Around this time last year, at the delightfully named
Trumpington, just outside Cambridge, archaeologists discovered the burial of a
16 year-old Saxon girl who lived and died in the second half of the 7th century
AD. This was a time when Christianity was taking hold in this region of England
and the girl seemed to be at the heart of it.
Excavators immediately knew there was something special
about the grave since the girl was laid to rest on a bed – a wooden frame
supporting a straw mattress and held together with metal brackets. This type of
burial (called, with great imagination, a ‘bed burial’) occurs only in a few
other places and seems to cluster around the 7th century. All appear to have
held women.
Laying the deceased on a bed may be an allusion to death
being a form of sleep and it is interesting that the Old English word ‘leger’ (which
gives us our modern word ‘lair’), was used in early literature to refer to both
beds and graves. The arrangement of the bed in the grave may also hark back to
ship burials, the most famous being at Sutton Hoo, where chiefs were laid in a
chamber aboard a ship. These ship burials may incorporate even earlier beliefs
about a ship taking the dead to the otherworld – and there is plenty of
evidence for this in rock art from the Bronze Age onwards – but nothing in the
Norse literature suggests that the belief was current at the time. Maybe a bed
burial was a later equivalent of a ship burial, although the two women buried
in a ship at Oseberg in Norway cautions that we should not assume a straight
divide along gender lines.
Moreover, the ship burials were decidedly pagan, whereas
many of the bed burials, including Trumpington, contained Christian imagery. In
particular, the Trumpington girl wore a pectoral cross – a beautiful
garnet-inlayed piece of jewellery made from solid gold – that marked her out as
truly extraordinary. Such crosses are so rare that only five other examples are
known, one from the grave of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. It raised speculation
as to whether the girl was of royal blood – possibly a princess – and whether
she could have been an abbess of one of the new monastic orders that catered
specifically for women. Her young age may have been offset by royal connection.
Despite all the finery, there is another aspect of the
burial that is less obvious and tells a richer story of life in these times. In
addition to wearing the cross, the girl also had more typically pre-Christian
Pagan items such as an iron knife, a chatelaine – which is a chain that hung
from the waist – and some glass beads. Granted, it does not look much, but is
possibly the equivalent of an abbess wearing a pentagram today. Clearly,
neither the girl (assuming they were her usual clothes and accoutrements) nor
those who buried her (who may have chosen the outfit she wore for her final
journey) minded that the imagery shifted between Pagan and Christian.
In fact, Christianity might have been adopted by the Saxons,
not because of its apparent message of self-sacrifice and care of the poor, but
because of its presumed ability to win wars. An inscription with the Staffordshire
hoard calls upon God to scatter his enemies and this is what people probably
wanted first and foremost – a battling, champion God. This was a time when
stories such as Beowulf were told around the evening fire and in the ‘Dream of
the Rood’ Christ himself becomes a warrior (as does Judith, showing that Saxon
women had pluck). It would not have been lost on people either that Christ,
like the great Germanic God Odin, hung on a tree and descended the lowerworld
for knowledge. Odin doubled for Christ just as Loki doubled for the Devil.
Although Saxon imagery became more Christian over time
(albeit, until the coming of the Normans, churches were decorated with
protective animals such as dragons), the 7th century was an age when traditions
mingled. Odin set off to war alongside Christ, graves referenced the sleep and
journey of death, and a young girl could wear the cross of a Christian abbess
and the trappings of a Pagan princess. It is a fascinating time and perhaps,
for a fleeting few decades, we can gain a glimpse of a more tolerant attitude
towards religious affiliation that seems all but lost to us today.
The remains of a mysterious Anglo-Saxon princess, who
died thirteen and a half centuries ago,
have been found in a field three miles south of Cambridge.
Aged just 16 when she died, and buried lying on a special
high status funerary bed, she was laid to rest with a small solid gold, garnet
encrusted, Christian cross upon her chest.
Her exact identity is as yet a complete mystery. However,
it’s likely that she was a member of one of the newly Christianized Anglo-Saxon
royal families of the period.
She was buried fully clothed, her bronze and iron chatelaine
(belt hook) and purse, still attached to her leather belt.
A clue to the circumstances of her death is the presence of
three other individuals buried in separate graves alongside her (two women aged
around 20 and one other slightly older individual of indeterminate sex, but
conceivably female). It’s likely that
they died at the same time – probably from some sort of epidemic.
Significantly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions that England was devastated
by the plague in 664 AD (around the very time that the archaeological evidence
also suggests they died).
The Independent
