Interpreting | 2009.09.27
Warriors of Mercia cast in a new light
The treasure unearthed in Staffordshire by the man with the second-hand metal detector is worth more than the value of the gold and jewels: it breathes life into our Anglo-Saxon ancestors
The clash of metal on metal. Flashing jewels on the sword hilts and helmets of mortal foes. These are sounds and images that still light up little boys\' eyes. And quite big boys\' eyes too. Anglo-Saxon warfare has fed our imaginations since the birth of a literary tradition on this island. It fed into our first recorded poetry and it still influences story- telling today.
But this weekend we have more physical proof that this world once really existed. The greatness of the rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, with their rich and violent culture, is clear at last because of the extraordinary archaeological find made near Lichfield and revealed to the public on Thursday.
To look at the array of intricately patterned precious metals that was uncovered is to see an army of Mercian warriors, marching under their blue-and-yellow flag, and to watch it descend on enemies that were kept at bay for a long stretch of our early history. Most evocative of all the Mercian finds, perhaps, is the misspelt biblical slogan etched along a strip of golden banding. "Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face," it reads. The religious inscription is similar to the one that runs around the Coppergate Helmet, or York Helmet, found in 1982, though it has a more martial tone, like a battle cry.
Terry Herbert, the 55-year-old metal detecting enthusiast who found the hoard in a Staffordshire field, had an incantation of his own intended to enlist the help of higher powers. "Spirits of yesteryear, take me where the coins appear," he said whenever he fired up his detector.
The cache he discovered has been compared in significance to the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. It is of such proportions that it at once confirms what academics had suspected about the might of the most successful Anglo-Saxon regime and yet also throws these assumptions into a completely new context. How could the Mercians possibly have had so much wealth? The yawning gap between the rich and poor exposed by the find has set historians reeling. An era that used to be called "the dark ages" was obviously a lot darker for some than for others.
Gareth Williams, curator of early medieval coinage at the British Museum, believes the find alters our understanding of the levels of wealth at the time. "We are unlikely to ever get a precise date for this hoard – that would be rare for any Anglo-Saxon England find," he said. "But it reinforces the picture of the Mercian power and authority and at the same time changes our picture of just how much wealth was available."
The seven warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, or the Heptarchy, as they were characterised in the 12th century, comprised Wessex, Essex, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia, Sussex and Kent. The Mercians dominated the middle of the country, below the Humber and down to London.
"If you look at Tamworth and Lichfield on the map, the key Mercian towns, you will see the straight Roman road underneath them," said Professor Simon Keynes of Trinity College, Cambridge. "This is the A5, or Watling Street, and it runs all the way to London, which was the great commercial centre of the early 8th century." Offa, the best known of an illustrious line of kings of Mercia, was once described by the poet Geoffrey Hill as "overlord of the M5". The Mercians have always been admired by writers, from the anonymous author of Beowulf to Hill and JRR Tolkien.
"Academics still argue about it, but the theory was that Beowulf was Mercian in origin and is about the mindset of these aristocratic warriors," said Keynes. "Like Sutton Hoo before it, this find gives real substance to the world described in Beowulf . It augments our earliest major English poem."
Until now, the Mercians were known chiefly through the odd allusion in the work of St Bede, the monk and scholar born in 672. Bede generally painted them as brutal baddies, although he did concede that they were tolerant of Christian missionaries. "We have always wondered how on earth the Mercians kept their power," said Keynes. "It now seems they had spectacular resources. So my reaction to the find is not, \'Oh my god, what a lot of gold!\' but rather that this starts to make sense of their extraordinary political power."
At the British Museum, Williams continues to mentally weigh the amount of gold found: "In the past, each time one of these sword pieces was found, everyone would say \'Wow!\'. Now we have 84 of them at once. And it is really beautiful stuff. The inlaid garnets had to be imported from some considerable distance. We have assumed before that this kind of quality indicated royal status. Now I wonder."
Williams suspects that archaeologists and historians have been too quick to push the late owners of such jewelled artifacts up the social scale. "Just because a find is hugely expensive, it does not mean it is royal. In the case of Sutton Hoo, some assumed it was a royal site. I have never been happy with that."
In 2003, the discovery of Anglo-Saxon treasure at Prittlewell in Essex prompted headlines about the burial of "the King of Bling". He was later demoted to "the Prittlewell Prince". Williams points out that the prince now appears to have been an average aristocrat. "This Staffordshire hoard is going to make us re-evaluate what may well have been a hugely wealthy warrior class. After all, we have got 5 kilos of gold here; much more than has been found elsewhere. Much more gold than Sutton Hoo, for example."
Key to research in the coming weeks will be the surviving Anglo-Saxon war codes that show the level of fines payable for killing people of various social ranks. "Sutton Hoo\'s gold doesn\'t match up to the values in the codes. We must compare this new find to these codes. It may be our biggest find yet, but where is it on the scale?" asks Williams. He believes historians must now adjust to the idea of a gaping divide between the rich and the poor in the late 7th and early 8th century.
"You could say these days we are going back to something we had in England ages ago. As a nation, we are reverting to that sort of extreme differentiation between what the classes have. Back then, you were either very, very rich or you had nothing."
All this wealth also came with a developed aesthetic. "There is real attention to detail and precision here," said Williams. "The warriors nicely matched up the various parts of their battle dress. They were brutal but it was important to look stylish and neat when you went out to kill people." Lichfield was a growing centre of Christianity at the time, on a par with Canterbury and York. The discovery of the hoard near here, along with the fact the only non-military items found are religious, will have a big impact on theories about Anglo-Saxon beliefs.
The Lichfield Angel, discovered in 2003 in the nave of the cathedral, was revelatory enough to cause Keynes to rethink his Cambridge lectures on the era. "I told my students it was a great find because it substantiated many theories about the Kingdom of Mercia. Now I am working out again what to say to my new students in two weeks\' time."
BEOWULF
Sophisticated people with a love of words
A newly constructed
barrow stood waiting, on a wide headland
close to the waves, its entryway secured.
Into it the keeper of the hoard had carried
all the goods and golden ware
worth preserving. His words were few:
"Now, earth, hold what earls once held
and heroes can no more; it was mined from you first
by honourable men. My own people
have been ruined in war; one by one
they went down to death, looked their last
on sweet life in the hall. I am left with nobody
to bear a sword or burnish plated goblets,
put a sheen on the cup. The companies
have departed.
The hard helmet, hasped with gold,
will be stripped of its hoops; and the
helmet-shiner
who should polish the metal of the
war-mask sleeps;
the coat of mail that came through all fights,
through shield-collapse and cut of sword,
decays with the warrior. Nor may webbed mail
range far and wide on the warlord\'s back
beside his mustered troops. No trembling harp,
no tuned timber, no tumbling hawk
swerving through the hall, no swift horse
pawing the courtyard. Pillage and slaughter
have emptied the earth of entire peoples."
When Seamus Heaney directed the Observer to these lines from his acclaimed translation of Beowulf , he could hardly have chosen a more perfect example of the mysterious riches of Anglo-Saxon England.
Elegiac and fatalistic, but unquenchably splendid, this poetry is typical of the lost world just unearthed in Staffordshire. The Anglo-Saxons get a bad historical press as Germanic thugs, but they were a highly sophisticated people with a love of wordplay and irony: ambiguity, innuendo and understatement, qualities we ascribe to Englishness. Behind a facade of unaffected plainness, they were stoic, and quite devious – forerunners of Tolkein\'s Middle-Earthers.
They would probably have been delighted at the discovery of the Cannock treasure by an out-of-work chatterbox using a second-hand metal detector on forgotten farmland.
The Mercian treasure will also go a long way to confirming the picture of Anglo-Saxon society nurtured by devotees of Beowulf , but overlooked by those who have accepted, uncritically, the historical spin of Viking propaganda.
Robert McCrum
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/s[...]n-treasure-hoard-staffordshire
