Early Medieval Burials

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Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Today we're going to go right back to the first few centuries of the medieval period. asking the question of how connected England was to neighbouring parts of continental Europe. And we're going to do that by tracking some quite remarkable changes in how people treated their dead.

Now, to talk to me about this topic, I have invited an archaeologist who has studied a rather staggering 33,000 graves from cemeteries in England and other parts of Europe. So I'm delighted to welcome Dr Emma Brownlee to the podcast. Thanks for joining me today, Emma. Thank you very much for having me. Emma is a research fellow in archaeology at Girton College and a fellow at the Macdonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.

Now I'm going to be asking you more specifically about your research on these early medieval burials in a moment, Emma, but before we get that far, just...

Wanted to get a little bit of the background and kind of set the scene, maybe even clear up a few little myths about that particular point in time, if that's right. So can you just start by... going really back to the beginning of the medieval period, so around about 500ish or so, sort of the end of the Roman Empire in Britain.

Can you just sort of very simply explain what's the sort of situation that people find themselves in at the time? What sort of influences do they have when that Roman period ends? So a lot of people think that when the Romans left Britain that there was a complete breakdown of society, abandonment of towns, people forget how to make pottery.

And to some extent, some of that is true. You definitely see a shift away from an urban lifestyle, but it's certainly not the case that lots of people suddenly leave. Instead, what happens is that Because all of those trade networks that sustained that urban way of life have broken down, it's not sustainable anymore to keep living in cities and in villas and in those big complexes. So you see more of a shift towards a rural way of life.

And one of the most interesting changes for me in this period is the real change in burial practices, because you go from a society who bury their dead in quite a plain, simple way, simple, unfurnished inhumations. to a society which is suddenly investing a lot of wealth in their graves. So unfurnished means no grave goods, is that right? Yes.

Yes, so the Roman way of burying the dead, they basically have no objects with them. Sometimes you get the occasional dress accessory like a brooch or a bracelet or boots. Hobnail boots are actually quite common. but you don't see much investment in the graves at all. Whereas once you start moving into that post-Roman period, suddenly that is where people are putting their wealth and putting their status display.

Okay, so you have some changes like that. What sort of influences then? Where are they getting these new ideas from at that point in time? So one of the things that we think is that they're starting to look more towards the northern European world as opposed to the Roman world and they're getting much more of their influences from

North Germany from Scandinavia and one of the ways in which we see that is through some of the styles of some of the new objects that are being introduced. So in particular you get this new animal art style. It's quite abstract, it's quite difficult to see what's going on, but that's a really clear link that you get with Northern Europe that just isn't a feature of those earlier Roman materials.

at this point in time as well i think most people what they've learned in school is that we have this brilliant record that tells us exactly what happens and it's the account of bead that explains that the angles saxons and the jutes come across and migrate or invade really and and that's seen in the material culture as well. Can you say something about that and whether that account is actually true? Yeah, so Bede gives us this very clear picture of you get these three tribes.

You've got the Angles who settle in East Anglia and Northumbria. You've got the Saxons who settle across most of the south of England. And then you've got the Jutes who settle in Kent. And the picture he gives us is quite a violent one. He talks a lot about plundering, about the native Britons being wiped out. And that gives us this very violent picture of that period of history. But...

Actually, Bede was writing in the 8th century, so he was writing a good few hundred years after the events that happened. And nowadays we think that what he's... actually doing is writing more about the political and social divisions that existed in the 8th century in his time period and back projecting into that earlier period okay so

Actually, that's not quite right then. Is that the case that we don't quite know what happens in those sort of fifth, sixth century that he's allegedly writing about? Yeah, we only have the one contemporary historical source. and that's a monk called Gildas and he isn't writing narrative history as we would think of it, he's writing almost this

tirade about the fact that the Anglo-Saxons have abandoned Christianity and how that's caused all of the problems that Britain is facing. So she's not a very measured source for the period. And when it comes to the archaeology, that's actually a lot more nebulous as well, because yes, we see all of these changes in material culture and changes in burial practices. and people have long assumed that that does map onto what Bede's talking about, but there isn't any independent evidence for that.

So it is actually quite a murky picture. We really don't know that much about this early medieval period. Is that the situation? I think so, yeah. It is quite murky. You get people who argue for these narratives of mass migration, like Bede talks about. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have people who will argue that there was absolutely no migration at all. And there was complete continuity from the Romano-British populations into the Anglo-Saxon populations.

And I think the reality probably lies somewhere between the two. We have evidence from isotopes and from ADNA that there were people moving around. but that doesn't necessarily support the complete population replacement theory.

Okay, so let's get back to the archaeology and your sort of specialism of all these graves. So we're now at this point in time where we don't quite know what's going on, but we know that these influences are coming in from the continents. We know that people are changing their ways of treating their dead.

bringing in lots of grave goods and just sort of focus on that for a moment why is that happening is that all about the afterlife? Is it about what they think people need when they go to the beyond? Or you mentioned briefly things like status and wealth. Is it more about the living than the dead? It's quite a complicated picture and I think there are probably multiple different things going on. I don't think we're talking about provisions for an afterlife necessarily. I spoke about...

rich graves but it's certainly not like say some of the Egyptian tombs where they're provisioning people for the entirety of their life. It's quite a limited selection of objects that are being placed in. So some of it is to do with status, I think. It's a means for the people who are carrying out the burials to show off their own status by investing in this lavish ceremony and putting all these rich goods in the ground.

But some of it is a lot more personal as well. And it's about that relationship between the living and the deceased. So you might give, say, a more sentimental object, place that in the ground with the dead to help maintain... those relationships.

I like the idea of that, that you're putting something very personal that links the two of you, even in the beyond. That's sort of the thing we will do today, isn't it? So, OK, so the next thing that you've been looking at, really, is that change over time again. So this comes in.

But then it changes again, doesn't it, over the following centuries. What happens next? So in the fifth century, you get this gradual increase in the amount of objects that are being put in graves and an increase in the variety of objects as well. And that reaches its real peak in the middle of the 6th century. And then after that, you get this gradual decline and almost more of a stratification of graves.

By the time you get to the 7th century, most people are only being buried with maybe one or two objects, although you have some which are incredibly richly furnished still, like Sutton Hoo. Most decline but then a few become really, really rich and then by the end of the 7th century, grave goods have pretty much gone completely out of fashion.

After that point, you might get one or two objects deposited with the dead, but it's absolutely nothing like the scales seen earlier, and almost everybody is placed in this very plain, very simple, unfurnished burial.

How then? I mean, you've already said that this isn't really necessarily about the afterlife as such, but I'd have to ask the question about religion because, of course, this sort of adoption of Christianity and the idea that in a Christian grave you shouldn't have anything with you because you don't need anything for the afterlife. Is that not a simple explanation like that, that actually people are becoming Christian and so they're no longer needing grave goods?

That explanation works very well when you look at England on its own, because of course the 7th century, when you get this decline, is the period of Christianisation. But as soon as you look across the channel towards the rest of the continent, that argument just completely breaks down. Because there you've got people who have been Christian for several centuries, pretty much continuously since the fall of the Roman Empire.

but they still bury their dead with grave goods. And there's one particular example I'm thinking of from actually underneath the cathedral in Cologne, where you have two people buried together in a grave. woman in her 20s and quite a young boy and they're incredibly richly furnished. So the boy is buried in a bed and he's got all of his weapons with him. The woman has got all of her jewellery. There's lots and lots of food offerings between the two of them. So that is an incredibly rich burial.

but in a very obviously Christian context. Yeah, so that's the sort of thing that we would absolutely not expect to see normally. Yeah, yeah. So this association between Christianity and unfurnished burial is actually something that comes in later. And in this early medieval period, the Christians are a lot more flexible about what is acceptable to do with the dead. And do we actually have records from that time? I mean, do we have written... I mean, you've already said we've got very few, so...

Is there anything that tells us this is what a Christian grave should look like in the, say, 7th century? No, there isn't. The Christian written records are very quiet on what is and isn't appropriate to do with the dead. So there is one source that dates to the 9th century that relates to Charlemagne's conquest of Saxony, and in that he talks about banning cremation and burial under barrows.

but he doesn't have anything to say about how appropriate grave goods are or not. Okay, so it's really, this is about the archaeology, isn't it? This is about what's in the ground. That's the only thing that's going to tell us, I suppose. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything from sex to spying.

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So you looked, as I said in this direction, you looked at 33,000 graves from, I think, 237 cemeteries in several different countries, which is an amazing amount of whack. I'm very impressed. Can you tell me something about that? of results that came out of that study? Yeah so I was interested in comparing how that decline in furnished burial happened in different countries and how well I could

match it up to some of the historical events. And actually what I found was quite surprising which is that the change happens almost at exactly the same point in time. everywhere no matter where you are in Europe. So no matter where you are you have this decline from the mid-6th century and then that really accelerates at the end of the 7th century so that not only

grave goods are being abandoned, but also the cemeteries in which grave goods are being used. So there's this real abandonment and rejection of the earlier practices. So how big an area are we talking about? How many countries did you look at? How widespread is this phenomenon? So I looked across England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and then the low countries.

So not all of Western Europe, but quite a proportion of it. Yeah, that's a really quite far distance. So that's quite staggering that this happens at the same time. And what are your thoughts about why that happens at the same time? I think this is telling us something about how connected those countries are at this point in time. I think for those ideas to have spread so quickly and be so shared. between these really quite vastly different areas.

It's telling us that people were moving around and they were swapping ideas and they were really part of this big shared conception of what was appropriate to do with your debt. So does it mean that people are... actually migrating? Is this all really people moving from one place to another and taking those ideas with them?

I don't think it's quite migrations, although that certainly is taking place even after that initial, what we think of as the migration period. Migration carries on and people move around. But I think it's also to do with trade and exchange, because the seventh century is a time period where you start to see those long distance exchange networks.

picking up again after that hiatus between the fall of the roman empire and the later medieval period the later seventh century is when that starts kicking off and you see the establishment of those big specialised trading centres like Hamwick and Ipswich and Doristad, places like that.

So that means that people kind of have places to access ideas, they have places to travel to and presumably then transport across the English Channel. So the use of boats and that sort of thing is also quite well developed. Yeah, again, the seventh century is when you start getting improvements in sailing technologies that make those long distance journeys.

possible. And it's not just the sea we're talking about as well, it's also the river networks. Rivers like the Rhine and the Moselle are really important for connecting the North Sea network and spreading that further into contact. Okay so you've painted a picture here of something really quite consistent, so lots of sharing of ideas, lots of similarities, things happening at the same time, the same sort of things. Did you find any areas that sort of stood out from that pattern at all?

Yeah, two in particular, Kent and then the part of Francia that's directly on the other side of the English Channel. And there... you actually don't see much of a decline in grave good use at the same time as everywhere else. Now it's not that grave good use carries on later there because it doesn't. Those big furnished cemeteries still go out of use at the end of the 7th century and are replaced with unfurnished burial. But...

The 7th century burials in those areas are just as richly furnished as the 6th century ones are. So it's almost like those areas are really resistant to this idea of change and keep on burying their dead in the same way. almost until the outside pressure to conform becomes so overwhelming that they have to go ahead and abandon grave good use.

So do you think that all of this suggests that this was sort of organised almost on a big societal level, that there was something, maybe not the church or anything like that, but were... people being told this is how you do things or is it a bit more organic and personal than that do you think i think it's more organic and bottom-up driven if there were some sort of like

top-down pressure to change the way they were burying the dead. You would expect to see some sort of written record of that, but we just don't have it. I think it's more a process of people just emulating their neighbours and as more and more people choose to adopt the simpler unfurnished burial practices it just becomes the standard thing to do. So it's a much more organic process I think.

So that's really interesting, isn't it? And also, just as a sort of slightly hypothetical thought, if that used to be the way that you would display status and wealth and your position in society, does that idea then get... transfer to something else because you know if that used to be your way of showing off how would you do that instead if you can't do it through the way you treat your dead

yeah some of the way you treat your dead does still show off status i think so you end up with more of a focus on monuments associated with graves they start becoming more common after furnished burial is abandoned and also the location of the burial and so this is where it does link in with Christianity a little bit because being buried in a church especially if it's a church that has a saint

remains associated with it. That's quite a high status thing and people want to be buried in those locations. So it's not that there's no status being shown off in these burials, it's just they're doing it in a slightly different way.

Awesome. Okay. So just to go back a little bit to a few of the things that popped up earlier on, I just wanted to ask you, because you've been studying grave goods for so much time, this idea that... graves can tell us about ethnic groups so you've said that some people might have moved we don't quite know if people really moved in and replaced the population in England or not you know that debate is going on still so this idea that

ethnic groups can be seen in grave goods in this time period. Is that right? Can we do that? Can we use graves to sort of infer ethnicity in the past? Ethnicity is quite a complicated concept. What I can say is that we can definitely see regional distinctions. in burial practices and in the styles of objects that are being put in graves. So brooch types is something that have been particularly used to do this. You get the quite distinctive style of brooch called a cruciform brooch which

corresponds nicely to what we think of as the Anglian area of England. And this is true outside of England as well, that people have used brooch styles to plot where the Franks and the Visigoths and the Bavarians and the Alemanians where they're all living. But I think most archaeologists now would be quite cautious about doing that.

especially with new scientific techniques coming in with isotope analysis. We can see people who have moved into an area who were not born locally there and yet have adopted the local style of dress. So I'd rather think of them as regional identities rather than putting the label ethnicity onto it. It is clearly... something regionally distinctive that's being displayed but it's not necessarily tied to your ethnic origins.

So it's kind of tied in with this sort of organic, you know, what your neighbours are doing sort of thing. Your regional identity maybe is the most important one in this particular period. Exactly, yeah. And there are so many different... types of identity that are being displayed in a burial. You have gender display and status display and potentially religious display as well. So your ethnicity is only one small

part of your identity and when you've got a very curated selection of objects being placed in the grave that's not necessarily what comes to the fore. Awesome. And I also want to ask you, because I'm very fascinated by graves myself, in terms of some of the slightly more unusual, perhaps, burial traits or ways of burial in this period,

Any others that you can draw us and tell us about from this particular period? So something I've been looking at recently is the idea of bed burials, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's where the body is buried in a bed. And in England this is a very restricted rite, so you only find it in the 7th century.

And almost all of the people buried in beds are adult women. There's a few younger individuals as well, but there's only one possible man in a group of, I think there's about 18 bed burials now. So these are like proper... beds that are built and put into the ground and then the dead is placed inside the bed is that right yes yeah in most cases it doesn't survive very well so we have just the metal fittings left

But they're quite distinctive, so we know that it is a bed rather than a coffin or any other type of wooden container. And then do you ever get bedding preserved or anything like that? Not very often, no. Okay, and are beds like this found anywhere else as well? Yes, they are, but they're actually quite widespread across Europe and you get a lot of them in southern Germany where

Actually, you get really good organic preservation. So you don't just have the metal fittings like you do in England. You have proper wooden bed frames preserved. And it's really quite incredible. But what's interesting about the continental ones is that there... they're not so restricted so you get them found from the 5th century through to the 8th century and you get men, women and children all found in these beds.

So what's the link? I mean, you must have had some thoughts around this. Yeah. So we've got some very preliminary isotopic results from some of the English bed burials. that suggests the women in them were not born in England. And I think what's happening here is that the bed burial rite is being imported into England in the 7th century.

directly as a result of Christian women moving around. Because we know that women's movement was quite important to Christianity. You have all these narratives of women moving to marry non-Christian kings as part of that conversion process. to me that explains why that very specific context explains why they are only 7th century and only women in England but much more common elsewhere.

That's really fascinating, actually, and quite surprising to find that result. So that's very exciting. I mean, so you're saying you think this is a Christian thing. Is there actually anything to really show or suggest that those English examples are Christian? Quite a few of them have Christian symbolism in. So there's the bed burial in Trumpington where they have a really lovely golden garnet pectoral cross.

laid on the chest of the woman in the bed and there's a few others with that symbolism too. So they've long been linked into this context of powerful Christian women early in the conversion period, even if the idea that they're migratory Christian women is something that's new.

That's really fascinating. I can't wait to hear the rest of that research. So where to next? And I mean, what else would you really like to find out in this research? What do you think could really add to our information that we have already? One of the issues I've had is to do with the quality of the dating evidence involved, because obviously people love the nice shiny burials with all the exciting things in them.

And so the unfurnished burials have actually been quite neglected in their study. We can't date them using objects the way we can date the furnished ones. So we really need more radiocarbon dating in particular. of those burials so that we can get a better sense of how their distribution compares to the distribution of the furnished ones. And that's something we're lacking at the moment and something I would really like to work on more.

Okay, so some good potential there then to sort of tap into some resources we haven't quite really used enough. Excellent. Emma, thank you so much for coming and sharing all that. And I don't know, are you planning on doing another 30,000 or is that it for now? I think that's it for now. I'm done with stuff on quite that scale. That sounds very sensible. So that was Emma, Dr Emma Brownlee. Thank you so much for joining me here today, Emma. Thank you for having me. It was great.

So this has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. If you don't already subscribe to the podcast, please do so now and help share the word to all your friends and family and colleagues and my... co-host Matt Lewis will be back on Saturday with a new episode and I will be back again next Tuesday. Thank you so much for listening.

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