A HIGH-STATUS SEVENTH-CENTURY FEMALE BURIAL FROM WEST HANNEY, OXFORDSHIRE

2015 ◽  
Vol 95 ◽  
pp. 91-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Hamerow ◽  
Anni Byard ◽  
Esther Cameron ◽  
Andreas Düring ◽  
Paula Levick ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Metal Detector ◽  
Grave Goods

In 2009, a metal-detector find of a rare garnet-inlaid composite disc brooch at West Hanney, Oxfordshire, led to the excavation of an apparently isolated female burial sited in a prominent position overlooking the Ock valley. The burial dates to the middle decades of the seventh century, a period of rapid socio-political development in the region, which formed the early heartland of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. The de luxe brooch links the wearer to two other burials furnished with very similar brooches at Milton, some 10km to the east and onlyc1km from the Anglo-Saxon great hall complex at Sutton Courtenay / Drayton, just south of Abingdon. All three women must have been members of the region’s politically dominant group, known as theGewisse. The burial’s grave goods and setting add a new dimension to our understanding of the richly furnished female burials that are such a prominent feature of the funerary record of seventh-century England.

THE GOLD AND GARNET CHAIN FROM ISENBÜTTEL, GERMANY: A POSSIBLE PIN SUITE WITH ANGLO-SAXON PARALLELS

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Hilgner
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Lower Saxony ◽  
State Museum ◽  
History Of ◽  
Loop Chain ◽  
And Function

The ‘Isenbüttel gold necklace’, now in the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover, was found almost a century ago in Lower Saxony, an area with no history of early medieval gold finds or richly furnished burials. As no parallels are known for the object, scholars have long debated the dating, provenance and function of this unique loop-in-loop chain, with its animal-head terminals and garnet cloisonné. Recent excavations of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries dating to the seventh century have, however, added new finds to the small corpus of objects known as ‘pin suites’, consisting of comparatively short pins perhaps designed to fix a veil or a light shawl in the collar area, with ornate pinheads, linked by chains. This paper focuses on Anglo-Saxon pin suites from high-status burials of the second half of the seventh century and seeks to set the finds group in its wider social and historical context, revealing the far-reaching relationships that existed between early medieval elites.

THE CHRONOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK OF EARLY ANGLO-SAXON GRAVES AND GRAVE GOODS: NEW RADIOCARBON DATA FROM RAF LAKENHEATH, ERISWELL, SUFFOLK, AND A NEW CALIBRATION CURVE (IntCal20)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
John Hines
Keyword(s):  
Calibration Curve ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Radiocarbon Dates ◽  
Radiocarbon Data ◽  
Standard Calibration ◽  
Productive Research ◽  
Burial Grounds ◽  
National Framework ◽  
Grave Goods

Between 1998 and 2008, 450 inhumation burials of the fifth to eighth centuries ad were excavated in four separate but adjacent burial grounds within RAF Lakenheath airbase in Suffolk. Study of the evidence has been based on the typology of the national chronological framework of sixth- and seventh-century graves and grave goods published in 2013, and correlated also with a related East Anglian regional scheme. Fifty high-precision radiocarbon dates allow for thorough evaluation of the scope for applying the phase-structure and estimated date-boundaries of the national framework to this one large site. The results can be held to reproduce the core sequence of the national framework, albeit with necessary modifications that provide greater insights into the processes used to generate models of the data, besides significant modifications to the perceived date-ranges of certain artefact-types. The results have also been markedly influenced (and apparently improved) by a new standard calibration curve, IntCal20, launched in August 2020. This study thus suggests key agenda for further productive research into this contextually vital body of information.

The Burial of A Princess? The Later Seventh-Century Cemetery At Westfield Farm, Ely

2009 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 81-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Lucy ◽  
Richard Newman ◽  
Natasha Dodwell ◽  
Catherine Hills ◽  
Michiel Dekker ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Isotopic Analysis ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Anglo Saxon

AbstractThis paper reports on the excavation of a small, but high-status, later seventh-century Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Ely. Of fifteen graves, two were particularly well furnished, one of which was buried with a gold and silver necklace that included a cross pendant, as well as two complete glass palm cups and a composite comb, placed within a wooden padlocked casket. The paper reports on the skeletal and artefactual material (including isotopic analysis of the burials), and seeks to set the site in its wider social and historical context, arguing that this cemetery may well have been associated with the first monastery in Ely, founded by Etheldreda in ad 673.

scholarly journals The Trumpington Cross in context

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 7-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Lucy
Keyword(s):  
Seventh Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Contextual Associations

AbstractAn Anglo-Saxon gold and garnet cloisonné pectoral cross from a seventh-century bed burial at Trumpington, Cambridgeshire is the fifth such example to be found. Details of the contextual associations of the five crosses are used to argue that these artifacts, and other high status cross-shaped pendants, were overt Christian symbols, strongly associated with high status female burials of the later seventh century. That one of the five examples was associated with the burial of St Cuthbert is highlighted as an anomaly, and could indicate that the Cuthbert Cross may have been a gift, rather than a personal possession of the saint.

scholarly journals The Staffordshire (Ogley Hay) hoard: problems of interpretation

Antiquity ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 85 (327) ◽  
pp. 221-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Webster ◽  
Christopher Sparey-Green ◽  
Patrick Périn ◽  
Catherine Hills
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Northern European

The hoard presents us with a startling number of unfamiliar images from the Anglo-Saxon past, not least in the new icon of treasure that it presents. As the descriptions of treasure and gift-giving in Beowulf so vividly remind us, the gaining of treasure, and its corollary, gift-giving, were major preoccupations for Anglo-Saxons and their northern European contemporaries, whether Clovis, showering the crowds in Tours with gold solidi when he was created consul in 508, Oswiu attempting to buy off Penda before the Battle of Winwæd with what Bede (HE III.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969: 288–91) described as an incalculable and incredible store of royal treasures or the huge Danegelds extorted by Vikings in the tenth and early eleventh century. But until July 2009, the picture presented by the archaeological evidence for Anglo-Saxon treasure could hardly have been more different: the material remains of treasure with which we are familiar come overwhelmingly from high-status burials, or as individual gold finds without context, most of them the result of relatively recent metal-detecting activity. Only one seventh-century Anglo-Saxon gold hoard exists, from Crondall in Hampshire, dated to c. 640; but that is essentially a coin hoard, the only non-numismatic items two small clasps which must have fastened the purse or satchel containing the coins.

A Seventh-Century High-Status Settlement at Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 23-49
Author(s):  
Adam McBride ◽  
Helena Hamerow ◽  
Jane Harrison ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Geophysical Survey ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Aerial Photographs ◽  
High Status ◽  
Distinctive Type

This article reports the results of recent fieldwork carried out at Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire. The site at Long Wittenham had previously been identified from aerial photographs and LiDAR as a possible seventh-century great hall complex – a distinctive type of high-status settlement – but the site had never been ground-truthed. Fieldwork was therefore undertaken to confirm the nature and date of the Long Wittenham cropmarks, through geophysical survey, metal-detecting and three seasons of excavation. The results have confirmed the existence of high-status seventh-century buildings at Long Wittenham, but the largest building previously identified at Long Wittenham is now interpreted as a Roman enclosure, leaving the complex of buildings without an exceptionally large hall. This complicates the interpretation of the site, suggesting that Long Wittenham may have been a secondary high-status site, potentially subordinate to the great hall complex at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire.

Feasts of the Virgin in the liturgy of the Anglo-Saxon church

1984 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 209-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Seventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Temple

By the end of the Anglo-Saxon period six feasts of the Virgin were celebrated in England; this large number represents an honour granted to no other saint. The feasts in question – the Purification, Annunciation, Assumption, Nativity, Presentation in the Temple and Conception – did not originate in England, however. Before turning to the English evidence, therefore, it is necessary to consider the background of Marian feasts at Rome and elsewhere in the context of the development of ritual from the seventh century to the eleventh.

scholarly journals St Edith of Polesworth and her Cult

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
NIGEL TRINGHAM
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon

Venerated at Polesworth (Warws.) in the late Anglo-Saxon period, the identity of St Edith remains uncertain, with medieval chroniclers suggesting various candidates, but she is likely to have been a seventh-century Mercian princess, perhaps also connected with a church near Louth (Lincs.). Buried at Polesworth, where miracles were still being recorded in the thirteenth century, and perhaps with relics in the collegiate church at nearby Tamworth, her cult was very localised, with only a few outliers elsewhere in the Midlands, probably linked to the Marmion family, lords of Tamworth castle and the founders in the mid twelfth-century of a female religious house at Polesworth.

V. The Shield in the Burial Rite

Archaeologia ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 63-70
Author(s):  
Heinrich Härke
Keyword(s):  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Burial Rite ◽  
Grave Goods

Shields are among the more common grave goods in Early Anglo-Saxon burials. In the investigated sample of forty-seven cemeteries with a total of 3,814 inhumations, 317 burials (8·3 per cent) in forty-three cemeteries contained a shield (Appendix 3). The frequency of shields becomes even more apparent if it is translated into percentages of weapon burials: in England, just under half (45 per cent) of all inhumations with weapons had a shield. This proportion is significantly higher than in the contemporaneous weapon burials of Continental Saxons (18 per cent), Franks (16 per cent) and Alamanni (24 per cent; Härke 1989, table 4.2). Excavations of cremation cemeteries in England do not seem to have produced unambiguous remains of shields: the Anglo-Saxons, in contrast to the Continental Saxons, appear to have put shields only into inhumation burials.

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