Sutton Hoo ship burial

The cemetery at Sutton Hoo, above the estuary of the River Deben, held some twenty mounds reserved for people of exceptional rank and was used in this way from about 575 to 625; the ship burial under Mound 1 appears to have been its last great funeral. An oak ship some 27 metres long, with places for perhaps forty oarsmen, was hauled up from the river and lowered into a trench, a timber chamber was built amidships, and a mound was raised over it. The wood rotted away in the acid sand but left its imprint, with the iron rivets still in place. The landowner Edith Pretty engaged the self-taught archaeologist Basil Brown, who opened smaller, long-robbed mounds in 1938 and in May 1939 began on the largest, finding the undisturbed chamber.

No bones survived, though soil analyses later detected phosphate traces of a body. The grave goods included a crested iron helmet with a face mask, related to helmets from Vendel and Valsgärde in Sweden; gold fittings by a master goldsmith — a great buckle, and shoulder clasps and sword mounts set with garnet cloisonné; a shield, a mail coat, a lyre and drinking horns; a purse with thirty-seven gold tremisses, each from a different Frankish mint; and Mediterranean silver, among it a large dish with the control stamps of Emperor Anastasius I (491–518), a nest of ten bowls and two spoons inscribed with the names Paul and Saul, perhaps a baptismal gift.

The coins date the burial to the 620s or a little earlier — Gareth Williams of the British Museum narrowed it to 610–635 — which fits the death of Rædwald around 624. Overlord of the southern English kingdoms from about 616, Rædwald had been baptized in Kent but, according to Bede, kept a Christian and a pagan altar in the same temple. His identification, proposed by H. M. Chadwick in 1940, is still favoured but unproven: other East Anglian kings, such as his son Eorpwald, have been suggested too, and some scholars doubt that the dead man was a king at all. The finds reveal a court with contacts from Sweden to the eastern Mediterranean and have often been compared with the world of Beowulf; most of them are now in the British Museum.