and the assumption that it was therefore made for King Alfred the Great and the other gold objects that are in some way similar to it. The more of them that are found, the weaker the association with the king seems to be, yet none of the others is quite so grand nor has the name Alfred on it.
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Pestell, Tim, and Katharina Ulmschneider, eds. Markets in Early Medieval Europe: Trading and “Productive” Sites. Macclesfield, UK: Windgather, 2003.
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Brings together both data from and interpretations of metal detecting and the discoveries of middle-Anglo-Saxon places at which large numbers of coins and metal artifacts are being found; some are church sites, but some do not seem to be. There are more in Norfolk and Suffolk than other counties—Kent having only one. There have been studies of particular counties subsequently, but this award-winning book is where to start.
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Rogers, Nicola S. H. Anglian and Other Finds from Fishergate. Archaeology of York 17/9. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 1993.
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Because only a small area of the wic (trading center) was excavated in the 1980s, the report on the whole range of artifacts and their production methods other than coins is of manageable proportions. Consequently this is a good single place to find discussion of the bone, metals, glass, and textiles of the mid-Anglo-Saxon period. Metallographic analysis of the knife blades by Jerry McDonnell shows their makers’ skills in piling metal of different qualities and welding on steel edges. Some other iron pieces were plated with white metal, another skilled technique. Justine Bayley contributes on crucibles for melting and molds for casting copper alloys, one of a number of studies by her.
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Southworth, Edmund, ed. Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: A Reappraisal. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1990.
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The first two papers in this useful compendium consider the emergence of graves and the study of the objects from them as part of the development of archaeology as a discipline. Among the other papers, David Leigh summarizes his work on trying to identify use of the same punch on different objects, and he shows the skill involved in animal and human mask designs. Roger White discusses the Roman objects found in Anglo-Saxon graves and claims that they do not imply directly continuous use or similar fashions. Barry Ager outlines the chronology and typology of the 5th-century quoit brooch style, a category much discussed subsequently though not always with the same clarity.
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Inorganic Material

Many specialist studies of glass and metal artifacts have been made. Publications are on glass for drinking vessels (Evison 2008) and beads (Brugmann 2004) and on metalwork manufacturing techniques (Coatsworth and Pinder 2002). No single book deals with pottery of the whole period, but Bayley and Watson 2009 discusses the use of fired clay in metalworking. Much significant work, both on artifact types and analyses, appears within excavation reports, but only one grave has been found with a smith’s tools and other equipment (Hinton 2000).

Bayley, Justine, and Jacqui Watson. “Emerging from the Appendices: The Contribution of Scientific Examination and Analysis to Medieval Archaeology.” In Reflections: 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology, 1957–2007. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 30. Edited by Roberta Gilchrist and Andrew Reynolds, 363–381. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009.
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Bayley, who is a specialist in copper-alloy analyses, summarizes her work on the mixtures used for different purposes and the residues that they leave, or fail to leave, as some are more volatile than others, on clay crucibles and other equipment. This part of the paper has a wider role, however, as it also deals with iron, glass, tin alloys, and ceramics, with references to the most important work.
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Brugmann, Birte. Glass Beads from Anglo-Saxon Graves: A Study of the Provenance and Chronology of Glass Beads from Early Anglo-Saxon Graves, Based on Visual Examination. Oxford: Oxbow, 2004.
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An attempt to bring order from the chaos of different shapes and colors of the most common surviving early artifact. Simple rings and plain colors had little reason to change with new fashions, and no obviously significant regional distinctions appear. The larger discoid ones may also have been spindle whorls, a few are on sword hilts, and “traffic-lights” seem garish to some modern eyes but were clearly made by people with distinct skills.
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Coatsworth, Elizabeth, and Michael Pinder. The Art of the Anglo-Saxon Goldsmith. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2002.
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An interesting combined authorship, one a scholar familiar with the textual and pictorial information about production, the other a practicing jeweler. The result is a guide through the intricacies of making filigree and beaded wire, die impressing, casting, making cell work, insetting stones, and the rest of the gamut of techniques that metalsmiths managed to create from their limited range of tools.
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Evison, Vera, I. Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Glass in the British Museum. Edited by Sonja Marzinzik. British Museum Research Publication 167. London: British Museum, 2008.
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A great scholar’s final publication, with the final touches by someone of the next-but-one generation. It is a gazetteer of sites and a definitive typology of vessels and their probable dates. Also notable is a contribution by Ian C. Freestone, Michael J. Hughes, and Colleen P. Stapleton on the chemical analyses that show that the “natron” glass used in the Roman period was available throughout the 5th century, some perhaps still in raw form, most from melted-down old vessels. This then had to be eked out by the addition of small amounts of silica from sand and plant ash, so that clear colors became cloudier. Next, this was disguised by adding cobalt for brilliant blue and then iron, copper, and antimony for red, yellow, and white, in applied trails or marvered into the body. Glass becomes increasingly unlikely to survive thereafter as potash replaced soda for many uses.
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Hinton, David A. A Smith in Lindsey: The Anglo-Saxon Grave at Tattershall Thorpe, Lincolnshire. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 16. London: Society for Medieval Archaeology, 2000.
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Three different sizes of hammers, various files, including a very fine one, punches, tongs, snips, and a surprising range of scrap pieces presumably intended for reuse indicate the grave of a 7th-century smith, someone who could work in various metals. He was buried in an isolated grave, as though to keep him slightly apart from normal society because of his special skills, like the Weland of medieval legend.
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Wood and Animal Products

Conditions in some Anglo-Scandinavian deposits in York mean that the town is one of the best sources of preserved woodwork (Morris 2000) as indeed of much else, including bone and antler objects, though an overall summary on those remains the starting point (MacGregor 1985). Wood surviving as handle and other residues is reviewed in Bayley and Watson 2009. Shafts of spears were traditionally made of ash and were placed in about half of the male graves—arrows were rarely included, probably because the bow was not considered a high-status weapon. Shields were more special; although usually described as made of lime wood in poetry, in fact a range of woods was used (Dickinson and Härke 1992).

Bayley, Justine, and Jacqui Watson. “Emerging from the Appendices: The Contribution of Scientific Examination and Analysis to Medieval Archaeology.” In Reflections: 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology, 1957–2007. Edited by Roberta Gilchrist and Andrew Reynolds, 363–381. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 30. Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009.
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The second part of this paper, by Watson, summarizes the uses of different woods for a range of artifacts, including walnut and maple for drinking vessels in high-status graves at Snape and Sutton Hoo.
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Dickinson, Tania, and Heinrich Härke. Early Anglo-Saxon Shields. Archaeologia 110. London: Society of Antiquaries, 1992.
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Found in around 20 percent of male graves, the shield was clearly high status but did not have the cachet of a sword. The metal fittings are what survive rather than the timber of the boards, but diameters can sometimes be established from the imprints in graves, and mineralized remains get trapped against the metal parts. Anything over 0.8 meters in width would have been very unwieldy to handle in battle; shields might be a single board, or laminates of thinner boards, or jointed planks. Most were flat, but a few seem to have been slightly convex. Leather over the top gave extra strength.
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MacGregor, Arthur. Bone, Antler, Ivory, and Horn: The Technology of Skeletal Materials since the Roman Period. London: Croom Helm, 1985.
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Animal bone was used for a range of mostly small artifacts; anyone might whittle a simple pin, but a comb needed specialist skill as it was made by sawing a series of bone plates with teeth riveted to a harder antler connecting strip. Antler was also for handles and dies—indeed was a rival to iron for anything small where hardness was needed. The bones of beached whales could be carved, and their enormous vertebrae were sought as chopping blocks. Elephant ivory from Africa gave way to walrus from the far north, both always valuable. Horn was mostly for drinking from, though it was one of the few accessible slightly transparent materials.
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Morris, Carole A. Craft Industry and Everyday Life: Wood and Woodworking in Anglo-Scandinavian and Medieval York. Archaeology of York 17. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 2000.
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Just as some bone tools could be made by anybody with a knife, so wooden things could be homemade—but turning bowls and other things on a lathe, coopering upright staves into a barrel or a churn by binding them with withies (iron came later), basketry, or splitting shingles for roofs were specialist crafts, as was the fashioning of a 9th-century saddle bow. Hard wood was as good as iron even for tools like shovels. Some things were painted, including red for a child’s top.
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Textiles and Skins

As so many metal artifacts bedecked clothing, two studies of costume and dress are welcome for showing the materials, techniques of production, and styles worn, with fine linen and woolen cloths available and silk making its first appearance in the 7th century (Owen-Crocker 2004, Rogers 2007). The Bayeux Tapestry, from the very end of the period, is really an embroidery (Hicks 2006) using plainer materials than the Llan-Gors discovery (Granger-Taylor and Pritchard 2001). An up-to-date bibliography of textiles is Coatsworth and Owen-Crocker 2007. Other organic materials include furs and skins used for trousers and other costumes as well as for scabbards, purses, and bookbindings (Cameron 1998).

Cameron, Esther, ed. Leather and Fur: Aspects of Early Medieval Trade and Technology. London: Archetype, 1998.
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Various essays, including one by the editor herself, who has made other contributions to the topic. James Howard-Johnson makes the interesting contrast between civilized Romans who would have been appalled to wear animal fur and barbarian Germans and Arabs who did not suffer from such nice sentiment. James Spriggs considers the limited evidence for beavers in Britain, whose teeth served as pendants and whose skin provided the bag for the lyre found at Sutton Hoo.
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Coatsworth, Elizabeth, and Gale R. Owen-Crocker. Medieval Textiles of the British Isles, AD 450–1100: An Annotated Bibliography. British Archaeological Reports International Series 445. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007.
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The introductory matter outlines techniques, different types of material—wool, flax, silk, gold thread—manufacturing techniques, and conditions necessary for preservation. This is followed by a list in alphabetical order by author of all discoveries of textiles and equipment. Well illustrated, so helpful on stitching methods and the like.
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Granger-Taylor, Hero, and Frances Pritchard. “A Fine Quality Insular Embroidery from Llangors Crannog.” In Pattern and Purpose in Insular Art: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Insular Art, Held at the National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff 3–6 September 1998. Edited by Mark Redknap, et al., 91–99. Oxford: Oxbow, 2001.
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Waterlogged conditions at Wales’s only crannog preserved a substantial part of a fine linen garment embellished with silk, Byzantine in appearance. It could have been a gift, such as a silk robe that Asser records as being given to him by King Alfred.
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Hicks, Carola. The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece. London: Chatto and Windus, 2006.
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Among many books and articles, this stands out for putting the famous embroidery into its historical context and then for telling its subsequent history and vicissitudes. Almost everything about it is debatable, and this account does not take a partisan line. Although English work and design are usually now accepted, there are French elements underlying the language of the texts. (For a full bibliography and technical details, see Coatsworth and Owen-Crocker 2007).
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Owen-Crocker, Gale R. Dress in Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2004.
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Revised and enlarged edition of an earlier book, enhanced by color pictures. Shows how linen undergarments and the woolen peplos were worn by women, with veils or other headgear, edging braids, and dyes depending on age at death, status, and region. Men’s costumes are harder to identify as they were rarely buried with the metal fittings that show where dress was fastened or may preserve mineralized remains of the weave. As unfurnished burial became the norm, so the evidence becomes slanted to illustrations of and texts about the elites.
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Rogers, Penelope Walton. Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, AD 400–700. Council for British Archaeology Research Report 145. York, UK: Council for British Archaeology, 2007.
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Focused on the early part of the period and has more on production than Owen-Crocker 2004. Particularly important for its discussion of regions in which different dress styles were worn, agreeing with other distributions that fluidity was considerable, Kent was different, and age was expressed in costume in much the same way as it was in the objects with which people were buried.