NEW DISCOVERIES FROM ANGLO-SAXON SUFFOLK
MICHAEL WOOD ON…
IN NOVEMBER, AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY was quietly announced by Suffolk County Council: an unprepossessing rectangular structure, marked by post holes in a farmer’s field. Nothing special, you might have thought – but for all who are fascinated by Anglo-Saxon history, it was thrilling.
The find was made at Rendlesham, five miles from the site of Britain’s greatest archaeological discovery, the ship burial at Sutton Hoo. Readers may have seen the 2021 Netflix film about that site, The Dig, featuring Ralph Fiennes’ sly, canny portrait of Basil Brown, the self-taught Suffolk archaeologist who first uncovered the ship burial before the excavation was taken over by the posh ‘professionals’ from London and Cambridge. There were a few jarring notes in the film – not least the relegation of Peggy Piggott to a walk-on part, when in fact she was already an experienced archaeologist by the time of the 1939 dig. However, though fictionalised, the film is a very evocative piece of English pastoral: digging in the Suffolk soil as a Spitfire flies low over the river Deben at Woodbridge, in that last summer before the world changed forever.
A related story was told by Bede, writing in the 720s, looking back to the moment of Gregory the Great’s Christian mission in 597 – for the great historian monk, almost within living memory. Rendlesham, he says, was the residence of Rædwald, king of the East Angles, who reigned from around 599 and was overlord of the Anglo-Saxon kings of his day. We can imagine Rædwald’s royal hall as being like Heorot (‘Stag Hall’) in Beowulf, “the greatest of halls… wondrous and gleaming”. Here the king would have feasted his followers, entertained by bards singing songs about the ancient heroes; here he would have greeted ambassadors, received tribute from his subkings, meted out justice.
Later, so Bede says, it was here that Bishop Cedd baptised Swithhelm, king of Essex, in the presence of the king of the East Angles. Clearly, there was by then a Christian church at Rendlesham – maybe on the site of today’s huge parish church, dedicated to Gregory the Great, which looms over farm fields on a low ridge above the A12. But in the 610s and 620s, England was still a semi-pagan world; it was a time of “no longer and not yet”. Bede tells us that Rædwald had accepted Christian baptism but, hedging his bets �
