CHAPTER TWO
“Their whole life is occupied in hunting and in the pursuits of the military art; from childhood they devote themselves to fatigue and hardships”
—JULIUS CAESAR
An inventory of the Staffordshire Hoard contained over 3,490 individual pieces, nearly half of which weighed less than a gram and included objects as small as a single bead, a glass pellet, or a rivet head. Some pieces still covered in soil were enigmatic enough to be categorized simply as “Fragment” or even “Earth lumps.” The many items that could be securely identified, however, presented a striking pattern: 151 sword hilt plates, 92 sword pommel caps, 73 sword hilt collars, and 10 pyramids from sword scabbards. The majority of the miscellaneous small items—mounts and rivets, studs and helmet fragments—also appeared to be associated with weaponry. In fact, out of the entire collection, only three pieces were, in the words of the official assessment, “clearly non-martial.”
A few obvious explanations come to mind as to why this hoard of carefully selected, overwhelmingly masculine, and militaristic objects was assembled. It was war plunder, perhaps, or a collection of broken weapons to be recycled into new gear. But while the hoard’s purpose is mysterious, its composition is not surprising, for the Anglo-Saxons, particularly in these early, formative centuries, were, above all else, a militaristic people.
Written documentation from this period is meager to nonexistent, and we can only infer the character of English society from such archaeological evidence as burial practices and artistic motifs and written accounts of Germanic traditions of other periods and regions. It was Roman writers who first brought the Germanic tribes into sharp focus by assessing their military culture with respectful eyes. “Their whole life is occupied in hunting and in the pursuits of the military art; from childhood they devote themselves to fatigue and hardships,” wrote Caesar of his encounters with them in 53 B.C. Tacitus, writing at the end of the first century A.D., devotes an entire treatise—Germania—to a description of the country and people who then lived north of the Rhine and the Danube. They carry short, narrow swords, he notes, and their infantry also carry javelins, which they hurl “to a great distance, either naked or lightly clad in cloaks.” Their battle lines are drawn in wedge formation, and for a warrior to throw away his shield is the “supreme disgrace.” Leaders are attended by a cadre of companions, for whom to “outlive one’s leader by withdrawing from battle brings lifelong infamy and shame.”
That the Germanic warriors continued to display striking panache is apparent in a fifth-century letter written by Sidonius Apollinaris, the aristocratic future Bishop of Clermont in Gaul, describing the attendance of German chiefs at a royal wedding: “Green mantles they had with crimson borders; baldrics supported swords hung from their shoulders, and pressed on sides covered with cloaks of skin secured by brooches,” he writes, betraying the kind of wary fascination that today might be extended to a cadre of gaudily arrayed professional wrestlers. “No small part of their adornment consisted of their arms: in their hands they grasped barbed spears and missile axes; their left sides were guarded by shields, which flashed with tawny golden bosses and snowy silver borders.”
The most common piece of military equipment found in Anglo-Saxon burials is the wooden-shafted, iron-headed spear. Evidence suggests that the length of the spear may have been related to the age of its bearer. Legal documents tell us that only a freeman could carry a spear, and the weapon seems to have been a kind of standard-issue token of a male’s right to bear arms. Tacitus, writing of the Germanic tribes of his era, remarked that on the field and off, the men were always under arms, and that when a boy came of age he was presented with a shield and spear—“the equivalent of our toga.” Also a common burial item, the shield was constructed of a light wood, such as poplar or willow, covered with leather, and surmounted by an iron boss. According to Tacitus, Germanic war equipment was generally not ostentatious, but the shields, exceptionally, were “picked out in carefully chosen colours”; remains of shields in Anglo-Saxon graves indicate they were sometimes embellished with metal plates in the forms of birds and fish.
Spears and shields required craftsmanship to assemble, the shield boss in particular being a complex item, forged in one piece. The elite weapon, however—the apex of Teutonic military craft—was the sword and, by the sixth century, in particular the long cutting sword, a version of which the Roman cavalry had used. Averaging about three feet long and three inches wide, the sword blades were pattern welded, a sophisticated technique by which rods and strips of iron or steel were twisted and hammered together; when the blade was ground, the intricate folds and layers formed polished patterns, such as chevrons or herringbone designs. Sword hilts were sometimes adorned with metal fittings of iron, silver, or gold, while the grips were made from wood or horn, and sometimes ivory.
An early sixth-century letter shows the widespread admiration the Teutonic sword attracted. Written on behalf of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, the letter thanks another Germanic king for an array of splendid gifts that had included fair-skinned slave boys and, more impressively, swords:
… swords capable even of cutting through armour, which I prize more for their iron, than for the gold upon them. So resplendent is their polished clarity that they reflect with faithful distinctiveness the faces of those who look upon them. So evenly do their edges run down to a point that they might be thought not shaped by files but moulded by the furnace. The central part of their blades … appear to be grained with tiny snakes, and here such varied shadows play that you would believe the shining metal to be interwoven with many colours.”
The earliest Anglo-Saxon weapon burials date from as early as the first half of the fifth century. Given that the age of males buried with weapons ranged from one to sixty years, it is unlikely that all, or even most, of the men buried with spear and sword were warriors. Probably the weapons were symbolic and few of the “warriors” may ever have wielded a sword.
Such ubiquitous tokens reveal how greatly militarism was admired and aspired to throughout every level of society. Both written testimonies and archaeology tell us, however, that the weapons themselves were not merely symbolic but also brutally functional. In an account of a killing blow wielded by Theodoric to Odovacar, rival as ruler of Italy in 493, Theodoric “pierced Odovacar’s body down to the hip.” Similarly, a study of skeletons from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Kent provides a sobering glimpse of the damage these weapons could cause: “Male, aged 25–35 years … has a single linear cranial injury 16 cm long … the plane of the injury is almost vertically downwards”; “male aged 20–25 years … thirty bone injuries have been catalogued which represent a minimum of seven cranial and eleven post-cranial blows”; “male aged 35 + … has a single cranial injury and a projectile injury to the lumbar spine. The cranial injury is to the right side of the back of the head, showing a long, curved cut on the cranial vault and two small wounds to the inner surface of the skull. The latter show that the blade passed right through the brain to contact the bone lying below it.” Even the matter-of-fact catalog of wounds is painfully evocative. (A description of “experimental axe wounds” inflicted on modern cadavers by the archaeologist conducting the study, while not for the faint of heart, should give the lie to any notion that Anglo-Saxon history is a dry subject.)
The pattern of skeletal injuries tells much about the nature of the conflict that produced them. Two adversaries faced each other in single combat, each armed with shield and sword, and each exchanged blows mostly at their opponent’s head, shoulders, and arms in downward strokes. Sweeping blows could be decisive but also left an opening for a counterblow; skillful use of a shield would be vital. Historically, such slashing matches had not always been recommended swordplay. Roman soldiers, for example, had been taught “not to cut but to thrust,” according to a fifth-century military training manual. “A stroke with the edges, though made with ever so much force, seldom kills,” while a thrusting stab is “generally fatal.” Unlike the Romans, who fought in units, an Anglo-Saxon battle probably broke down into a series of single combats.
No comparable manual on the training of Anglo-Saxon warriors exists, and we must infer much from later heroic poems and sagas not only of England, but also of other northern Germanic traditions, such as those found in Scandinavia and Iceland. Germanic warriors learned to use weapons through hunting as well as specifically military drills, a fact Caesar observed as early as the first century B.C. As in many warrior societies, young men banded together for hunting, training, and also raiding and looting. A remarkable aspect of these war bands of unsettled youths, widely attested in Indo-European as well as specifically Germanic cultures, was their adoption of animal traits and identities, such as dressing in wolf skins and committing taboo acts for initiation. A die from Cambridgeshire shows the wolf-warrior was known in England. And in the Hrafnsmál, a ninth-century Norse poem, a raven tells a Valkyrie about the practices of warriors at King Harold’s court:
Wolfcoats are they called who bear
bloodstained swords to battle;
they redden spears then they come to the slaughter,
acting together as one.
In the same tradition was the berserkr warrior, who fought in a frenzy, literally running berserk; the word probably refers either to the “bearshirt,” or bearskin, the warrior wore or possibly to his “bare shirt,” a reference to the fact that he fought naked. Depictions of barbarian warriors naked except for a belt have been found in both early Scandinavian and Roman art, and the practice has an unexpected modern parallel in the Butt Naked Brigade, a Liberian warrior gang that fought naked while terrorizing civilians during Liberia’s long civil war. In both cases, the calculated act of madness represented by the warriors’ nakedness and the almost supernatural confidence such nakedness manifested in the face of tearing weapons of iron and steel helped make these fearsome fighting units so effective. The berserkr warrior and the practice of war as a kind of god-sent frenzy was in sharp contrast to the dispassionate, studied professionalism of the Roman army. Victory, according to the Roman military manual cited above, is attained only by “skill and discipline” and by “continual practice” and training recruits “to every maneuver.” Rome’s objective had been to win and hold an empire, while the roaming barbarian Germanic tribes mostly had sought plunder; but Roman discipline ultimately fell to the barbarians.
At the head of any warrior band, disciplined or wolflike, was the lord, to whom all followers and companions pledged loyalty. Roman writers had noted this bond, and it retained its potency down the centuries and through the Anglo-Saxon age. A lord gave his companions and retainers, or thanes, valuable gifts and protection, and in return the companion was expected to give his life if called upon. Heroic poetry makes this explicit, as these lines from the late-tenth or early-eleventh-century Battle of Maldon make clear:
Quickly was Offa cut down in the fight;
yet he had carried out what he had promised his lord,
when he vowed to his treasure-giver
that both together should ride safely home into the stronghold,
or fall in the army,
die of wounds on the field of battle.
He lay as befits a thane, close by his lord.
Shame and infamy were the fate of any warrior who survived the death of his lord in battle; Tacitus had said as much, and in the eighth century A.D. we find the following entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: The thanes, or retainers, of King Cynewulf, having learned their king had been killed in an ambush, were offered “life and rewards” by his slayer if they came over to him—“which none of them would accept, but continued fighting together against him, till they all lay dead.”
This central bond of Anglo-Saxon society was, then, a highly practical arrangement. It was also, at least in poetic sagas, emotional, and a thane who had lost his lord was like a man without a home, an exile from society.
“[L]ong ago earth covered my lord in darkness,” mourns the speaker of the tenth-century poem The Wanderer, “and I, wretched, thence, mad and desolate as winter, over the wave’s binding sought, hall-dreary, a giver of treasure.” The exile “remembers hall-warriors and treasure-taking,” and how “his gold-friend,” or lord, “received him at the feast.”
Heroic poetry is replete with gifts of gold and weapons, but historically a common gift from lord to thane was land; landholdings principally calibrated a man’s status. But gifts of any kind served as material tokens of the lord’s most important service: protection of his followers. The thane of a powerful lord was not likely to suffer harassment by an enemy.
Such alliances, by which power and land were accrued and consolidated, were the likely origin of the tribal kingships that grew in the early and mostly undocumented early Anglo-Saxon era. By A.D. 600, England was divided into four major and three petty kingdoms, plus a number of smaller groupings, and most of the history of early England concerns the jockeying of these kingdoms for power. A king’s followers, his royal war band, did not fight for “country” or freedom, or even perhaps for their own people; they fought for their lord. Staffordshire, where the hoard was found, lay in the ancient and important kingdom of Mercia, for example. In the two and a half centuries between A.D. 600 and 850, records indicate that Mercia waged 14 wars with Wessex, its neighbor to the southwest; 11 wars with the Welsh; and 18 campaigns with other foe. But, as the historian who tallied these campaigns dryly notes, the list of 42 wars almost certainly does not represent a full list of “endemic,” or small-scale, conflicts of this period.
While heroic poetry provides expansive descriptions of life at the court of a Germanic lord or king, archaeology has also contributed stunning insights. In 1938, as World War II loomed, excavations were begun at a site called Sutton Hoo, on a bluff overlooking the River Deben in Suffolk, where a cluster of conspicuous barrows or mounds had long attracted attention. The first mounds excavated proved to have been robbed during the Elizabethan age, but the largest of the mounds contained what is now regarded as one of the archaeological treasures of England: the burial of a warrior king of East Anglia, from the early seventh century A.D. Here, in the royal grave where they had been laid well over a thousand years earlier, were the physical objects evoked in the heroic songs: a stone scepter surmounted by a regal bronze stag; a hanging bowl embellished with Celtic patterns of colored glass; bowls, dishes, spoons of fine silver, an iron ax, and a pattern-welded sword; a drinking horn and gold buckle of fabulous intricacy; the remains of a coat of chain mail and relics of leather and woven clothing; and an iron helmet resembling a mask that is so distinctive and striking it has become the iconographic image of the Anglo-Saxon age.
Most stunning of all, these splendid objects were assembled in the belly of what had been a wooden ship. Although the wood, like the bones of the royal warrior it held, had disintegrated long ago, it had a left a ghostly imprint in the sand, an eerie impression of gunwales and strakes studded with the surviving iron rivets. At almost 90 feet in length and just under 15 feet in width, the Sutton Hoo vessel was almost twice the size of the only other ship burial found in England—that at Snape, only nine miles away.
Scyld was still thriving when his time came
and he crossed over into the Lord’s keeping.
His warrior band did what he bade them
when he laid down the law among the Danes:
they shouldered him out to the sea’s flood,
the chief they revered who had long ruled them.
A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. Far-fetched treasures
were piled around him, and precious gear.
I never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail.
Beowulf, 26–40
Much as the discovery of the ruins of Troy on the Dardanelles had made the Iliad and its story of the Trojan War real, so the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial made the heroic world of the Anglo-Saxon warriors tangible and historic. The finds also confirmed the remarkable commonality of culture between the Germanic settlers of England and their kin in Scandinavia. The poem Beowulf, uncertainly dated to somewhere between the mid-seventh and early tenth century, also straddles the heroic cultures of these two people: The poem is written in the Anglo-Saxon language—and is, then, in Old English—but it is set in Scandinavia, and Beowulf himself is the warrior-hero of the Geats in southern Sweden. Similarly, the counterparts to the ship at Sutton Hoo are the pre-Viking burial ships found in Sweden, while the specifically Swedish character of a number of the Sutton Hoo objects has led to speculation that the East Anglian dynasty to which the buried king belonged might have been of Swedish ancestry.
While much is known about particular aspects of Anglo-Saxon warfare and weaponry, much remains unknown about how these different features were assembled. Was a war-band, or fyrd, for example, composed only of the nobility? Or did peasants also participate as warriors? How was fyrd service levied? A late-seventh-century law code cites fines imposed for neglected military service, but it is unclear if this was a standing law or a measure established in reaction to a specific local threat. How large were the armies? Estimates range from a few thousand men to an improbable 20,000. And tactically, how were wars fought? Did warriors fight, as well as travel, on horseback? The motif of a spear-wielding warrior riding a horse as he runs down a hapless foe adorns the iron helmet found in the royal burial at Sutton Hoo and also appears in the Staffordshire Hoard—but these scenes may be mythological or even classical, not realistic. Given that horses of this era in Britain stood only eight to ten hands high, about the size of a Shetland pony, warhorses would have to have been specially bred. Probably, the early army was not divided into cavalry or infantry, and a warrior fought on foot or horse as circumstances required. Shield maids, or women warriors, are well attested in poetic traditions. Did they have counterparts on the historical field of war?
The price of war in Anglo-Saxon times was, as now, high, and death in battle was the common fate of the warrior king. Of 22 battles recorded in the seventh century, 12 saw the death of “at least one royal figure.” A good king was by necessity also a good warlord. The Sutton Hoo warrior, buried with his magnificent sword and shield, may have been King Raedwald, known to have died around A.D. 624, “shortly after the battle of Idle,” according to Bede. How he died is not known, and his bones have not survived to tell us; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, however, tells of his association with a royal death by noting that in the year 617, “Æthelfrith king of the Northumbrians [was] slain by Raedwald, king of the East-Angles.”
A royal burial like that at Sutton Hoo, along with the more humble cremations and burials found in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries throughout England, tells of the inevitable end of all warriors. More intriguing is the fate of the weapons themselves. Sometimes a fine sword, and presumably the good fortune it had won its previous owner, was passed on as a family heirloom until it was eventually buried with its final owner. A sword given to a retainer by a lord, possibly with other war equipment such as arms or even horses, represented a legal contract of sorts—the heriot, or “war gear,” which was to be repaid to the lord if the retainer “fell before his lord.” In a will written in the tenth century, a royal official bequeaths “to my royal lord as a heriot four armlets of … gold, and four swords and eight horses, four with trappings and four without, and four helmets and four coats-of-mail and eight spears and eight shields.”
But sometimes weapons were buried without warriors, in what seems to have been a religious practice. Most evidence comes from rivers and bogs in Scandinavia, where it appears that weapons had been collected after a battle and, along with miscellaneous domestic objects, left as ritual offerings. A number of the sword blades in these deposits had been deliberately bent back and effectively broken. Similarly, deposits of weapons have been found in pools of water in both Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England; one Scandinavian lake sacrifice included 56 long swords, each bent and defaced. In England, the practice is also found as early as the Celtic Bronze and Iron Age.
The “killing” of swords and other weapons is an ancient tradition found in many cultures: For example, killed weapons have been found in Israel dating from the 11th century B.C., and similar weapons have been found in Dark Age Greece. Why this practice occurred is unclear; possibly it was to ensure that a warrior’s weapon would never be wielded by another man’s hand. Possibly the weapon was killed so as to accompany the dead warrior to the land of the dead, in the way that favorite dogs or horses were sometimes sacrificed on the pyre of their owner. Perhaps the weapons were left or buried as offerings to patron deities, and the defacing of the weapon represented the owner’s complete and inexorable surrender of its use.
These facts return us to our talisman, the Staffordshire Hoard, which consisted mostly of broken military equipment. Were the weapons simply broken for easier disposal? Or had they been ritually killed before being buried in the Staffordshire ground?
THE ART OF THE SWORD
The magnificent sword fittings found in the Staffordshire Hoard present only half of the story: Such fittings had been stripped from what must have been superb blades. In Anglo-Saxon England, a fine sword blade was itself a treasure. Swords were given names and bequeathed in wills. In the 11th century, Prince Æthelstan bequeathed to his brother, Edmund, a sword that was said to have belonged to Offa, the king of Mercia who died in 796. A fine blade could be fitted with a new hilt; the blades changed little, but the hilt needed to conform to the latest styles.
The making of a blade was a long process requiring considerable skill; the iron had to be smelted from its ore and beaten into narrow bars, then twisted and hammered flat. The angled lines formed by the twists were laid on a bar that would make up the blade’s core. At white-hot temperatures, bars were hammered together so that they fused to form a blade. Strips of carbon steel welded onto each of its sides made edges sharp.
Once the blade had been assembled, it was ground and polished, the angled lines reappearing as patterns, and it was fitted with a hilt. The hilt of an Anglo-Saxon sword consisted of a number of elements. Top and bottom guards each contained two metal plates separated by a layer of wood, bone, ivory, or, most likely, horn. Between the guards was a grip of bone, horn, or wood. In some cases, the grip bore decorated metal rings, examples of which were found in the hoard. The hilt fittings were slipped over a tang on the blade’s end, which was heated and hammered to form a button that held the elements together. This button was covered by the pommel cap, secured by four or more long rivets. Some pommel caps bore a ring, the function of which is unknown, but it may have played a part in the swearing of oaths. 
SAXON WARRIORS AND GEAR
Anglo-Saxon England was a martial society, more so than those on the Continent. The chronicles record almost constant warfare, with the Anglo-Saxons fighting the Welsh, the Vikings, and very often each other. The most common weapon was the spear, which early law codes show could only be carried by free men. Excavators have found iron bosses from the centers of wooden shields, but rarely swords and helmets. Body armor is almost unknown; the mail shirt from the Sutton Hoo ship burial is the sole example. Bequests in later Saxon wills, however, suggest that it was not uncommon.
Not everyone buried with weapons was a warrior; in some cases the person in the grave was too young or infirm to have made use of them. There is some evidence that men buried with weapons were slightly taller than those without, perhaps indicating a warrior elite. But male bones found with spearheads show the men to have suffered all the ills of brutal work; these were farmers tilling the land, not a pampered aristocracy. Oddly, weapons are less common in graves during times of war than in more peaceful times. Perhaps during conflict people had better things to do with weapons than burying them, or active warriors had already shown their military prowess. Dressing up has always been an important aspect of warfare: Splendid equipment boosts a man’s ego and daunts his enemies. The superb objects found in the Staffordshire Hoard surely would have been carried in battle; a warrior had to show his status, and it would have been unthinkable to hide it behind plain clothing. Although we know little about Anglo-Saxon beliefs regarding life after death, we do know that they wanted to be remembered. The duty of caretaking memories of heroic deeds traditionally fell to poets, such as Homer in times past and the anonymous author of Beowulf, who would tell and retell the tales, thus preserving them for the ages.
SOCIAL CLASSES
While many basic aspects of Anglo-Saxon society remained unchanged over the centuries, people became wealthier. When we look at finds from fifth- and sixth-century graves, some are richer than others, but none is outstanding; few, if any, could be considered aristocratic. In the seventh century, however, although most burials contain little in the way of grave goods, a few are exceedingly rich, with gold and garnet jewelry and swords, likely indicating the rise of an aristocracy. The Staffordshire Hoard must represent the upper aristocracy, its treasure belonging to the king and his companions.
Slavery was common in Anglo-Saxon England. In the Domesday Survey of 1086, slaves formed about 10 percent of the population; most were agricultural laborers but occasionally also skilled workers. Slavery declined in the late Saxon period and disappeared after the Norman Conquest. The rest of the population was graded by their weregilds—the fines payable for killing them. This system was intended to allow disputes to be settled and to avoid blood feuds. Everyone, including the king, had a value, and these values varied with time and place. In seventh-century Wessex, a nobleman was valued at 1,200 shillings and a free peasant at 200 shillings, with an intermediate grade at 600 shillings. A murdered woman was valued at her father’s, rather than her husband’s, weregild, and, if she was pregnant, her unborn child had half its father’s value. King Alfred divided his subjects into those who prayed, those who fought, and those who toiled. Those who prayed ranged from great prelates like St. Wilfrid to poor country priests; those who fought included both the noble earls and the common foot soldiers; and the laborers included both agricultural workers and fine craftsmen. Women who prayed included royal abbesses. Although we know of no female warriors, there were women like Aethelflaed, the Lady of the Mercians, at whose command the Vikings were driven out of the English Midlands. And the superb textile-working skills of Englishwomen were famed throughout Europe.