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Creating the Pagan English (Sue Content and Howard Williams) This pdf of your paper in Signals of Belief in Early England belongs to the publishers Oxbow Books and it is their copyright. As author you are licenced to make up to 50 offprints from it, but beyond that you may not publish it on the World Wide Web until three years from publication (October 2013), unless the site is a limited access intranet (password protected). If you have queries about this please contact the editorial department at Oxbow Books (editorial@ oxbowbooks.com). An offprint from Signals of Belief in Early England Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited edited by Martin Carver, Alex Sanmark and Sarah Semple © Oxbow Books 2010 ISBN 978-1-84217-395-4 Contents Preface .....................................................................................................................................ix List of Contributors ...............................................................................................................xi Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................xii Foreword: Heathen Songs and Devil’s Games (Neil Price) ........................................... xiii Chapter 1: Agency, Intellect and the Archaeological Agenda (Martin Carver) ..............1 Chapter 2: In the Open Air (Sarah Semple) .......................................................................21 Chapter 3: At the Water’s Edge (Julie Lund) .....................................................................49 Chapter 4: At the Funeral (Howard Williams) ...................................................................67 Chapter 5: In the Hall (Jenny Walker) ................................................................................83 Chapter 6: Animal Magic (Aleks Pluskowski) .................................................................. 103 Chapter 7: Horses in Mind (Chris Fern) ..........................................................................128 Chapter 8: Living On: Ancestors and the Soul (Alexandra Sanmark) ..........................158 Chapter 9: Creating the Pagan English (Sue Content and Howard Williams) ..............181 Afterword: Caveats and Futures (Ronald Hutton) ...........................................................201 Index .......................................................................................................................................207 Chapter 9 Creating the Pagan English From the Tudors to the Present Day Sue Content and Howard Williams Introduction From the late eighteenth century onwards the ascription of furnished graves to the early Middle Ages has given archaeology a special but ambivalent role in shedding light on the pagan Anglo-Saxons. Drawing on this material, historians and archaeologists have interpreted the pagan ancestors of the English in diff erent ways, refl ecting the shift ing socio-political, religious and intellectual climates of the day. These att itudes have stretched from denial of the barbarian and pagan roots of the Anglo-Saxons through to a celebration of the noble Teutonic civilization from which the values and ideals of the English people, nation and church were believed to stem. Between these extremes is a widespread and persistent objective: to narrate the story of the Anglo- Saxons from their origins as pagan migrants to their ‘redemption’ through conversion and nation-building. To locate the understanding of paganism in the interpretations of Anglo-Saxon archaeology, it will be necessary to review, however briefl y, its role in our discipline’s historiography. The historiography of Anglo-Saxon archaeology The history of archaeology is a burgeoning sub-discipline in its own right (Murray and Evans 2008). For its part, British archaeology has received recent assessments of the origins and development of the discipline from its antiquarian roots (e.g. Levine 1986; papers in Pearce 2007) including dedicated studies of the invention of Prehistory (e.g. Briggs 2007; Rowley-Conwy 2007), the development of Roman archaeology (e.g. Hingley 2008) and the history of medieval archaeology aft er the Norman conquest (Gerrard 2003). By contrast, the origins and development of Anglo-Saxon archaeology have received relatively litt le scholarly att ention, although this is now being addressed. Our brief analysis defi nes three main phases of historiography, which we have chosen to term ‘prehistoric’, ‘protohistoric’ and ‘historic’. 182 Sue Content and Howard Williams The ‘prehistory’ of Anglo-Saxon archaeological thinking emerges in the sixteenth century following the Dissolution of the monasteries and the Reformation of the Church of England. The Saxons began to be celebrated in earnest as progenitors of the English church and nation, with Anglo-Saxon manuscripts as the focus of sustained research. Coins and graves were aff orded only brief examination and burials were not yet att ributed categorically to the Anglo-Saxons (Parry 1995). Even so, early medieval archaeology began its development during this period (Content forthcoming). The initial reluctance to att ribute graves and artefacts to the pagan Anglo-Saxons may refl ect more than a lack of chronological expertise. As Philip Schwyzer has argued in relation to Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia of 1658 (in which early Anglo-Saxon urns are described but given a Roman date), the Saxons may oft en have been seen as too much of a political ‘hot potato’ to risk recognition by antiquaries (Schwyzer 2007). The eighteenth century, which saw the rise of antiquarian interest in Anglo-Saxon and other ‘northern antiquities’ (Sweet 2004), might be described as the ‘protohistory’ of Anglo-Saxon archaeology. The earliest barrow-diggers explored and recorded numerous early medieval graves although they still frequently failed to att ribute them to the Saxons. The antiquary Bryan Faussett excavated over seven hundred early medieval graves but regarded them as ‘Romans Britonised or Britons Romanised’ (e.g. Smith 1856: 102, 136), Furthermore, Faussett ’s notebooks and discoveries were only made public with Charles Roach Smith’s publication of Inventorium Sepulchrale in 1856: close to a century aft er their discovery (Hawkes 1990; Hingley 2008). Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century the Romans were oft en regarded as a safer bet until Douglas’ 1793 Nenia Britannica saw early medieval graves fi rst ascribed to the Saxons. With the early nineteenth century, we move from the ‘prehistory’ and ‘protohistory’ into the ‘early history’ of Anglo-Saxon archaeology, associated with the overall rise in popularity of the discipline, including the Victorian pastime of barrow-digging. Although there is a sizeable literature of antiquarian, historical and philological studies from the nineteenth century, its modern historiography has so far seen only a minor focus on the rationale of Anglo-Saxon archaeology itself and the excavations and collections of individual antiquaries (e.g. Hawkes 1990; Kidd 1978; 1979; Rhodes 1990; White 1988; Wiley 1979; Wilson 1984). In terms of the wider context of the history of archaeology, Anglo-Saxon scholars like John Yonge Akerman, Charles Roach Smith and Thomas Wright have been primarily noticed because of their resistance to the adoption of the Three Age System (Briggs 2007; Rowley-Conwy 2007: 114–118; 126–38; 288–89). However, other recent overviews have illuminated the historical and intellectual context of nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon archaeology (Lucy 1998; 2000; 2002; Rhodes 1990) and the broader role of Anglo-Saxonism in early Victorian culture (Content 1995; Frantzen and Niles 1997; Young 2008). There have been more detailed explorations of how philological and historical ideas informed, and became embedded within, the archaeological work of individual early Anglo-Saxon archaeologists (Williams 2006a; 2006b; 2008 and see below). The international context of dialogue between English antiquaries and Continental and Scandinavian scholarship has also received att ention (Kidd 1978; Williams 2006a; Williams 2007a). Meanwhile, a consideration of early Victorian Anglo-Saxonism as an intellectual programme and socio-political discourse Creating the Pagan English 183 has highlighted the role of archaeology in constituting the social ‘forgett ing’ of the sub-Roman Britons (Williams 2007b). Less att ention has been aff orded so far to the history of Anglo-Saxon archaeology in the twentieth century. Useful overviews are available in the form of introductions to studies of the early Anglo-Saxon period (e.g. Arnold 1997; Lucy 2000; 2002; Wickham- Crowley 1999), and Catherine Hills (2007) has recently provided the most extensive critical appraisal of the twentieth century development of Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Also, in a recent paper, Arthur MacGregor (2007) has presented the fi rst-ever assessment of the archaeology of E.T. Leeds. Yet the later history of Anglo-Saxon archaeology remains less well-studied than its early history. For the last forty years, changing theoretical approaches, new methods and evolving discoveries have yet to be fully and adequately charted in relation to the history of studying the pre-Christian beliefs and practices of the Anglo-Saxons, although some valuable reviews of the evidence have been conducted (e.g. Wilson 1992). Within the post-processual climate of the last thirty years, in which self-refl exivity has been championed, early Anglo-Saxon archaeology has seen some detailed att empts to critique its terminologies, theories and methods (e.g. Lucy 1998). However, while some scholars, notably
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