Whilst holidaying in the Colchester area for a few days the wife and I visited the Saxon Ship burial site at Sutton Hoo. The 7th century site is the nearest thing we have to archaeological evidence of the first king of England, possibly the Anglo-Saxon king, Raedwald.
The Sutton Hoo area is the stuff of legends and those legends have given it a reputation for mystery, the sinister and even the preternatural. The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the Sutton Hoo treasure were initiated by the visions of a psychic on the eve of the second world war, circumstances which helped recall the legend that King Arthur would return from his grave in his country's hour of need. Arthur may actually have been a Celt battling against the invading Saxon’s but the language of myth and legend does not make fine distinctions; rather it is the vague associative and symbolic language of dreams. Perhaps because a pagan ambiance still haunted the mounds of Sutton Hoo it seems to have become an execution & burial ground for miscreants during the mediaeval 9th and 10th centuries. Much later in the 20th century the general area had a military presence with all the associated inscrutability of the armed forces. The wider environs played host to the famous Rendlesham forest UFO incident of Christmas 1980.
Truth, legend and myth form an inseparable union at Sutton Hoo. When the Romans left Britain in AD 410, the commentary of history was interrupted for a while and an information black-out descended. When history did eventually re-emerge in Bede’s writings we find Anglo-Saxons inhabiting these Islands. The Anglo-Saxons connect Britain to Iron Age prehistory via their link with migrations from the continent. Effectively then, the “dark ages” represent a time when prehistory almost reasserted itself in England.
When I look at the mounds at Sutton Hoo, which have been deliberately constructed high above the Deben Estuary to be visible*, I wonder if their connection with prehistory might throw light on the beliefs of the much more distant and mysterious pre-roman cultures who pockmarked Southern England with many earthworks. Ultimately, however, Anglo-Saxon “prehistory”, cheated the black-out of the dark ages and emerged via the back door: When the Anglo-Saxons became Christianized and learnt to write, their oral traditions were caught in the net of history by a new generation of Anglo-Saxon scribes such as Bede. A few words of history (or even of legend) is worth a thousand archeological artifacts.
The oral traditions of the Saxons, which would have been told and retold in the heady fireside atmosphere of their thatched halls, may not be the most reliable of sources. Moreover, Bede glorified this history by depicting it as the out working of destiny rather than serendipity. But to be fair to Bede when history is observed retrospectively it does look like destiny; we can see the precursors and antecedents that the chaotic vicissitudes of time uses as the seeds of great things. It is very tempting to feel you are part of a people destined for greatness as the story of Israel indicates. Small beginnings are thus glorified. To Raedwald's subjects his glory would be easy to interpret as part of a Divine plan, although in the context of his times he is seen to be a small time king. But in the wider perspective of world history he is not insignificant: In Raedwald prehistory was emerging into history and paganism into Christianity; these were the seeds of the world to come. That the minor language Raedwald spoke was in due course to become a world language propagated by a seafaring nation is fittingly portended in Sutton Hoo’s burial ship. Thus the events in this corner of the England 1300 years ago stand in the main stream of English history, even world history. As the National Trust guide to Sutton Hoo says:
...they formed the nation which fought under Harold II at Hastings in 1066, were ruled by Norman Lords, and were gradually awarded rights by royal charted and won them in Parliament. Gathering with other ancient peoples, they made Britain a world power.
The Anglo-Saxon governmental ethos eventually merged with that of the Normans to give us the institutions of a country that lead the world out of rural arcadia into the modern industrial age. It is thus very easy to impute mystique to the site at Sutton Hoo and see the portents of destiny. This in turn helps fuel the legends which surround it; from the ghostly psychic visions to those close encounters of the second kind.
Gulls wheel over the mounds at Sutton Hoo during our visit
* "Hoo" comes from "haugh", which translates as "high"
