Rædwald, also written as Raedwald or Redwald, was a king of East Anglia, an Anglo-Saxon kingdom which included the present-day English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. He was the son of Tytila of East Anglia and a member of the Wuffingas dynasty, who were the first kings of the East Angles. Details about Rædwald's reign are scarce, primarily because the Viking invasions of the 9th century destroyed the monasteries in East Anglia where many documents would have been kept. Rædwald reigned from about 599 until his death around 624, initially under the overlordship of Æthelberht of Kent. In 616, as a result of fighting the Battle of the River Idle and defeating Æthelfrith of Northumbria, he was able to install Edwin, who was acquiescent to his authority, as the new king of Northumbria. During the battle, both Æthelfrith and Rædwald's son, Rægenhere, were killed.
The Prittlewell royal Anglo-Saxon burial or Prittlewell princely burial is a high-status Anglo-Saxon burial mound which was excavated at Prittlewell, north of Southend-on-Sea, in the English county of Essex.
Grave goods, in archaeology and anthropology, are items buried along with a body.
West Stow is a small village and civil parish in West Suffolk, England. The village lies north of Bury St. Edmunds, south of Mildenhall and Thetford and west of the villages of Culford and Ingham in the area known as the Breckland. This area is located near the Lark River Valley and was settled from around AD 420–650. West Stow Hall is to the north of the village.
Anglo-Saxon paganism, sometimes termed Anglo-Saxon heathenism, Anglo-Saxon pre-Christian religion, or Anglo-Saxon traditional religion, refers to the religious beliefs and practices followed by the Anglo-Saxons between the 5th and 8th centuries AD, during the initial period of Early Medieval England. A variant of Germanic paganism found across much of north-western Europe, it encompassed a heterogeneous variety of beliefs and cultic practices, with much regional variation.
Eorpwald; also Erpenwald or Earpwald,, succeeded his father Rædwald as King of the East Angles. Eorpwald was a member of the East Anglian dynasty known as the Wuffingas, named after the semi-historical king Wuffa.
Martin Oswald Hugh Carver, FSA, Hon FSA Scot, is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of York, England, director of the Sutton Hoo Research Project and a leading exponent of new methods in excavation and survey. He specialises in the archaeology of early Medieval Europe. He has an international reputation for his excavations at Sutton Hoo, on behalf of the British Museum and the Society of Antiquaries and at the Pictish monastery at Portmahomack Tarbat, Easter Ross, Scotland. He has undertaken archaeological research in England, Scotland, France, Italy and Algeria.
The Kingdom of the East Angles, informally known as the Kingdom of East Anglia, was a small independent kingdom of the Angles during the Anglo-Saxon period comprising what are now the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk and perhaps the eastern part of the Fens, the area still known as East Anglia.
Ixworth is a village and civil parish in the West Suffolk district of Suffolk, England, 6 miles (9.7 km) north-east of Bury St Edmunds on the A143 road to Diss and 9 miles (14 km) south-east of Thetford. The parish had a population of 2,365 at the 2011 Census.
The settlement of Great Britain by diverse Germanic peoples, who eventually developed a common cultural identity as Anglo-Saxons, changed the language and culture of most of what became England from Romano-British to Germanic. This process principally occurred from the mid-fifth to early seventh centuries, following the end of Roman rule in Britain around the year 410. The settlement was followed by the establishment of the Heptarchy, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the south and east of Britain, later followed by the rest of modern England, and the south-east of modern Scotland. The exact nature of this change is a topic of on-going research. Questions remain about the scale, timing and nature of the settlements, and also about what happened to the previous residents of what is now England.
The archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England is the study of the archaeology of England from the 5th century AD to the 11th century, when it was ruled by Germanic tribes known collectively as the Anglo-Saxons.
The Taplow Barrow is an early medieval burial mound in Taplow Court, an estate in the south-eastern English county of Buckinghamshire. Constructed in the seventh century, when the region was part of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, it contained the remains of a deceased individual and their grave goods, now mostly in the British Museum. It is often referred to in archaeology as the Taplow burial.
Burial in Anglo-Saxon England refers to the grave and burial customs followed by the Anglo-Saxons between the mid 5th and 11th centuries CE in Early Mediaeval England. The variation of the practice performed by the Anglo-Saxon peoples during this period, included the use of both cremation and inhumation. There is a commonality in the burial places between the rich and poor – their resting places sit alongside one another in shared cemeteries. Both of these forms of burial were typically accompanied by grave goods, which included food, jewelry, and weaponry. The actual burials themselves, whether of cremated or inhumed remains, were placed in a variety of sites, including in cemeteries, burial mounds or, more rarely, in ship burials.
Helena Francisca Hamerow, is an American archaeologist, best known for her work on the archeology of early medieval communities in Northwestern Europe. She is Professor of Early Medieval archaeology and former Head of the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford.
The Trumpington bed burial is an early Anglo-Saxon burial of a young woman, dating to the mid-7th century, that was excavated in Trumpington, Cambridgeshire, England in 2011. The burial is significant both as a rare example of a bed burial, and because of the ornate gold pectoral cross inlaid with garnets that was found in the grave.
A bed burial is a type of burial in which the deceased person is buried in the ground, lying upon a bed. It is a burial custom that is particularly associated with high-status women during the early Anglo-Saxon period, although excavated examples of bed burials are comparatively rare.
The Street House Anglo-Saxon cemetery is an Anglo-Saxon burial ground, dating to the second half of the 7th century AD, that was discovered at Street House Farm near Loftus, in the unitary authority of Redcar and Cleveland, England. Monuments dating back as far as 3300 BC are located in the vicinity of the cemetery, which was discovered after aerial photography revealed the existence of an Iron Age rectangular enclosure. The excavations, carried out between 2005 and 2007, revealed over a hundred graves dating from the 7th century AD and the remains of several buildings. An array of jewellery and other artefacts was found, including the jewels once worn by a young high-status Anglo-Saxon woman who had been buried on a bed and covered by an earth mound.
Shrubland Hall Anglo-Saxon cemetery is a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon burial site discovered at Shrubland Hall Quarry near Coddenham, Suffolk. The cemetery contains fifty burials and a number of high-status graves including "the most complicated Anglo-Saxon bed ever found." Bed burials, in which a female body is laid out on an ornamental wooden bed, usually accompanied by jewellery, are rarely found, and are considered of national importance. Only 13 bed burials have been found to date in the UK. The bed burial was one of two graves at the cemetery which were found within wooden-lined chambers. The second chamber contained a male skeleton with grave goods including a seax, a spear, a shield, an iron-bound wooden bucket, a copper alloy bowl and a drinking horn.
Tania Marguerite Dickinson is a British archaeologist specialising in early-medieval Britain. Dickinson undertook undergraduate study at St. Anne's College, Oxford and postgraduate study at the Institute of Archaeology (Oxford). Her doctoral thesis, titled The Anglo-Saxon burial sites of the upper Thames region, and their bearing on the history of Wessex, circa AD 400-700, was supervised by Sonia Chadwick Hawkes and Christopher Hawkes.
