Gone Medieval - Sutton Hoo

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Centuries ago, an Anglo-Saxon noble was buried within a 90-foot ship in a mound at Sutton Hoo. It serves as the richest burial ever found in northern Europe to date. Discovered in 1939, not much survived of the original ship. However, an imprint of the ship remains on the earth. In this episode, first released in November 2021, Dr. Cat Jarman is joined on the ground by Martin Carver, director of the Sutton Hoo Research Project. He shares his knowledge of the celebrated mounds and the ongoing reconstruction of the Great Ship Burial.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Welcome to today's episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. This one is going to be a little bit different because today I'm out visiting a very special archaeological site, possibly the most significant early medieval site in England, in fact.

And I thought I'd take you all with me. The place I've come to is none other than Sutton Who in Suffolk, home to the very famous Anglo-Saxon burial grounds that were made even more famous by the recent film The Dig. The site has a number of large burial mounds and in the 1930s some of these were excavated for the first time including Mount 1 which contained the spectacular shipgrave dating to the early 7th century

along with a burial chamber filled with lavish grave goods including a helmet and artefacts of precious metals including many that were imported from distant lands. I've come to certain. Who today to find out more about the site because embarrassingly I actually haven't been here before but also to hear about a new and very ambitious project to reconstruct a full-scale model of the ship that was found in Mount 1. The person I'm here to meet is Professor Martin Carver from the University of York because Martin really is the ultimate Sutton Hoo expert as he

directed excavations here between 1983 and 1992 and he has written several books about the site. He's also the director of the Saxon Ship Company, the organisation that's now making the replica ship. It's quite chilly out here today, so rapid warm and come along on Martin's tour. Right, so now we've come to Sutton Who itself, so I'm so delighted to be here with you, Martin. And can you just disagree to our listeners? What are we standing on top of right now? this is the most famous mound at Sutton Who is not the only one but it's the most famous one this is mound one

excavated in 1939 famously by Basil Brown as seen in the movies and we are looking at the oval shape of the mound as it was when he dug it in 1939 and the area of the ship is marked out with a pointy bit at each end and you can see from that that the ship is not equally covered by the mound.

In fact part of the mound nearest the river has been largely removed by ploughing. So the burial chamber was off on one side and in this burial chamber they found all these marvellous things laid out in quite a meaningful way I believe with the regalia at one end and then the coffin in the middle and then the cooking the sort of kitchen end for making feasts the other. So it's like a tableau which seems to say something about the person, very rich person. Somebody has devised this burial to show some of the objects. And we can imagine that these were shown because the roof of the chamber was put in at the end, as put in afterwards. So there was a time when you could walk around in the 7th century and see the burial. And you can

imagine the parents explaining to the children what they were looking at and they would look at some of the finds that's the sword which he took on such and such an expedition that's the shield that was a gift from so and so if you like it was like a mini biography in artifacts and so and so that's why I think these burials are not just what the person owned but were much more about what somebody was trying to say about him, almost like an obituary. And I think the person that probably created this was his widow. We don't know her name, but she was quite a famous person that appears in Beneral Bees history. We came and excavated here much later in the 80s, and tried to explore the whole burial ground. So from where we're standing, you can see mounds

in front and to the side and behind us, they're all different sizes. And so when I started, what I wanted to try and do was to find what story the cemetery was telling. I didn't make an assumption that these were all kings or anything like that. I realized that because they're different sizes, they're probably all for distant status and so on. And so we selectively took a strip north, south and east, west, over the burial ground. and dug the mounds that came up in those areas and deliberately chose the mounds that had already been dug, which might sound rather silly.

But in fact, it was because I wanted to do the minimum amount of damage and get the maximum amount of history, and that's meant not plunging into things that we didn't know much about. But we knew that mound two, mound five, six, seven, they'd all been dug before. They'd got holes in the top, where people have dug.

And in fact, we found that there's been a dig in the early 17th century, very comprehensive in pits, big pits. And then there's been one and another lot in the 19th century. They dug trenches. They dug quite long trenches through the mounds.

And when we excavated mound seven, we found the steps cut in the side where the antiquary could come after lunch and then go and see what good things the earth had thrown up. It was an archaeology of the archaeology. Well, it was the archaeology of the archaeology and really interesting as well and we come to 38, 39 and there's Basil Brown digging

and then he also dug trenches and we dug in a different way again according to the age we lived in then and now of course they're doing even more exciting things with much better equipment than we had and finding lots. So there's a lot to tell Sutton who's got a lot to tell us still. Now one thing that we mentioned just as we were walking in here is that we are now standing on top of the most famous mound, so mound one. But that's not the only one, as you've said, but it's also not from the only period. And this actually is a cemetery that was used for really quite a long period of time. So it's not just one little moment in time, it's much longer than that.

Can you say something about those other cemeteries? Yes, there are three cemeteries. One is where Mrs. Trammer's house is now. and that's a sixth century, more conventional type of cemetery, furnished cremations as well, but they also have a very interesting burial rite where the cremations are buried in a bronze bucket. And that looks towards the first of the burials in the royal burial ground, cemetery number two, where we're standing now. And that starts with cremation mounds, cremations under mounds,

and they are using bronze buckets. they're buried with animal remains as well and playing pieces and those kinds of things. So now we've arrived at something like the late 6th, early 7th century. And then there was mound 17, famous mound. It's quite a small one, difficult to find, but we found it. And that had a young man and a horse buried in adjacent graves and the young man had a sword and a shield and buckets on.

And the horse had a nice bridle with gilt strap ends and a very nice snaffle bit as well. So that was a lovely find. And then two ship burials, not one, but two. And the first one was under mound two, and the ship was buried on top of the chamber. So the man was lying in a chamber underground, and then the ship had been sort of dragged on top. And then mound one, the famous one, where the person was buried in a chamber, inside the ship. And then there were others that came into our sample area and there were young people buried with a small amount of jewelry and then best of

all there was a woman buried in Mount 14 and Mount 14 had been really wrecked by the tomb robbers. They dug it quite wildly anyway but they'd also dug it during a thunderstorm apparently because they were treading in all the bits into the silt in the bottom. But that was lucky for us because they didn't find them to take them away. So we were able to say that this person was a woman. She had a silver chattelaine. That's like a bunch of keys, which is a sign of high status.

And then little like furniture tax, which suggested a couch or a bed of some sort, as in other bed burials of this same period. And the same period is like 650, so the middle of the 7th century. So we've got accompanied burials, rich burials, all the way from the sixth century through to the mid-seventh. Then there's a bit of a gap and we get the third cemetery which consists not of furnished burials but of people who've been executed by hanging. And they're buried in rather higgledy-piggledy way. One group is on the outside of the royal burial ground and round. sockets which look rather like they were for gallows, another group all round mound five.

And we've included these in the Sutton Hoo story because they're really part of what happened afterwards. They're radiocarbonated to the 8th of 10th century. So the time of the Christian kings or the time of the Vikings come to that. So, you know, there are explanations which we're not quite able to be absolutely firm about, but nevertheless they seem quite suggestive. So the story of the Sutton Who Burial Ground is also the story of East Anglia in their way. It's able to stretch what we knew before. And it doesn't close the book. It really just opens new things that people want to know now.

And that's why work still going on here. So really people have been engaging with it for quite. a long time just both from that period itself and also ongoing in the more recent times. But the one thing I wanted to talk to you about as well while we're here, which leads into the next project that you're working at the moment, it's got to do with the location. Yes. And this I think really only makes sense if you come here to see it. Because we are standing up on an oprometry and as you walk towards the cemetery, you can really

see down that hill and you can see down towards the river. To say something about that location, the geography of this and why the... that was important. Just to avoid disappointment, there are two places you can see the river clearly from the Royal Beryl Ground. One is the top of Mount Two. And the other is the top of the tower, which the National Trusts have built, and that's actually built so you can take in the whole of the burial ground. But if you turn around look the other way, you see the river. And the river's very important in the location of this burial ground. It comes to a point where just about

the tidal reach and once upon a time it spread broadly here broad enough to turn around a very big boat well it was a very big boat that was in mound one 90 feet long 27 meters and that was probably the most important find in mound one not the most glittery but the most important is the most important machine you know in the lives of people of the seventh century with the most kudos and the most potential but of course it was quite incomplete. However, it's not the only complete find that was in the burial chamber or that was associated with this mound and the burial chamber contained, for example, a hundred or so fragments of the helmet and the helmet's been reconstructed.

So there is a logic in wanting to reconstruct the boat and that's what we're doing at the moment. And that's actually happening just a few miles from here, isn't it? Yes, it's just happening across the river from here in Woodbridge. And we are lucky enough to have got the use of a former yacht building establishment with a magnificently huge shed called the Long Shed. And it's long enough to build a 27-meter long boat in. And that's what's happening. We've just really started. The keel is going to be laid this week or joined together this week. And then we'll start putting the strakes on and they've got to be held together with iron rivets which is what the original ship was nails with roves sealing them so we've got to find four thousand of those

we've got to make four thousand of those rivets so we think we'll have it built in a couple of years and then we're going to take it on trials and those trials will be mainly rowing trials to start with yes and that's the key point but let's go and have a look at the progress of the ship down at the site itself. Okay. So I'm here now looking at the actual reconstruction and talking to some of the volunteers making it. Can you just explain to me what it is you're doing right now?

Yes, we're shaping the keel in order to fit the first plank, which will be nailed onto here. And so this is one, or is it several large pieces of oaks? There's one piece of wood through to the... the other end, about 50 feet. And then this is a join here. That goes up there and there will be another join to the top there to bring it up to that height. And you're using just simple axes, simple axes, yes. And is it sort of something that anybody actually really knows how to do? Are you learning as you're doing it? I'm learning how to do it. I've not worked we would before.

And is it going well so far? Going very well. Fantastic. I mean, you look so brilliant. And what's the next step then? So once you've got the keel in place, you're going to put the planks on the side? The first plank will go either side. That's called the garboard. And it's quite a critical plank because it's joined to the keel.

And all the rest will be joined to it in that shape. Fantastic. Well, I can't wait to see the result. Brilliant. Thank you. to me a history of Olympus and the deathless gods who govern earth, sea and sky. That is Zeus's command. It's the ancients from History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and every month on the podcast we're taking a deep dive into the Olympian gods. None of them are as simple or as single facet as we've kind of reduced them to in our heads

when we think about the gods of the pantheon who do one thing each. With world-leading experts, we'll be telling the dramatic story of who they are. Aphrodite was the goddess of love and sex and passion, and specifically she was considered often to be love itself. Their myths and their meanings. Hephaistus was already there, and that he split Zeus's head with an axe in order to liberate Athena from Zeus's head. And how they've influenced the course of history.

Imagine ourselves back in the foot. of people who are trying to explain and understand a world around them. A world which is not fair or just. That gets us into absolute key facet of how to understand the ancient Greek gods, which is that they are not good people. Join us as we explore some of the most fascinating deities history has ever known. Listen and follow on the ancients from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Martin, so we've now come down from Sutton Who,

we've gone across the river and we've come down into Woodbridge, so we're right on the river now, and we come into the long shed where there's something quite extraordinary, which is the work in progress on the reconstruction on the ship from Mount One. And you're the director of the Saxon Ship Company in charge of this project, essentially. So tell me exactly what's going on here. What's going on here is that we're building the ship in a shed. The shed is like a sort of hangar. really and it's 40 metres long

and we can see so far the sort of snake-like form of the keel in other words the lowest piece of wood in the ship made of solid oak made of oak trees that have been split and then lovingly trimmed and trimmed and trim

with an axe until they gradually get the shape that's needed for the very bottom timber of the ship and that's in this lovely rich oak almost like a piece of furniture because it's so beautifully finished and then on top by total contrast

there are plywood formers that moulds they're called which show what the shape is going to be and that helps the shipwright with the next phase which is to attach planks to the flanges

which are on top of the keel you see here these flanges sort of come out they're all one piece of wood but they come out and then they've got to be joined with rivets which is a nail and a rove a diamond shell rhomboid shaped

rove which slips over the top so it's like they're clenching these two together and so the first one you put on is the lowest of the planks is called strake so the lowest strait the garbored streak is put all the way along

and then the next one has to be added to that and then the next one and then the next one. So these are they gradually grow into the shape of a boat through the months as they are fastened with the rivets. So some four thousand rivets go into joining the long planks of the nine lots of strakes building up to the top of the shape. And then when that's done, we will be putting the gunwales on. There's the piece of wood that goes along the top of the sides of the boat and the gun also carries the foals which in other pieces of wood thorn shape piece of wood against which you pull the oars and then you have a colossal rowing boat and as you see it's huge

and it doesn't look as it could possibly row anywhere but with enough people and this could be 40 could be 28 there's the experiments are going to to see what we can do and with that number of crew and the boat in its final form it'll be taken through the hangar door here which is a little slipway is presented almost immediately and it'll be down that slipway and into the river Deben at high tide and the year will be

2024 I hope. Okay so this is really quite immense in so many different ways both in the size and scale of it in the amount of effort that's going to go into this and it's a long-term project. You're talking another three years or so to get it done.

Yes, to get it built, yes. And the question then, of course, is why are you doing? I mean, I can see it's an interesting project. This is going to be a beautiful thing, but I know that there's an actual research agenda behind this, isn't there? It's not just a fun project.

Why are you doing this? Yes, I think we can isolate a number of reasons. The first obvious one is that we want to know more what it was like being in the 7th century at the time when they buried the ship and wrecked its chamber and put all those. treasures in it and did all the things that we know about Sutton Hoo and are staggered by it in many ways so that's just a little window on it this grave was a

big grave but it's a little window on it so you want to know more about that world but why a ship so the ship was the biggest artifact so I can put it that way in the grave a grave had many other finds in some of them of incomparable beauty and this ship was the most important machine, I think in the lives of 7th century English. It took them on the rivers, took them on the sea. It was also a status

symbol. So what we're trying to do is to see whether we can reconstruct it and that gives us rewards which are partly I suppose they're mainly to the research, to the understanding of history but they're also part

of a sort of social dividend which the whole operation gives. So we know that the ship itself is incomplete. It was only a stain really in the ground and with rows and rows of ruins. And so that gives us some idea of the dimensions. It certainly tells us what the materials are,

so it's made of oak and iron, and it's 27 metres long, so that much we know. It's not complete, though. And other finds in the chamber, let's think of some. For example, the helmet, That was found in a hundred or so little bits. And when they were trying to understand the burial and what was in it, it was obvious that this had to be reconstructed.

And so it has been reconstructed. It's taken a few years to do. It wasn't easy. It's really broken up. The remains of the ship was in better condition than that. So to have a complete ship is actually easier than to have a complete helmet. And no one's arguing that that's a good thing to do. So that's very important to think.

I think the second thing is that the action of building it helps to fill in the gaps that we don't know about. And in a strange way, the ship is telling us what to do. We know what the rivets are like. We know what the heads of the ribbons and the rows are like. And when they are parallel to each other, we know they would have gone through two planks, two one-inch planks, which were, so to speak, parallel with each other. So that means that we have some idea what shape the keel should be. And that's been discovered now that it had a hollow chamfer along it

in order to make that possible. That's the ship telling us what to think. So it's teaching us how it should be. And that's not too fanciful. Ask any of the volunteers here what's happening when they use the axe to shape the oak. And they may wax lyrical about it, but mostly they'll say, well, you know, you just get a feel for how it should be.

and that means that we're getting a type of evidence which doesn't really exist anywhere else and that will help us build it. We've got some other clues too so another reason why it's worth doing is that we can see many things that are really aesthetic about the way the oak is shaped

about the way the rows of the rivets are all lined into lines parallel to the keel. It's as though it has to be perfect. And in that sense it's copying so many of the finds in the chamber think of that metal work and also the textiles

with sort of worsted finish diagonal twills and so on amazing really beautiful why would the ship be less beautiful than that so although it's extremely big it'll also be us think aesthetically satisfying

so I think those are some of the reasons which we believe it's really important but obviously deep down there's a research need here we don't know what was happening in the most important factor of the history of the area of northwest Europe, which is how did people get about and what could they do? Did they have sales? How did they navigate? There is information here, but it isn't yet complete enough. We'd like the information to be so complete

that you could easily write a novel about it without having to make anything up. That would be super, except story. You can make that up if you like. provide all the props. So I think that's where we're going, and we know that there are lots of examples, or not lots, but some examples, mainly in Scandinavia, or buried ships. And they seem to be in a sort of evolutionary sequence from rowing boats through to ones that might have sailed, ones that definitely sailed, and they get bigger with time.

Fantastic. And they need to, maybe they can tack, maybe they can't. There's so many things to discover. and that can be discovered by experiment what we're going to do is to row our boat first of all going to see how hard it is to get 40 people to row together

and if you've got rowing with my family to get four people to row together is an extreme achievement the idea of 40 mind boggles but of course that's what has to happen they have to be beautifully in time and you know that's part

of the learning process as well Definitely. And so we're also going to do what rowing boats do best, in other words, travel the lakes and the rivers. And we thought we'd do some adventures starting at Woodbridge and going down the deepen, out into the sea and then round the corner and up the Thames, for example. Now, that's a place we know, 7th century angles would have gone. and then instead of turning right we turn north instead for the second route and that takes us up to the Trent and then at the top of the Trent

we take the Humber we go to the Humber then we go to the Trent and at that point that's where lots of battles have been between the East Angles and the Mercians so they're definitely there and the ship was the way to go because you're safe until you get there you can see the advantage

and then we probably go up to Jaro because that's where Venerable Bid lived and the historian of the 7th and 8th century. And that somehow helps put our drama into its proper framework. I think when we do that, we're going to learn so much about not only river travel, but also the state of our rivers today and whether they are being looked after, whether the motorboats are doing them not of harm,

whether we're going to have a different view of the countryside by being in a boat and looking sideways. just over the bank. We're going to use place names to see the sort of places alongside the river which should have had early English or later Scandinavian presence, and then we're going to see how easy it is to travel, how many hours can you row before you need a rest, do we need a reserve crew, where would we spend the night?

All that, I think, is going to be a great adventure and a relatively safe one because we're in the river rather than in the ocean. I think that's going to show people that rowing is a really important way of getting a boat It's not just waiting for the sail It's pretty busy with your boats of all sizes Lots of different sizes of boats They're all sculling about the creeks

Yeah, a little coastal travel of course In sight of land And using the rivers as the motorways of the age I think that's going to bring the whole thing to life In a very important way I mean it's such a a wonderfully ambitious project, isn't it? And I think it's going to add to knowledge in so many different ways.

And obviously, as we just said, it's quite a long-term project. If people want to follow it, how can they see the progress? Can they come in here? Can they come to visit here in Woodbridge? Yes, the ship shed, where we are now, it's got a place for visitors to come and see what's going on. We have open days. If you can't get to Woodbridge, we have a website,

which is Saxonship.org. And that has a newsletter, every month. saying what we've been doing. You can certainly help us build the ship. We ask people to help us with the provision of oak. And the farmers of Suffolk have been absolutely wonderful, and they've given us whole oak trees to work with, which is fantastic. Now we've got to put the planks on.

We're going to need 4,000 rivets, and each of those rivets, you know, has to be hand-forged. We can get the metal, but we have to hand-forge them. So that's going to cost a fair bit. And we're asking people to invest in rivets. And they're about £20 each from memory. That's on the website anyway. So you'd be an investor in the boat.

A bit of the boat would depend on your gift. And then we'd also have about 80 oar, so that's 40 plus 40. So we've got enough to break a few and lose a few. then there are £1,000 to sponsor and then you've got your ore and you can put your name on it and so you can help the boat be propelled by doing that

and that's really how we get money we do apply to charitable bodies as well to say would you like to help us we've got a very small group of paid staff we've got four professionals and 65 volunteers So we also love volunteers, especially if they can come from not too far away, so they can be here three or four times a week.

We teach them how to hold an axe and how to work it. They get passionate about trimming oak. They'll do it all day long. And it is fascinating. I mean, wood is such wonderful stuff to work with. And if you think that when you've worked it, you're then dressing it with lincide oil and pitch and things like that and makes this wonderful smell.

So the whole atmosphere in the shed. Got some tar and pitch right next to us now, haven't we? They can smell that quite strongly. Definitely a great atmosphere. Okay, so people can help. I think the rivets are a great Christmas present. I've sponsored a sponsorship, isn't it? If you've always wanted to be an early medieval shipwright,

you can come and volunteer perhaps. Yeah, we give you a little certificate to say you bought a rivet. It's got your name on it. And that means that you've helped put the ship in the water. Fantastic. Martin, it's been so brilliant to come here and see it. So thank you so much for showing me around and for sharing it with our Gone Medieval listeners. Thank you so much for coming. And if you want to go and find out more, do have a look at that website.

We're going to get out of this rain that's bombarding the tin roof of the shed. I don't know if you can actually hear anything. But do check out the ship and follow it over the next three years. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. Today, recorded from Sutton Hoo and Woodbridge. please remember to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already and stay tuned for our next episode which will be up on Saturday with Matt Lewis and mine next Tuesday