Sutton Hoo: a ship burial mystery
History · Key Stage 2 · The School
A landowner's curiosity
EDITH PRETTY owned land at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Several grassy mounds sat on her property. In 1938, she hired a local archaeologist, BASIL BROWN, to dig into the largest one. She had long wondered what really lay beneath them. Nobody expected what they would find.
Digging up a ship that was not there
The wooden ship had rotted away completely in the acid soil. Nothing of it remained to touch. But the iron rivets that once held its planks together had stayed exactly in place, in a long ship-shaped pattern. Brown carefully dug around the rivets, leaving the soil itself standing where the wood used to be. This method took great patience and a careful hand. He had found the ghost of a ship.
A burial that had never been robbed
In 1939, digging inside the ship, the team found a burial chamber. Unlike almost every other mound like it, robbers had never found this one. Gold buckles, a helmet, coins and silver survived, undisturbed for over a thousand years. The helmet alone is now world famous. Then, weeks after the dig finished, the Second World War began.
No body survived the soil, and no inscription names the person buried. So historians reason from what does survive. The treasure is fit for a king. Some of it came from as far as Byzantium, which was very far away indeed. One strong theory names Rædwald, a powerful East Anglian king who died around AD 624. It fits the evidence well — but "fits well" is not the same as proof, and honest history says so.