Although Sutton Hoo dominates the popular imagination of Anglo-Saxon ship burials, there is another prime example excavated substantially earlier – The Snape Ship Burial. Less rich in grave-goods, it still provides a fascinating look into Middle Anglo-Saxon burial practices. Here’s a very brief overview of the site, along with some resources for further reading. Ship […]
This week, in a repurposing of my Masters Degree dissertation, we have a look at the trade weights used by the Vikings. Often found by metal-detectorists and amateur archaeologists, these are often considered as diagnostic of the presence of Vikings within England. But what were they used for, and what can they tell us about […]
Did the ‘Vikings’ leave an archaeologically identifiable footprint in England when they settled? Can we excavate those remains and find the presence of the raiders and settlers? Richard and Haldenby’s exceptional 2018 article suggests yes, we can. This week I thought I’d write a quick article about my favourite article ever – Richard and Haldenby’s […]
A dominant question in late ‘Anglo-Saxon’ history and archaeology is how and why the newly solidified thegnly class establish themselves, and what material culture we can use to track their presence. It is broadly agreed that ‘thegnly culture’ is a useful and meaningful term – why did a new way of living develop, and what […]
One of the most commonly acknowledged forms of historical nicknames are those applied to monarchs – Charles the Bald, Bloody Mary, Robert the Bruce etc. The Anglo-Saxons are no exception, and we find some impressive examples in the written sources. A question of terminology: Royal ‘Nicknames’ are traditionally referred to as ‘Epithets’ – descriptive or […]
A brief look into learning, understanding and translating four major early medieval languages – Latin, Old English, Old Norse, and Old French. Here you’ll find a list of beginners books and free online resources, including dictionaries. #ComissionsEarned (This post includes Amazon Affiliate links) – As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. A historian […]
Occasionally, you come across a resource that is so incredibly good, it amazes you that it’s free. The Yale Early Medieval Lecture Series (available free on Youtube) is one of these cases, and is an amazing contribution by the Yale outreach programme to leveling the playing-field and getting everyone access to the humanities. You can […]
Bored in lockdown or at work? Try designing your own Bayeux Tapestry! https://htck.github.io/bayeux/#!/ A new app doing the rounds on Twitter lets you drag and drop individuals, animals, buildings and more from the original tapestry into new scenarios and scenes. I can’t find anything more about the creators than that they’re called Leonard, Mathieu and […]
Continuing the search for free online resources for those interested in history, this week we take a look at the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds, a database of some of the archaeological coin evidence from England. Numismatics, the study of coins and currency, is a crucial part of archaeology, but one that I am […]
The British Museum has a wonderful collection of online resources on the Sutton Hoo finds that can be explored from your computer. One of the things I’ve missed most in lockdown has been going to museums. However, it’s important to remember that museums have been putting in a great effort to digitise and engage with […]
Food is a universal, but frequently invisible to the historian. What and how did people of the past eat? Do these questions vary by ‘class’, gender, age etc. In the first of these Deep-Dives into smaller topics of early medieval history, we’ve going to approach this broadly by looking at the food consumption of the […]
How did the elite in Anglo-Saxon England use textiles and clothes to express their status and power? As an archaeologist, can we ever find evidence of this material culture, or is it all hypothetical? We looked briefly before at how the thegnly class in Anglo-Saxon England sought to distinguish themselves from the masses through a […]
How did rich late ‘Anglo-Saxons’ live? Can their use of buildings and shape tell us about how they viewed themselves, and how they maintained their power? In the final part of the series discussing how Anglo-Saxon thegns expressed their power and status, after examining diet and textile use, we move onto the biggest archaeological category […]
The poetry of ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ holds an interesting middle-ground in public perception. On the one-hand Beowulf is perhaps the single most famous piece of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural output, of any form. Tolkien famously translated it, as did Heaney, and there was that terrible movie in the 2000s that we try and forget… However, the sheer quantity […]