The Last Voyage | Sutton Hoo

Hello and welcome to the National Trust podcast. I'm James Grasby, building and landscapes curator for the National Trust. And today, I'm in Suffolk in the east of England, to learn more about a discovery found under layers of acidic sandy soil. Some 1400 years ago, a community came together to haul a ship from a river within which they were to bury their King. And today we're going to reimagine what that final journey was really like.

Hi. Are you James?

How do you do?

I'm Jacq Barnard. I'm the project manager from the Sutton Hoo Ship's Company. Shall we go and have a look inside?

Yes, please. That is an enormous boat. I had no idea how huge it is! We're looking at the side of this vessel and you've got the oak keel that runs the full length, but the principal shape is given by a superstructure which really defines the shape of this long, lean, sleek pointed at both ends, huge boat. I mean, I could park four family cars along the keel, nose to tail and still have room for a couple of minis at either end.

Well, I could take you up to one of our end platforms and we can have a look at it from above?

Right, we're just climbing up to an elevated platform that I guess is about 10 ft above the ground, and we're not even as high as the prow of this ship.

When you see it elevated and being built in this kind of magnitude, it is just breathtaking. Our principle here is if we don't know what the Anglo Saxons done, we will always go back in time rather than forward. So the saw which we knew the Romans used, wasn't used by the Anglo Saxons. So as much as possible, we are using their methods and their tools to try and understand exactly how they built this ship 1400 years ago.

So whereabouts have you got to in the process of rebuilding this boat?

Our plan is that we get two planks on a week, we're on track. So by the end of this year, we hope to have the whole hull planked so it would look like a ship, but it won't have any insides. So the following year will all be about making sure that the frames are in place, that we've worked out how the flooring will be fitted, how the seating will be put in...

Very sort of dominant and striking feature about the design is this regular punctuation along the length of the vessel of these metal rivets.

You know, if, if it weren't for these rivets, we wouldn't be building this ship because when they excavated the site up at Sutton Hoo, it was the rivets that remained in the sand in the ground in the right places, which allowed us to convert that archaeological information into a modern day plan.

Because there was something particular about the geology of the site that caused the wood to decay and disappear, but the metal to remain?

That's spot on.

I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of these metal rivets.

I can tell you there are 3598 of those in there.

Wow

That's an awful lot of hammering required.

The enthusiasm and vigor is to be seen everywhere. You've got a few more years of work to do, and then what happens?

Spring 2025 is when we hope to get it on the water and then we're going to incrementally trial it. But one of the reasons we're building this is to find out what it was capable of and what it may have been used for and why it might have been used as a burial ship. Why was it held in such high

This is an enormous enterprise.

The ship really is just the beginning, isn't it? So what we've got out there is the beautiful river Deben which must have been the playground of this original ship. So don't you think it would be a good idea if we went out onto the river ourselves and, and had a bit of a look and see what journey may have happened?

I think that would be absolutely stunning

Ok, let's go. James, this is Brian, who's our skipper for the day.

How do you do, Brian?

Hello, James, pleased to meet you. Sorry about the weather today! I hope you don't mind, I've brought somebody else along who I think will be able to help you reimagine the journey.

Hello, I'm Matt.

I have to say you are a formidable looking figure. You're wearing a warm pinky red woollen cloak and a tunic and a fabulous hat.

I'm wearing it because I'm a member of Wulfheodenas, which is a living history organisation that concentrates on recreating the material culture of the people of that time. This is the sort of thing that somebody of reasonably high status would be wearing in the early seventh century at the time of King Redwald and the Sutton Hoo ship burial.

It's very striking. I wonder if you've got any gear for me?

Can't be going out onto the water just in 21st century clothes. So to start with, we're going to give you a woollen tunic and then we'll put one of these wrap around coats over the top of that and then a cloak over the top of that and we'll get you a hat as well and you will be ready for an adventure on the Deben.

You are kind

I'm also carrying this rather large horn that you can see. The end is sawn off because it's a sounding horn rather than a drinking horn.

Matt I think we should sound that now to start our journey. I think they heard that. Matt we've left Bawsdey Quay behind in a very small, clinker-built, wooden boat, in the water that is timeless, the way the waves are breaking over the bow of this wooden vessel.

The landscape that we see, the hills that we see in the distance as we move further up the river, is exactly the same landscape as we would have seen in the sixth and the seventh century.

These are the sensations and the sights that somebody entering this river at that period would have felt. Actually as I understand it, we're closer here to mainland Europe than I am to my home in Worcestershire. This must have been a meeting place of seafarers.

Definitely, I think particularly once we start to see the development of Kingdoms, of power centres, and that's something that the Deben is particularly important for. It's a highway for, for European trade, for cross channel trade, and trade from much further away as well, even as far as like the Byzantine Empire and then beyond into China. And it's also kind of a highway for people migrating into the country.

Now, Matt, tell me who was King Redwald.

Redwald, he ruled East Anglia but he held power over kings of other Southern Kingdoms as well, so kings of Essex and possibly Kent, Sussex and possibly even Wessex as well. So he was very important, King.

Brian, our captain has turned the engine off and we are mid-channel, silence in this timeless wooden boat. What I'm fascinated about Matt, is why will you choose to bury your King in a boat?

It's making that really important statement saying here is a powerful man. Here is a true King amongst kings and it's his family stamping their authorities - this is how important we are. Not only was Redwald so rich and powerful and he deserves to have all of these things buried with him, but we as his descendants are so rich and powerful that we can give them up to the ground to go with Redwald into whatever lies beyond.

But it's a formidable prospect. Jacq, you're also a very experienced rower in your own. right - We're sitting on a thwart broadly speaking, which is a transverse bench on which a rower would sit and then there would be two oars people would there on either side on the same bench?

But remember that the ship is very wide in the centre, it's 4.8 m across - we would be a long way from one another. But we would also be expected to row in unison because in order for 20 rows on each side to move at the same time, they have all got to go in the water and come out of the water at the same point. If not, they'll start to clash with one another.

And tell me, Matt, who were these Anglo Saxon rowers?

You can't just put anybody into any boat and expect them to be able to row efficiently. And even more so when it's like a royal vessel of the size that we're talking about. So the assumption has to be that these are men who are trained for rowing, retained as rowers. They probably had other duties as well, they may have been what we call a'gesith'- They would be people who would own lands that were given to them by the King, and they would perform military service for the King.

Fascinating. We're drifting, fire up the motor! we're off. And the waves are breaking over the bow. We're going into the wind and I guess there's a little bit of tide that is wanting to push us out to sea too. But picturing taking that vessel, rowing would be very hard work... The estuary was really quite broad when we started, and it's narrowing down and there is Woodbridge with a modern marina and some clearly more industrial buildings.

And the land rises around us as well as we move up. It's been very sort of flat and level and the bit that we're coming up to now is where we assume that the ship itself would have been moored before it was then dragged out of the water and hauled the half mile up to the burial mounds of Sutton Hoo.

It's been an encounter with history. We're slowing down now so we must be getting pretty near our destination - Sutton Hoo. I've left Jacq and Matt and have come to the bank beneath Sutton Hoo. There is a public footpath here along the bank and I can just see a very steep hill and some woodland to one side. I'm here to meet Laura, who's going to help me understand what happened once the ship got to this very point. I can see her. Laura.

Hello. Nice to meet you.

I'm very pleased to meet you.

I'm Laura and I'm the archaeology and engagement manager here at National Trust Sutton Hoo.

Couldn't be more thrilled to be here. The rain has stopped.

Yes! Welcome to Sutton Hoo.

Now look, I'm feeling a bit daunted. We've recreated this journey from the mouth of the river Deben to here. This was the beginning of the great haul of that ship - from here?

Yes. Sutton Hoo is a place name in Old English, which is the language of the Anglo Saxons. The Sutton bit means southern and Ton means place or settlements. And then a Hoo is a raised area of land often overlooking water and that exactly describes where we are and we're going to be heading up one of the Hoos to where the Royal Burial Ground is situated.

And in terms of this moment, the ship has been beached, I suppose, in this squashy mud?

Yes

So conceivably, there would have been spectators on both sides of the river? There would have been other vessels, perhaps?

Possibly Yes. Yes. And it would have been, we think over a course of several days. Possible funeral feasts as well - the kind of the ceremony. This is, wasn't the kind of funerary practice that would have been afforded to everyone. There are only three Anglo Saxon ship burials that we know of in the whole of England and there are two here at Sutton Hoo and one nearby at Snape.

You've then got an enormous problem. I mean, it's hard enough to launch a ship going with gravity but to pull it out of the water across these sort of muddy surfaces of this bank, across this berm up here.

It's something quite alien to us today, I guess dragging a huge ship just by the means that they had. But various theories include a lot of manpower first and foremost, and ropes, potentially these trees being used as rollers to get us up there and potentially even livestock as well being used. But it would have been a phenomenal feat.

So Laura, we're out of the mud, we've got a bit of a journey to go now, haven't we?

We do. So we don't know exactly the route that the ship would have taken, but we're going to do is close to what we think is kind of possible today.

Underneath this grass is a very dry sandy soil. I can imagine that being quite a sort of slick surface over to which you could drag it quite readily.

Yes, we have quite acidic soil here in Suffolk. The soil type means that there isn't a ship to see at Sutton Hoo today because over time water seeping in, created an acid bath which then dissolved kind of all the organic materials such as the timber of the ship, the body that was placed in it. And what was uncovered in 1939 by archaeologists such as Basil Brown and Charles Phillips was actually a fossil of a ship.

Laura we've emerged with some lovely woodland into a much more open landscape, but nevertheless, the ground is rising. I guess we've got 30 or 40 m?

We're nearly there, but we are on the steepest kind of part of the incline now, just imagining the people hauling the effort to get this ship up there. And meanwhile, people are preparing the actual kind of burial itself.

Were slaves part of the picture?

Quite possibly. Yeah. The Anglo Saxons did have slaves. We know slaves were part of their culture and also were slaves themselves as well.

I tell you what, I was rather sorry when I had to take off my Anglo Saxon clothes, they protected me very well in the boat. But I was very struck by the colour, the vivid, vibrant colours, I mean, almost sort of 1970s, retro and groovy.

Yes, a lot of the time people refer to this period as the dark ages, but it couldn't be further from the truth. It was a very vibrant time and we know that they used natural dyes to create a rich rainbow of colour. And that is one of the things that's worth thinking about, you know, in terms of the ship, the level of Sutton Hoo craftsmanship, and thinking about other Anglo Saxon stone sculptures that were painted, it could have been carved, it could have had decorative panels.

The trees are thinning and this path winding its way through them. And we're beginning to get a glimpse of that soft pillow shape on the horizon.

This is where we're gonna put the ship that we've been dragging up the hill. This is mound one and then we'll set about furnishing the ship and the burial chamber ready to heap over the soil to create this beautiful mound.

Now, Laura, which way was the ship facing?

So it's this East to West orientation, facing out to the river and that connection to the North Sea, we think is just such an important part of the kind of burial layout.

Take me through the process of burying a boat.

What we're doing is kind of furnishing a burial chamber in the middle. The King would have been laid out in there. Some people think that he was buried in a tree trunk coffin. Other theories suggest that he was lying kind of supine on the base of the ship. And then it's a process of adding in the objects that not only represent him in life but also would have had a purpose, a statement for him in death as well.

So not simply a basic tool kit for the afterlife.

Yes, many of these things might have been specifically made for burial. There were some things included for a practical purpose, but some things were very much for the statement of power. The Anglo Saxons at this time in East Anglia are predominantly pagan, but we are very much at that transition point. So we've got influences coming in from the East, Christianity coming through, through Kent and spreading. And we also have Christianity to the West thinking about Ireland and Scotland as well.

So what a remarkable discovery for the archaeologist Basil Brown in 1939. Staggering.

We say that this is a discovery that changed history. That it truly revolutionised our understanding of who these people were, what they were capable of - the amazing craftsmanship. Everything found here at here is an expression of what it was to be an Anglo Saxon and what they were capable of.

Laura, what is intoxicatingly striking is the geometry of it, that we've got this dark foreground and this hemisphere like a rising planet of this, of this mound on the horizon set against this wonderful sky that you only get in this part of the world, I think. But why here at Sutton Hoo?

Archaeology is a bit like having a jigsaw puzzle box. We've got some of the pieces, but we haven't got the picture on the back. So a lot of the time, what we're doing is looking at the evidence that we have, seeing how it fits together and coming up with theories. There's still so much to learn about Sutton Hoo, so much research that we're still carrying out today to uncover other bits of the story. We think there are around 18 burial mounds here.

18?

Yes. Some of them have been plowed down to almost on the flat. So, shall we go and explore some of the other people buried here?

Yes please. Laura, this feels like a great privilege to be going over the barrier. It's got a little rope here.

So I'll just unhook the rope and let you in. So this is for our guided tours. So just kind of minimizing footfall and the erosion on the burial grounds.

So, Laura, that's one of the groups to our left, a guided tour.

It is, and actually, we're going to head over to Mound 17.

And every step we take, a grasshopper leaps out in front of us.

A carpet that's alive with wildlife.

Mound 17 looks in comparison to mound one, pretty modest. It's pretty flat.

It is. So this was one of the very last things that was discovered during the 1980s campaign and it was actually found, purely by chance, by Professor Martin Carver at the end of his excavation season, believe it or not, whilst he was playing golf.

When we took over the site, we were conscious that the site had been raided on a previous occasion. So we put the site under 24 hour guard. I did my stint, I was a lone guard surrounded by a lot of mounds and being a golfer, not a very good one but a keen golfer it's safe to say, I invented a game where you chip from Mound One to Mound Two, from Mound Two to Mound 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and so on. Thus, helping me learn the geography of the site, and also try and improve my chipping skills.

What was actually found here?

So we've got two graves in front of us and one possible theory is this is Redwald's son and he was buried with everything that you would think of for a warrior. Moving over to the next grave, it's a horse. So his horse, we believe, to accompany him on to the next life and over there, which is again, no longer really visible as a mound, Mound 14, is the only high status female burial that we found here. That could have been Redwald's Queen. Unfortunately, we'll never know for certain.

So what you're saying was this was exclusively a family burial site?

The Royal Burial Ground is a really important part of our Sutton Hoo stories, but there are other chapters that are equally as interesting and fascinating. So during Professor Martin Carver's excavation, they also

The story is not over. It's been fascinating, Laura, thank you very much indeed. Standing here in the courtyard looking at the full size sculpture of the great ship they have here. It's inspiring to think of what the Anglo Saxons achieved at Sutton Hoo. It really shows the commitment and the ceremony and the importance, in preparing their dead for the afterlife. And the sheer feat of strength and engineering to enable that to happen is incredibly impressive.