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Saxon gems show taste for cheap bling has long history
AN archaeological dig has shown that "cheap bling" was the norm even in a Saxon village.
A three-year excavation on a windblown spur of sand overlooking the River Trent yielded literally millions of finds – including hundreds of decorative pins and brooches as well as millions of animal, fish and bird bones.
An amazing array of ornaments in shiny copper alloy and bronze turned up at the abandoned mediaeval settlement of North Conesby, in the parish of Flixborough, in north Lincolnshire – but only one object made of gold.
Dave Evans, the co-editor of a new book about the artefacts, said the finds revealed insights into the life of ordinary people which studies of the period tend to ignore. He added: "A lot of our appreciation of how Anglo Saxon society worked has tended to be shaped by a very small number of texts, Beowulf, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Church and the Anglo Saxon Chronicle.
"Everyone seizes on these places and forgets the rest. If you look at the big exhibitions or coffee table books everyone wants to talk about places like Sutton Hoo, but the difficulty with that is that it's like studying the Royal Family and expecting that to tell you how ordinary people live."
The finds – which mainly date from the middle Saxon period, about AD700 to 1000 – aren't as magnificent as those found at Sutton Hoo, the site of the famous Anglo-Saxon ship-burial, but they tell their own story.
He said: "We only have one gold object, a mediaeval twisted gold bracelet, and maybe 50 silver objects and perhaps 100 odd coins.
"But there's an amazing range of copper alloy, bronze brooches and pins, something like 600 dress pins in almost every style. Some of it is tinned and plated to make it look at first glance as though it was silver or gold. A lot of it is cheap bling but the fact this is the kind of things that turn up on many better-off settlements of the period make them more useful to archaeologists than those found exclusively in royal households or burials."
The settlement was a local centre for other small villages and farms. The coins found suggested it was an estate centre collecting rents and a market where people were buying goods with cash. Other finds included 22 styli – tools for writing, the largest number ever recovered from a secular site in the whole of Anglo-Saxon England, showing that literacy played an important role in the life of the settlement.
Analysis of some of the two million animal, bird and fish bones showed that eating habits were diverse – including porpoise and dolphin bones suggesting the locals turned creatures getting stranded to good use. Large cattle bones suggested animal being specially bred for consumption.
The dig revealed the remains of 40 buildings and other structures – and large spreads of rubbish containing huge quantities of artefacts. The settlement was occupied between the seventh and the early 11th centuries – at its height it probably included members of the social elite – and during a later phase between the 12th and 15th centuries.
The site first came to attention in the 1930s when an antiquarian called Harold Dudley suggested there may be a Royal settlement in the area as Conseby meant the King's Farm.
In 1988 a dig found a dozen Saxon burials and the parts of a huge ditch full of Saxon material which appeared to mark the boundary of a major settlement, prompting English Heritage to fund a major excavation.
The details of the many thousands of artefacts recovered at Flixborough are set out in a new book, Life and Economy at Early Mediaeval Flixborough, edited by Mr Evans and Christopher Loveluck.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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