The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial. The Archaeology of the Jewellery

Extract

We have not hitherto considered the East Angles as a showy and conspicuously prosperous folk. In the Settlement Period we find them, as Mr Myres says, 'a federation of several smaller peoples' living in groups that were geographically isolated and to a certain extent independent of each other. Their material wealth would be judged by such a cemetery as Caistor-by-Nonvich, and on the evidence available before the Sutton Hoo discovery we should not have credited them with any unusual skill in the crafts or with the possession of notable riches. But we now know that in the early seventh century the folk inhabiting the coastal area between the Orwell and the Alde were the subjects of a prince whose grave contained one of the most magnificent and costly furnitures that has ever been found in a Teutonic tomb. Hitherto, when we have wanted to show off the richness of Anglo-Saxon England, we have looked to Kent. Now we have learnt that in one limited area of Suffolk, where lies Rendlesham, a vicus regius of the East Anglian ruling dynasty, the maximum brilliance of Kentish archaeology was not only equalled, but surpassed in splendour ; and we realize that the house of Wuffa (the sixth century grandfather of Redwald) thus put to shame the rich royalties of Kent, at the time of, or only shortly after, the reign of Kent's greatest king, Ethelbert.