The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial (Mound 1)

This is not a hoard in the strict sense, and that is exactly why it belongs on this site. A hoard is buried to be hidden, usually with the hope of coming back for it. The treasure under Mound 1 was buried as a public act, in front of mourners, inside a ship hauled up from the River Deben, and nobody ever meant to dig it up. That difference mattered in law: in 1939 a treasure trove inquest decided that because the objects had been buried without any intention of recovery, they were not treasure trove and belonged to the landowner. Sutton Hoo is also the yardstick against which every other Anglo-Saxon treasure, the Staffordshire Hoard above all, is measured.

In 1938 Edith Pretty, owner of the Sutton Hoo estate above the Deben, engaged Basil Brown, a self-taught excavator working for Ipswich Museum, to open the burial mounds near her house. The smaller mounds he dug first had been robbed. In May 1939 he turned to the largest, Mound 1, and within days found iron ship rivets still in their rows. The timber had rotted completely, but the sand preserved its ghost: a clinker-built rowing ship about 27 metres long. Once the scale of the find was clear, a team led by Charles Phillips took over the burial chamber, recording and lifting its contents in a few tense weeks before the outbreak of war.

The chamber had been built amidships and later crushed when its roof collapsed under the mound. Even so, its contents were spectacular. At the west end lay a crested iron helmet with a face mask, a huge round shield, and a whetstone sceptre topped by a bronze stag. Where a body would have been lay a sword with gold and garnet fittings, and a suite of matching jewellery: a hollow great gold buckle, a pair of hinged shoulder-clasps for a leather cuirass, and a purse-lid of gold and garnet cellwork. The purse held 37 Frankish gold coins, three blanks and two small ingots. Around them were silver from the eastern Mediterranean, including a great dish stamped in the reign of Emperor Anastasius I and two spoons inscribed PAULOS and SAULOS, as well as drinking horns, cauldrons, buckets, a lyre, a mail coat and textiles.

No skeleton was found. Acid sand dissolves bone, and later soil analysis detected phosphate consistent with a decayed body, so most scholars accept that this was a grave rather than a memorial. The dead man is unnamed. Since 1940 the favourite candidate has been Rædwald, king of the East Angles and overlord of the southern English, who died around 624; the coin dating fits him, though his son Eorpwald and other candidates cannot be ruled out, and some historians think the case for Rædwald is weak.

The gold work is of a quality without parallel elsewhere in Europe at the time, and the burial shows how far an East Anglian court could reach: Swedish-style helmet and shield ornament, Frankish coins, Byzantine silver and British enamelled hanging bowls all went into one grave. The objects went into storage for the duration of the war, then were conserved and studied by the British Museum, where the helmet and sceptre were reconstructed. Excavations in the 1960s and 1980s, and more recent work, have filled in the wider cemetery.

Comparing Sutton Hoo with true hoards is instructive. Staffordshire contains far more gold but no complete object; Sutton Hoo preserves whole objects in their arrangement, letting archaeologists see how the war-gear stripped and buried in hoards was actually worn.