Sutton Hoo

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I'm Dr Kat Jalman. Welcome to today's episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. This one is going to be a little bit different because today I'm out visiting a very special archaeological site. Possibly the most significant early medieval site in England, in fact. I thought I'd take you all with me. The place I've come to is none other than Sutton Hoo in Suffolk.

home to the very famous Anglo-Saxon burial grounds that were made even more famous by the recent film The Dig. The site has a number of large burial mounds and in the 1930s some of these were excavated for the first time. including mound one which contained the spectacular ship grave dating to the early 7th century along with a burial chamber filled with lavish grave goods including a helmet and artifacts of precious metals including many that were imported from distant

lands. I've come to Sutton Hoo today to find out more about the site because embarrassingly I actually haven't been here before but also to hear about a new and very ambitious project to reconstruct a full-scale model of the ship. that was found in Mound 1. The person I'm here to meet is Professor Martin Carver from the University of York, because Martin really is the ultimate Sutton Hoo expert, as he directed excavations here between 1983 and 1992.

and he has written several books about the site. He's also the director of the Saxon Ship Company, the organisation that's now making the replica ship. It's quite chilly out here today, so wrap up warm and come along on Martin's tour. Right, so now we've come to Sutton Hoo itself. So I'm so delighted to be here with you, Martin. And can you just describe to our listeners, what are we standing on top of right now?

This is the most famous mound at Sutton Hoo. It's not the only one, but it's the most famous one. This is Mound 1, excavated in 1939, famously by Basil Brown, as seen in the movies. We are looking at the oval shape of the mound as it was when he dug it in 1939. And the area of the ship is marked out. with a pointy bit at each end. And you can see from that that the ship is not equally covered by the mound. In fact, part of the mound nearest the river has been largely removed by ploughing.

So the burial chamber was off on one side and in this burial chamber they found all these marvellous things laid out in quite a meaningful way, I believe, with the... regalia at one end and then the coffin in the middle and then the cooking the sort of kitchen end for making feasts the other so it's like a tableau which seems to say something about the person very rich person

Somebody has devised this burial to show some of the objects. And we can imagine that these... were shown because the roof of the chamber that was put in at the end was put in afterwards so there was a time when you could walk around in the 7th century and see the burial and you can imagine the parents explaining to the children what they were looking at and they would look at some of the finds. That's the sword which he took.

on such and such an expedition that's the shield that was a gift from so and so if you like it was like a mini biography in artifacts and so that's why i think these burials are not just what person owned but were much more about what somebody was trying to say about him almost like an obituary and i think the person that probably created this was his widow

We don't know her name, but she was quite a famous person and appears in Venerable Bede's history. And we came and excavated here much later, in the 80s. and tried to explore the whole burial ground. So from where we're standing, you can see mounds in front and to the side and behind us. They're all different sizes. And so when I started...

What I wanted to try and do was to find what story the cemetery was telling. I didn't make an assumption that these were all kings or anything like that. I realised that because they're different sizes, they're probably all... of a different status and so on and so we selectively took a strip

north south and east west over the burial ground and dug the mounds that came up in those areas and deliberately chose the mounds that had already been dug which might sound rather silly but but in fact it was because i wanted to do the minimum amount of damage and get the maximum amount of history and that meant not plunging into things that we didn't know much about. But we knew that Mount 2, Mount 5...

six, seven, they'd all been dug before. They'd got holes in the top where people had dug. And in fact, we found that there's been a dig in the early 17th century, very comprehensive in pits, big pits. and then there'd been one another lot in the 19th century. They dug trenches. They dug quite long trenches through the mounds, and when we excavated Mound 7. We found the steps cut in the side where the antiquary could come after lunch and then go and see what good things the earth had thrown up.

An archaeology of the archaeology as well. Well, it was the archaeology of the archaeology and really interesting as well. And we come to 38, 39, there's Basil Brown digging. And then he also dug trenches and we dug in a different way again, according to the age we lived in then. And now, of course, they're doing even more exciting things with much better equipment than we had and finding lots.

So there's a lot to tell, certainly we've got a lot to tell us still. Now one thing that we mentioned just as we were walking in here is that we are now standing on top of the most famous mound, so mound one. but that's not the only one as you've said but it's also not from the only period and this actually is a cemetery that was used for really quite a long period of time so it's not just one little moment in time it's much longer than that can you say something about those other cemeteries

Yes, there are three cemeteries. One is where Mrs Tranmer's house is now. And that's a sixth century, more conventional type of cemetery, furnished cremations as well. But they also have a very interesting burial rite where the Croatians are buried in a bronze bucket. And that looks towards the first of the burials. in the royal burial ground, cemetery number two, where we're standing now.

And that starts with cremation mounds, cremations under mounds, and they are using bronze buckets. They're buried with animal remains as well, and playing pieces and those kinds of things. So now we've arrived at something like the late 6th, early 7th century. And then there was Mound 17, famous mound. It's quite a small one, difficult to find, but we found it.

and that had a young man and a horse buried in adjacent graves and the young man had a sword and a shield and buckets on and the horse had a nice bridle with gilt strap ends and a very nice snaffle bit as well. So that was a lovely find. And then two ship burials, not one, but two. And the first one was under Mount 2, and the ship was buried on top of the chamber.

So the man was lying in a chamber underground and then the ship had been sort of dragged on top of it. And then Mount One, the famous one, where the person was buried in a chamber inside the ship. And then there were others that came into our sample area. There were young people buried with a small amount of jewellery. And then, best of all, there was a woman. buried in Mount 14 and Mount 14 had been really wrecked by the tomb robbers.

They dug it quite wildly anyway, but they'd also dug it during a thunderstorm, apparently, because they were treading in all the bits into the silt in the bottom.

But that was lucky for us because they didn't find them to take them away. So we were able to say that this person was a woman. She had a silver Chatelaine. That's like a bunch of keys, which is a sign of high status. And then... little like furniture tax which suggested a couch or a bed of some sort as in other bed burials of this same period and the same period is like 650, so the middle of the 7th century.

So we've got accompanied burials, rich burials, all the way from the 6th century through to the mid-7th. Then there's a bit of a gap and we get the third cemetery. which consists not of furnished burials but of people who've been executed by hanging and they're buried in a rather higgledy-piggledy way. One group... is on the outside of the Royal Bureau of the Ground and round sockets which look rather like they were for gallows. Another group all round Mount 5 and we've...

included these in the Sutton Hoo story because they're really part of what happened afterwards. They're radiocarbon dated to the 8th to the 10th century. So the time of the Christian kings. or the time of the Vikings come to that so you know there are explanations which we're not quite able to be absolutely firm about, but nevertheless they seem quite suggestive. So the story of the Sutton Hoo burial ground is also the story of East Anglia in a way.

and it's able to stretch what we knew before and it doesn't close the book. It really just opens new things that people want to know now and that's why work's still going on here.

So really people have been engaging with it for quite a long time, just both from that period itself and also ongoing in more recent times. But the one thing I want to talk to you about as well while we're here, which leads into the next project that you're working on at the moment.

It's got to do with the location and this I think really only makes sense if you come here to see it because we are standing up on a promitory and as you walk towards the cemetery you can really see down that hill and you can see down towards the river. To tell you something about that location, the geography of this, and why that was important. Just to avoid disappointment, there are two places you can see the river clearly from the Royal Bellagrand. One is the top of Mount 2.

And the other is the top of the tower, which the National Trusts have built. And that's actually built so you can take in the whole of the burial ground. But if you turn around and look the other way, you see the river. And the river is very important in the location of this burial ground. It comes to a point where just about the tide will reach, and once upon a time it spread broadly here.

broad enough to turn around a very big boat. Well, it was a very big boat that was in Mount 1, 90 feet long, 27 meters, and that was probably the most important find. in mind one not the most glittery but the most important is the most important machine you know in the lives of people of the 7th century with the most kudos

and the most potential but of course it was quite incomplete. However it's not the only complete find that was in the burial chamber or that was associated with this mound and the burial chamber contain, for example, 100 or so fragments of the helmet, and the helmet's been reconstructed. So there is a logic in wanting to reconstruct the boat, and that's what we're doing at the moment.

And that's actually happening just a few miles from here isn't it? Yes it's just happening across the river from here in Woodbridge and we are lucky enough to have got the use of a former yacht building.

establishment with a magnificently huge shed called the long shed and it's long enough to build a 27 meter long boat in and that's what's happening we've just really started the keel is going to be laid this week all joined together this week and then we'll start putting the strakes on and they've got to be held together with iron rivets which is what the original ship was nails with roves sealing them so we've got to

find 4,000 of those we've got to make 4,000 of those rivets so we're having a big opening or a big sort of press day on the 10th next week to launch our campaign for doing that. So we think we'll have it built in a couple of years and then we're going to take it on trials and those trials will be mainly rowing trials to start with.

Yes, and that's the key point, but let's go and have a look at the progress of the ship down at the site itself. Okay So I'm here now looking at the actual reconstruction and talking to some of the volunteers making it. Can you just explain to me what it is you're doing right now? Yes, we're shaping the keel in order to fit the first plank, which will be nailed onto here. And so this is one...

Oh, is it several large pieces of oak? There's one piece of wood through to the other end, about 50 feet. And then this is a join here. It goes up there and there will be another join. To the top there to bring it up to that height and you're using just simple axes simple And is it sort of something that anybody actually really knows how to do or are you learning as you're doing it? I'm learning how to do it. I've not worked with wood before. And is it going well so far? Going very well.

Fantastic. I mean, he looks so brilliant. And what's the next step then? So once you've got the keel in place, you're going to put the planks on the sides? The first plank will go either side. That's called the garboard. And it's quite a critical plank. Because it's joined to the keel. And all the rest will be joined to it in that shape. Fantastic. Well, I can't wait to see the result. Brilliant. Thank you.

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Okay, Martin, so we've now come down from Sutton Hoo. We've gone across the river and we've come down into Woodbridge. So we're right on the river now. And we come into the long shed where there's something quite extraordinary, which is the work in progress on the... construction on the ship from mound one and you're the director of the saxon ship company in charge of this project essentially so tell me exactly what's going on here

What's going on here is that we're building the ship in a shed. The shed is like a sort of hangar, really, and it's 40 metres long. And we can see so far the sort of snake-like form of the keel. In other words, the lowest piece of wood in the ship, made of solid oak, made of oak trees that have been split, and then lovingly... trimmed and trimmed and trimmed with an axe until they gradually get the shape that's needed for the very bottom timber of the ship. And that's in this lovely rich oak.

almost like a piece of furniture because it's so beautifully finished. And then on top, by total contrast, there are plywood formers, moulds they're called, which show what the shape is going to be. and that helps the shipwright with the next phase which is to attach planks to the flanges which are on top of the keel see here these flanges sort of come out there's all one piece of wood but they come out and then they've got to be joined with rivets which is a nail

and a rove, a diamond rhomboid-shaped rove, which slips over the top. So it's like they're clenching these two together. And so the first one you put on is the lowest. of the planks is called strake so the lowest strake the garbled strake is put all the way along and then the next one has to be added to that, and then the next one, and then the next one. So these, they gradually grow into the shape of a boat through the months.

as they are fastened with the rivets. So some 4,000 rivets go into joining the long planks of the nine lots of strakes building up to the top of the shape and then when that's done we will be putting the gunnels on there's the piece of wood that goes along the top of the sides of the boat and the gunnel also carries the tholes which are another piece of wood, thorn-shaped piece of wood against which you pull the oars and then you have a colossal rowing boat.

And as you see, it's huge. And it doesn't look as if it could possibly row anywhere. But with enough people, and this could be 40, it could be 28, the experiments are going to see what we can do. And with that number of crew and the boat in its final form, it'll be taken through the hangar door here, which is a little slipway is presented almost immediately, and it'll be down that slipway and into the... River Dieben at high tide and the year will be 2024, I hope.

Okay, so this is really quite immense in so many different ways, both in the size and scale of it, in the amount of effort that's going to go into this. And it's a long-term project. You're talking another three years or so to get it done. Yes, to get it built, yes.

the question then of course is why are you doing this i mean i can see it's an interesting project this is going to be a beautiful thing but i know that there's an actual research agenda behind this isn't there it's not just a fun project why are you doing this yes i think we can

isolate a number of reasons. The first obvious one is that we want to know more what it was like being in the 7th century at the time when they buried the ship and wrecked its chamber and put all those treasures in it and did all the things that we know about Sutton Hoo. and are staggered by it in many ways. So that's just a little window on it, this grave. Well, it's a big grave, but it's a little window on it. So you ought to know more about that world. But why a ship? So the ship was...

the biggest artifact, if I can put it that way, in the grave. A grave had many other finds in, some of them of incomparable beauty. And this ship was the most important machine, I think, in the lives of 7th century English. It took them on the rivers, took them on the sea. It was also a status symbol. So, you know, what we're trying to do is to see whether we can reconstruct it and that gives us rewards which are partly...

Well, I suppose they're mainly to the research, to the understanding of history, but they're also part of a sort of social dividend which the whole operation gives. So we know that the... The ship itself is incomplete. It was only a stain really in the ground and with rows and rows of rivets. And so that gives us some idea of the dimensions. It certainly tells us what the materials are. So it's made of oak and iron and it's 27 meters long. So that much we know.

It's not complete, though. Other finds in the chamber, let's think of some. For example, the helmet. That was found in a hundred or so little bits. And when they were trying to understand the burial and what was in it... It was obvious that this had to be reconstructed, and so it has been reconstructed. It's taken a few years to do. It wasn't easy. It's really broken up. The remains of the ship was in better condition than that.

to have a complete ship is actually easier than to have a complete helmet and no one's arguing that that's a good thing to do. So that's very important to think. I think the second thing is that

The action of building it helps to fill in the gaps that we don't know about. And in a strange way, the ship is telling us what to do. We know what the rivets are like. We know what the... heads of the rivets and the robes alike and when they're parallel to each other we know they would have gone through two planks, two one-inch planks which were

so to speak parallel with each other so that means that we have some idea what shape the keel should be and that's been discovered now that it had a hollow chamfer along it in order to make that possible that's the ship telling us what to think. So it's teaching us how it should be. And that's not too fanciful. Ask any of the volunteers here what's happening when they use the axe to shape the oak.

And they may wax lyrical about it, but mostly they'll say, well, you know, you just get a feel for how it should be. And that means that we're getting a type of evidence which doesn't really exist anywhere else. And that will help us. We've got some other clues too, so another reason why it's worth doing is that we can see many things that are really aesthetic about the way the oak is shaped.

about the way the rows of the rivets are all lined into lines parallel to the keel. It's as though it has to be perfect. And in that sense... It's copying so many of the finds, you know, in the chamber. Think of that metalwork and also the textiles with sort of worsted finish, diagonal twills and so on. Amazing, really beautiful. Why would the ship be less?

beautiful than that so although it's extremely big it'll also be i think aesthetically satisfying so i think those are some of the reasons which we believe it's really important but Obviously, deep down, there's a research need here. We don't know what was happening in the most important factor of the history of the area of Northwest Europe, which is how did people get about and what happened.

Could they do? Did they have sales? How did they navigate? There is information here, but it isn't yet complete enough. We'd like the information to be so complete.

that you could easily write a novel about it without having to make anything up. That would be super, except the story can make that up if you like. We want to provide all the props. So I think that's... where we're going and we know that there are lots of examples or not lots but some examples mainly in Scandinavia of buried ships and they seem to be in a sort of evolutionary sequence from rowing boats through to

ones that might have sailed, ones that definitely sailed, and they get bigger with time. Fantastic. And they need to, maybe they can tack, maybe they can't. There's so many things to discover.

and that can be discovered by experiment. What we're going to do is to row our boat. First of all, we're going to see how hard it is to get 40 people to row together. And if you go out rowing with my family, to get four people to row together is an extreme achievement. The idea of 40 mind boggles. But of course that's what has to happen. They have to be beautifully in time.

and you know that's part of the learning process as well definitely and so we're also going to do what rowing boats do best in other words travel the lakes and the rivers and we thought we'd do some adventures starting at Woodbridge and going down the Deben out into the sea and then round the corner and up the Thames for example. Now that's a place we know 7th century.

angles would have gone and then instead of turning right we turn north instead for the second route and that takes us up to the Trent and then at the top of the Trent, takes us to the Humber, we go to the Humber then we go to the Trent and at that point that's where lots of battles have been between the East Angles and the Mercians so they're definitely there.

And the ship was the way to go because you're safe until you get there. You can see the advantage. And then we'd probably go up to Jarrow because that's where Venerable Bede lived and the historian of the 7th and 8th century. And that somehow helps put our drama into its proper framework. I think when we do that we're going to learn so much about not only river travel.

but also the state of our rivers today and whether they are being looked after, whether motorboats are doing them a lot of harm, whether we're going to have a different view of the countryside by being in a boat and looking sideways, just over the bank. We're going to use place names to see the sort of places alongside the river which should have had early English or later Scandinavian presence. And then we're going to see how easy it is to travel, how many hours can you row.

before you need a rest? Do we need a reserve crew? Where would we spend the night? All that I think is going to be a great adventure and a relatively safe one because we're in the river rather than in the ocean. I think that's... going to show people that rowing is a really important way of getting a boat it's not just waiting for the sail it's you're pretty busy with your boats of all sizes lots of different sizes of boats they're all sculling about the creeks

Yeah, a little coastal travel of course, in sight of land and using the rivers as the motorways of the age. I think that's going to bring the whole thing to life in a very important way.

I mean, it's such a wonderfully ambitious project, isn't it? And I think it's going to add to knowledge in so many different ways. And obviously, as we just said, it's quite a long-term project. If people want to follow it, how can they see the progress? Can they come in here? Can they come to visit here in Woodbridge?

Yes, the ship shed, where we are now, it's got a place for visitors to come and see what's going on. We have open days. If you can't get to Woodbridge, we have a website, which is saxonship.org. And that has a newsletter every month saying what we've been doing. You can certainly help us build the ship. We ask people to help us with the provision of oak.

and the farmers of Suffolk have been absolutely wonderful and they've given us whole oak trees to work with, which is fantastic. Now we've got to put the planks on, we're going to need 4,000 rivets.

And each of those rivets has to be hand forged. We can get the metal, but we have to hand forge them. So that's going to cost a fair bit. And we're asking people to invest in... rivets and when with about 20 pounds each from memory that's on the website anyway so you'd be an investor in the boat a bit of the boat would depend on your gift And then we'd also having to have about 80 ore, so that's 40 plus 40. So we've got enough to break a few and lose a few. Then there are £1,000 to sponsor.

and then you've got your oar and you can put your name on it and so you can help the boat be propelled by doing that and that's really how we get money we do apply to charitable bodies as well to say would you like to help us we've got a very small group of paid staff i think we've got four professionals and 65 volunteers so we also love volunteers especially if they can come from not too far away so they can be here three or four times a week we teach them how to hold an axe and how to work it

They get passionate about trimming oak. They'll do it all day long. And it is fascinating. I mean, wood is such wonderful stuff to work with. And if you think that when you've worked it, you're then dressing it with linseed oil and pitch and things like that and makes this wonderful smell. So the whole atmosphere in the shed.

Got some tar and pitch right next to us now, haven't we? They can smell that quite strongly. Definitely a great atmosphere. Okay, so people can help. People can... I think the rivets are a great Christmas present. I've written sponsorship, isn't it? If you've already wanted to be an early... of all shipwrights you can come and volunteer a little certificate to say you bought a rivet it's got your name on it and that's means that you've helped put the ship in the water

Fantastic. Martin, it's been so brilliant to come here and see it. So thank you so much for showing me around and for sharing it with our Gone Medieval listeners. Thank you so much for coming. And if you want to go and find out more, do have a look at that website. We're going to get out of this rain that's bombarding the tin roof of this shed, so I don't know if you can actually hear anything. But do check out the ship and follow it over the next three years.

This has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. Today recorded from Sutton Hoo and Woodbridge. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already and stay tuned for our next episode which will be up on Saturday with Matt Lewis and mine next Tuesday. day.