30 August 2023
By Chris Dodd
Chris Dodd mixes with the Anglo-Saxons.
Writing this, I am looking across the River Deben towards gentle humps of tawny fields peeping through thick woods under a wide Suffolk sky. I am sitting in a riverside hideaway that I have known since I was a student. The Deben flows for 34 miles from Melton and spills into the sea at the giant container port of Felixstowe. On its way it passes through the ancient port of Woodbridge where it becomes tidal. The navigation channel then sweeps through the yacht anchorage at the hamlet of Waldringfield, continues past the Rocks, the Ramsholt Arms to Felixstowe Ferry where it crosses the bar. It is a popular waterway for a multitude of sea birds, wild swimmers and seals.
The Orwell and the Stour rivers, like the Deben, shake tides with the sea nearby. The town of Felixstowe shows off its nineteenth century pleasures of beaches, sandy and shingle, seaside gardens, lunch and dinner venues and an antiquarian bookshop that is cavernous and maze-like. The container port of Felixstowe eyeballs the ferry port of Harwich, a passenger gateway to the Continent, across the mouths of Orwell and Stour,
Waldringfield lies four miles south of Woodbridge on the Deben. It gets its name from ‘open land of the family or followers of a man called Waldheim’ and is recorded in the 1086 Domesday Book as Waldringfield. Its church is fourteenth century. Iron Age shards of pottery have been found there. Its industrial heyday came in the 1860s when coprolite was dug up from the beach and shipped to nearby Ipswich for processing as fertiliser.
This trade fizzled out early in the twentieth century, but a cement industry came on stream in the 1890s whereby river mud was mixed with chalk that was shipped in from the Medway, an activity that lasted into the 1900s. Nowadays Waldringfield draws wild swimmers, paddle boarders, paddlers, canoeists, scullers and crews of rowing fours who slip down with the tide from Woodbridge, and crowds of dinghy sailors from the flotilla-full Waldringfield Sailing Club.
Being from Bristol, my youthful landscape was the Avon Gorge, the Mendips, the Quantocks, the Cotswolds and spectacular sunsets over the Severn estuary, I always regarded East Anglia as rather flat in more than one sense. But every now and again the Suffolk landscape jolts a memory of the area’s long and deep medieval roots, none more so than the unique phenomenon across the Deben from where I sit. Not far upstream towards Woodbridge are some fields that have mounds. They are the National Trust’s burial ground known as Sutton Hoo.
One such recent reminder is the granting of protection as a scheduled monument to the 19th century steamship Lady Alice Kenlis. She was launched in Glasgow in 1867, designed by Hercules Linton who also designed the tea clipper Cutty Sark. Lady Alice carted cattle, cargo and people between England, Scotland and Ireland and was briefly a ferry before being converted into a dredger based in Bristol. She was partly dismantled in the 1930s and, now defined as a hulk, towed to her resting place on the Deben near Woodbridge. Her importance lies in her designer, one of the leading shipwrights of her era.
The Lady Alice Kenlis rests on mud belonging to the National Trust. When diggers began to investigate the nearby burial mounds in the 1930s, they gradually came upon the rarest of archaeological finds, the most spectacular of which being the hulk that is thought to date from the seventh century known as the Sutton Hoo ship.
At various times the area around Sutton Hoo was woodland, sheep and cattle country, or small farm enclosures known as Celtic fields. Favoured crops may have been grapes and big cabbages. When the Romans departed from southern Britain after 410, Germanic tribes such as Angles and Saxons settled in the southeastern part of the island. As Roman imperial rule fizzled out, Southern Britain was divided into small independent kingdoms, while settlement in East Anglia is thought to have been early and dense, enabled by rivers including the Deben.
The Deben’s lowest convenient fording place is above Woodbridge, seven miles (11 km) from the North Sea. There are sixth-century burial grounds to the south at Rushmere, Little Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin, and Bronze Age mounds circle Brightwell Heath. Cemeteries of a similar date are found at Rendlesham and Ufford, and a ship-burial at Snape is the only comparable one with Sutton Hoo in England.
The territory between the River Orwell and the watersheds of the Alde and Deben rivers may have been a royal centre. Gipeswic (Ipswich) began its growth as a port for foreign trade early in the seventh century, Botolph’s monastery at Iken was founded in 654, and Bede identified Rendlesham as the site of Æthelwold’s royal dwelling.
The man who found the seventh century Anglo-Saxon ship buried at Sutton Hoo was Basil Brown, a self-taught archaeologist and astronomer (in Old English Sut combined with tun means ‘southern farmstead’ and hoh refers to a hill ‘shaped like a heel spur’, explains Wikipedia). Basil was born at Bucklesham near Ipswich. As a lad he studied his grandfather’s astronomical texts and he left school at the age of 12 to work on his father’s farm at Rickinghall, where he was often seen digging in fields.
Brown turned himself into a self-made polymath at evening classes, earning a certificate for drawing and diplomas with distinction for astronomy, geography and geology with the help of the Harmsworth Self-Educator correspondence college. He taught himself Latin, French, Greek, German and Spanish. Although declared medically unfit for war service, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as a volunteer from 1918 to 1919. He made a modest living teaching astronomy while pursuing his archaeological interests.
Meanwhile Edith May Pretty, who owned the ‘southern farmstead shaped like a heel spur’ near the river Deben, became curious about the eighteen mounds on her land. Ipswich Museum sent Basil Brown to investigate in 1939. He excavated three burial mounds that he discovered had signs of robbery in medieval times, but he found Bronze Age pottery shards, a bead, a ‘Viking’ iron axe and some ship’s rivets similar to those at a ship burial site at Snape, near Aldeburgh.
In the largest mound, and now with the assistance of Pretty’s gardener John Jacobs and gamekeeper William Spooner, he came upon the biggest discovery. In the sandy soil he uncovered an impression of a 27-metre ship dating from the seventh century. A conference of museum experts eventually coordinated the work and the British Museum removed 263 items for safekeeping to Aldwych Underground station for the duration of the Second World War. The discovery of the ship contained one of the most magnificent archaeological finds in England for its size and completeness, its far-reaching connections, the quality and beauty of its contents, and for the profound interest it generated.
The Sutton Hoo grave field contained about twenty barrows, and from around 575 to 625 was reserved for people who were buried individually but accompanied by objects indicating that they had exceptional wealth or prestige. The ship grave is believed to be that of Rædwald, King of East Anglia, but the identity of its inhabitant remains a question. After the war, digs continued under Rupert Bruce-Mitford from 1965-71 and Martin Carver from 1983-92.
Although practically none of the original timber survived, the form of the ship was perfectly preserved. Stains in the sand had replaced the wood but had preserved many construction details. Nearly all of the iron planking rivets were in their original places. The original ship was found to be 27 metres (89 ft) long, pointed at either end with tall rising stem and stern posts and widening to 4.4 metres (14 ft) in the beam amidships with an inboard depth of 1.5 metres (4 ft 11 in) over the keel line.
From the keel board, the hull was constructed clinker-fashion with nine planks on either side, fastened with rivets. Twenty-six wooden ribs strengthened the form. Repairs were visible: this had been a seagoing vessel of excellent craftsmanship, but there was no descending keel. The decking, benches and mast were removed. In the fore and aft sections along the gunwales, there were oar-rests shaped like the Old English letter ‘thorn’, indicating that there may have been positions for forty oarsmen. The central chamber had timber walls at both ends and a roof, which was probably pitched.
The heavy keel-less sea-going vessel built of green oak had been hauled from the river up the hill and lowered into a prepared trench, so only the tops of the stem and stern posts rose above the land surface. After the addition of the occupant and his artifacts, an oval mound was constructed that covered the ship and rose above the horizon on the riverward side of the cemetery. The view to the river is now obscured, but the mound would have been presented as a symbol of power to those using the waterway. This appears to have been the final occasion upon which the Sutton Hoo cemetery was used for its original purpose. Long afterwards, the roof collapsed under the weight of the mound, compressing the ship’s contents into a seam of earth.
The attraction of significant sunken and wrecked ships is that their stories usually grow and change over time as archaeologists dig deeper. Examples are Brunel’s Great Britain during the years since she was towed from the Falkland Islands through the Avon Gorge for restoration in the Bristol dock where she was built; Hercules Linton’s Cutty Sark restored at Greenwich; Viking ships in Oslo, Norway, and Roskilde in Denmark; the warship Vasa that sank in 1628 on her maiden voyage off Stockholm; three Royal Navy ships at Portsmouth dockyard, Nelson’s Victory launched in 1765, Henry VIII’s Mary Rose that sank in 1545 and the fearsome Victorian iron warship launched in 1861 to discourage the French in the English Channel, HMS Warrior; the 1797 frigate USS Constitution, also known as Old Ironsides, in Boston, Massachusetts; the replica royal barge Gloriana now rowing on the tidal Thames, and the Hellenic Navy’s wonderful reconstruction of an Athenian trireme, Olympias, designed by marine architect John Coates and classicist John Morrison and now in the maritime museum in Piraeus, near Athens.
It is no surprise that the sight of the imprint of the longship in the sand gave the archaeologist Angela Care Evans the idea of creating a full-size replica. And what an adventure the replica Sutton Hoo ship is turning out to be. The answers to the three basic questions of boat design remain unanswered, at least partially: is she for speed, ferrying passengers or cargo carrying; will she row or sail on ocean, sea, river or lake; what is at hand to build her?
Work began in 2021 in the Longshed on Woodbridge’s waterfront, a shed long enough in which to build a 27-metre ship. The project is supported by a specially created charity, Sutton Hoo Ship’s Company. The volunteers constructing the replica are using oak planks and iron rivets while attempting to discover what other materials and methods were used by the seventh century shipwrights. Tim Kirk, a modern-day shipwright, has let it be known that the plans call for 80 trained rowers to find out how the ship actually moved. ‘It is really a big experimental archaeology programme,’ he said on ITV News.
As a body has not been found, there was early speculation that the ship-burial was a cenotaph, but soil analyses conducted in 1967 found phosphate traces, supporting the view that a body had disappeared in the acidic soil. The presence of a platform (or a large coffin) that was about 9 feet (2.7 m) long was indicated. An iron-bound wooden bucket, an iron lamp containing beeswax, and a bottle of north continental manufacture were close by. The objects around the body indicate that it lay with the head at the west end of the wooden structure.
Artifacts near the body have been identified as regalia, pointing to its being that of a king. Most of the suggestions for the occupant are East Anglian kings because of the proximity of the royal settlement at Rendlesham. Since 1940, when H.M. Chadwick first ventured that the ship-burial was probably the grave of Rædwald, scholarly opinion divided between Rædwald and his son (or step-son) Sigeberht. The man who was buried under Mound 1 cannot be identified, but the finger pointing at Rædwald still has widespread scholarly acceptance. From time to time, other identifications are suggested. As of 2019, the refurbished museum on the site states that the body is Rædwald while the British Museum leaves it at a ‘King of East Anglia’.
A spectacular item of evidence supporting Rædwald’s case is the iconic helmet found in the grave. It is a functional piece of defensive armour and a decorative piece of extravagant metalwork. It has become a symbol of the Early Middle Ages.
The Ship’s Company has an excellent web site on which to plot its progress, so I will leave you with a heap of questions that the shipwrights hope to answer. I look forward to the day when I shall be lolling with a pint outside the Maybush watching a mighty wooden ship slipping down the Deben, rowed by a mighty Saxon crew. And to be clear, there’s nothing ‘flat’ about East Anglia.
The Company questions:
- How fast could it go?
- How big are the waves it could cope with safely?
- What was it worth? We know the Saxon value of a sheep, so how does this compare?
- How long would it have taken to build?
- How many people rowed it (we think an ordinary crew of 28 but maybe 40 sometimes)?
- What loads could it carry?
- Were all the oars the same length?
- How did the King get ashore without getting wet?
- Did it have a sail? Would it sail well?
- How did they get it to Sutton Hoo (it’s a steep hill!)?
A play entitled The Wuffings by Ivan Cutting and Kevin Crossley-Holland and staged by Eastern Angles Theatre Company in 1997 re-imagines the Mound 1 burial. John Preston’s historical novel The Dig (2007) re-imagines the 1939 excavation when the ship was found, as does Netflix’s film adaptation of the story in 2021 starring Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes (which came in for some criticism for hinting at a love affair between Edith May and Basil). These and the video game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020) that features the landscape of the site serve to remind East Anglians that they walk on hallowed ground, as did Angles, Saxons and Vikings before them.