Dr. Helen Gittos (6:04)

Okay, there's loads to unpack there, including some words that we probably need to talk a bit more about, like Byzantine and Sasanian, but we'll come back to that in a second. I wonder how many people have spent a decade worrying about distribution maps. I mean, that's quite a thing to worry about, particularly in a pandemic. There was a lot to worry about then, but it's good that you did worry about it because it's brought up some interesting ideas. Before we dive into all of that, can we just talk about Sutton Hoo and the other burials that are similar to it. So there's a group of. You describe them as princely burials which date to 580 to 635 AD and there's a group of them. Can you just tell us a little bit about them and what sort of things have been found in those burials?

David Musgrove (6:45)

Yeah, so the most famous of these burials is the ship burial at Suttonhoo in Suffolk, which was excavated on the eve of the Second World War and was found to contain remarkable treasures that within this boat was built a chamber in which a man was buried. And he was buried with extraordinary luxuries. Silks from the eastern Mediterranean, textiles, silverware, all sorts of things from Gaul, from the East Mediterranean, from western Britain. And one of the things that's become clear to historians and archaeologists in quite recent times is that this was the end of a generation or two generations who had buried some people in such special ways. And they tend to be their men. And they're buried under mounds, sometimes in chambers, under mound, sometimes within ships or under ships in all sorts of innovative ways. Each one is a bit different, but also they're actually all very similar to one another. They're buried with armor and, well, they're buried with military equipment, rather things like shields and swords and lots of objects which were rare and unusual and special for being so. And I think when I started being aware of this stuff, I think I probably thought that this was a sort of a thing that the Anglo Saxon did. And what we've come to realize in recent times actually is that it was something that a small group of men did for one or two generations only. It was a very brief moment in time when this was happening. And one of the things that has really helped us in understanding about these was that in 2003 one of these burials was found in Southend in Pricklewell, in Southend on Sea in Essex. And this burial was excavated under modern circumstances and written up and finally published in 2019. And the excavation of that is one of the very few examples of these burials that we've got that has been excavated in modern times. And so this provided us with a huge amount of information that we didn't previously have. And one of the amazing things about the Prittlewell burial is that the man who was buried there was buried with these two gold foil crosses, tiny little, very thin gold foil crosses that were placed on his eyes. And he was almost certainly buried before Augustine's mission arrived to convert the English, as Bede tells us. And so the publication of that report and all of the objects that were found within that grave was one of the things that I'd also been worrying about and thinking about. And spurred on by partly because the preservation of the grave was just extraordinary. So there were actually objects hanging on the walls of the wooden chamber within this Prittlewell man had been buried. So this raided all sorts of questions about where the very special objects in that burial had come from.

Dr. Helen Gittos (9:48)

I went to the Chalk History Festival and they actually recreated the Prittlewell burial. They had a bunch of carpenters there and it was fantastic. I got to wander around inside it. It was very good, very, very impressive that what they did there. So there's several of these burials that exist across England and this is the period, as you said, when we tend to think of Anglo Saxons kingdoms forming and these burials have been kind of associated with that process. What's your thinking on that theory?

David Musgrove (10:16)

I think that this is quite a late stage in the process of kingdoms. I don't think this is a new class of men who were suddenly being proclaimed kings and inventing the idea of kingship. One of the things that appears to be the case is that these burials tend to be located on the edges of kingdoms rather than in their middles. So they tend to be towards the boundaries of the territories that they're in. And this seems to suggest that, that the audience for these burials was as much their neighbors in neighbouring kingdoms, their peers across the water or wherever it might be, than it was their own people. And it comes with a whole suite of other things, but especially what we've come to call great hall complexes. So quite short lived, very grand ceremonial places which seem to be part of a theater of kingship which is being newly created at this time. But once again they seem to be towards the edges of territories. And as John Blair and Adam McBride and others have said, they're very similar to the ones that are being built in neighbouring kingdoms. So the ones in the Anglo Saxon territories actually share quite a lot with the Romano British ones to the west. And so this seems to be something which is about community consensus building between kingdoms. So people are coming to regular feasts and meetings and goodness knows what, probably things like games and competitions and their acts are sort of communal, coming together as part of a diplomatic process. And this is happening at a time when the historical records shows us that we're getting over kings. So you're getting kings of kings. And it appears to be the case that lots and lots of people in Britain in particular were aspiring to be kings of all of Britain. And so I think that these princely burials seem to be part of that move towards over kingship, rather than about the invention of kingdoms from the beginning. Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the Diet resolutions. A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last year. And my resolutions, unlike big wireless, is to not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a try@mintmobile.com switch. $45 upfront payment required. Equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees, extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.

Dr. Helen Gittos (12:55)

Let's get into the logic of this theory that you've been exploring then. So the traditional explanation of how these exotic goods got into these princely burials was that they were basically traded through the Merovingian kingdoms. The Merovingian Empire. You think that that doesn't stack up?

David Musgrove (13:12)

Yeah. Either traded or given as gifts or sort of down the line, passed on in some way. And I think particularly it's been seen that the Merovingians were the kind of people who had most close contact with the Eastern Roman Empire, which we call Byzantium, and that they were then passing things on to neighbours such as in Britain. One of the things that I've never been terribly convinced by that is that some of these objects are really, really unusual. And there's no evidence that there were sort of shiploads of them coming from the Eastern Mediterranean through trade, and very little evidence that they're being sort of mediated through the Merovingian Empire. So the man who was buried in Prittlewell, whose chamber grave you imagined going into in The Chalk Valley History Festival. He had a shelf in his chamber and on that shelf was a flagon for containing liquid which had come from the shrine of St Sergius in Sergiopolis, modern Rusafa in modern day Syria.

Dr. Helen Gittos (14:14)

How do we know that? How do we know it came from that shrine?

David Musgrove (14:17)

We know that because it's like a bit like a jug and it's got a handle and then it's got a net and then you pour the water from the neck and around the neck is this bracelet which has on it an image of St Sergius. And it's like images of St Sergius that we know were being produced in Sergiopolis and where his major shrine was. And so when I realized that the army, that the federate troops recruited by the Byzantines from Western Europe, that they were fighting within about 30 miles, we know for certain of Rusafa on the campaigns against the Sassanians, I began to think, well, mightn't this be another possible route, that these people were actually bringing back objects directly themselves from travels that they had been on in the Eastern Mediterranean? And that would explain why they were such unusual objects, but also objects that are not, you know. So the flask in Prittlewell is made of copper alloy. It's special because of its connection with the shrine. It's not special because it's made of gold or silver.

Dr. Helen Gittos (15:25)

And one of the other points I think you were making is that some of these objects, they're brand new and also they're kind of in vogue, they're in fashion, you know, they were being used in the Eastern Mediterranean. So tell us a little bit more about the logic that you're following there.

David Musgrove (15:39)

So the other thing that I began to realise was that these objects weren't old legacy items. I think I'd thought that they were sort of hand me downs, they were old stuff that had been around for a while in treasuries elsewhere and then passed on. And I began to realize that again and again, again they weren't, they were things that were current in the eastern Mediterranean. And indeed there's an example of a shopping street in Ephesus where you can see that the shop that has had earthquake damage, so it's sort of sealed as a, as a layer, a bit like Pompeii. We know exactly what it was like in the early 7th century because it wasn't changed until it was excavated and found. And there you've got goods that are on sale that are like the ones that were being buried at about the same Time. Well, a bit earlier, in fact, in Britain. So these aren't ancient things. These were contemporary with what was being used in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time. They're not old when they're buried. And that's quite startling. Suddenly you are beginning to see that the connections between the far edges of the empire, between the east and the old part of the Western Roman Empire are much more in touch with one another than one might have thought.

Dr. Helen Gittos (16:46)

So that explains your point about the idea of them being traded or gifted across the Eastern Mediterranean and through Europe. Doesn't stack up because they've got here too quickly, is that right?

David Musgrove (16:56)

Yeah, they've got here too quickly and there isn't really enough evidence of other such objects to see that they're part of normal trade networks.

Dr. Helen Gittos (17:04)

So on that basis, then we need to think about who would have got them from Sergiopolis, for instance, in Syria, to what's becoming Anglo Saxon England. And that's where we get this idea that it's somebody, a mounted knight serving in the Byzantine armies. So let's go back into that. So can you give us a bit more context about what the state of Byzantium is at this point? Because it's interesting. You make a very good point in your article, actually, that we kind of think about the Roman Empire finishing 410 AD, the Romans leave Britain and that's kind of the end of it. But Byzantium is the extension of Rome over in the east and we overlook that a bit when we think about Britain and the history of England and Britain. And you make the point that that's a bit of an oversight. So tell us a bit more about Byzantium and who the Sasanians are and why they would be fighting each other.

David Musgrove (17:49)

So I think it's worth saying that people who work on Byzantium have been having arguments among themselves about what name they should use. And some of them have been saying we ought to really be calling ourselves Romanists. That what was happening then was. And I think from a Western point of view, it would be really helpful for us to think about it not as Byzantium, but as about the Roman Empire. What we know is that the great empire to the east of Byzantium, the Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanians, they had been in conflict, the two empires within each other, with one another on and off for a very long time. And that conflict is resurging again in the 570s. And so that is what the Byzantines are desperately trying to do something about. We need to kind of firm up our boundaries here and protect our territory. And so a man called Tiberius, who's the consul, he comes to the west to recruit this big army and he takes that back to the eastern front and they start off in Armenia and they go through Azerbaijan and Syria and they go right deep into Persian territory as well. And the campaigns last on and off from 575 to 591. So it's a very long period of time when they are fighting. And one of the things that's really extraordinary about it is that one of the commanders of that army was a man called Morris, and he was in command for much of the early period. And he then left the battlefield in 582 and became the emperor. And at some stage in his life, he wrote one of the earliest surviving military manuals. So we have this text called the Strategicon, where he's writing about the ideal of how to organize an army, how it should be, how you should fight. And this is, you know, incredible evidence for the reforms that he was making, but also gives us some insights into what the army that he'd been in command of was actually like. And so we have lots of written sources, of Byzantine historians that give us some indications of where the army went and where the campaigns were. And we've got some names of people involved, we've got some names of Westerners involved, and we can be pretty sure that the recruits came from all over Western Europe, from the Franks, the Burgundians, the Saxons, the Goths, the Lombards, from all over. And they seem to have fought until about 591, when that army appears to have been disbanded. So some of them will have survived all of those campaigns and some of them will have wanted to come home. Might we think that amongst them were Anglo Saxon adventurers? So one of the things that we know is from the Strategicon is that when they joined up, they were given armor and weaponry, and then they're giving an annual grant of money in which to buy armor for their horse, armor for themselves and weaponry. So they're continually sort of renewing their stuff. You end up with an army, which is. Some people may have gone to see the recent exhibition, Legion Exhibition at the British Museum, which was about the Roman army. And one of the points that is made very clearly in that exhibition is that there was no set uniform like you might imagine. Now, in fact, everyone is kitting themselves out and commissioning stuff, some of it from in house armourers and some from elsewhere. And that's the kind of thing that we have to Imagine for this army too, that it was pretty diverse in how they ended up looking.

Dr. Helen Gittos (21:21)

Yes, I went to that exhibition, it was brilliant. I annoyed the people there by putting on the helmets and making some videos. Sorry, anyone who was there when I was doing that. So that's really interesting, isn't it, that the Byzantium Empire should be reaching out for troops to the west at a time when we kind of imagine, or maybe I imagine incorrectly, that there's kind of a bit of a disconnect between the west, but particularly Britain and the East. What does this tell us about the relationship between the Eastern Roman Empire and what was the remains of the Western Roman Empire at this time?

David Musgrove (21:56)

I think one of the things is that that seems to be a recurring pattern that over all the whole history of Byzantium, it's been argued that they were keeping an eye on where they would be able to get hold of federate troops. So earlier than this we can see that they were recruiting from Scandinavia in the 5th century. The very famous recruitment in the 11th century is much more well known. So this was something that they were constantly doing. They were always on the lookout for good quality mercenary troops that they could hire. One of the things that I was really startled to learn was that there is in Gaul at this time what the people who work on coins called a Merovingian national coinage. And this was a coinage that was pretty uniform over much of the Merovingian territories and which was fundamentally based on Byzantine coins. So they're the same weight, they've got the Byzantine emperors on them. And once you start imagining that, it's hard not to imagine that some of those people were conceiving themselves as much more closely connected to the empire than we thought. And of course there were lots of Byzantines stationed and in control of parts of Italy. So Byzantium isn't far away and distant at the other end of the Mediterranean Empire. It's there in Italy, it's close at hand. And those sort of diplomatic contexts then between, you know, east and west are actually going on within Europe.

Dr. Helen Gittos (23:28)

It occurs to me that some of our listeners might not be aware of what Merovingia is or was. Would you be able to give us like a one line sentence on the Merovingian Empire?

David Musgrove (23:37)

In very simple terms, it's what we talk about the rulers of modern day France and Germany at this time.

Dr. Helen Gittos (23:43)

Brilliant, thanks. So I'm reminded of a conversation. I did a podcast series a little while ago about the end of Roman Britain for the history of extra podcast Listeners can still listen to it. And one of the chaps I was speaking to then, and he was talking about the 5th century rather than the 6th century, but he said that there were people in Britain who were basically LARPing live action role playing as Romans, kind of pretending to be Romans when they weren't really part of the Roman Empire, which struck me as always, a very interesting thing. You make some observations about how the people buried at Prittlewell and Suttonholme might have thought about themselves and whether they would have considered themselves in any way Roman. Would you be able to sort of expand on that a bit?

David Musgrove (24:18)

Yeah. So there are all sorts of really startling things in these burials. For example, one of the largest silver dishes to have survived from the Roman Empire survives in Suttonhu Mount War, so Maze in Constantinople, circa 500. This huge silver dish is in that burial. There is a huge amount of other material that's also come directly from Byzantium. Bowls, what I think might be a liturgical spoon, silver spoons that have come from the Eastern Mediterranean. Bitumen, pieces of tar that were little lumps that have now been identified as having come from Syria within that boat. The armor that was buried in Sutton Hoo Mound 1 was buried with is really, really unusual. And in particular, so bits of it survives, the chainmail survives in a kind of horrible rusty lump. But what's much more impressive are the shoulder clasps that were holding on his probably leather cuirass that covered and protected his body. And they're beautifully decorated, and they clearly are decorated. They're made within an English context with English designs on them, but they are of a type which can only otherwise be paralleled from the far edges of the Eastern Mediterranean. So they've got kind of hinged so that they move on your shoulder, and they've got loops so that they were stitched onto that. And trying to find parallels, things that look like that is really, really hard. And the parallels that have been found come from the Eastern Mediterranean. And as I began to look at other things, you know, suggestions that people over a very long period of time, including Rupert Bruce Mitford, who wrote up all of that material and published it a long time ago, now seem increasingly right. So there is a really odd whetstone, apparently, for sort of sharpening weapons. It was never used for sharpening weapons, which he said looked like a scepter, a Roman symbol of office. Now, I always thought that was a bit weird and I never really kind of taught that, but it turns out that something very similar has recently been found in Rome. Of the right kind of date. So maybe indeed that is also something that was contemporary. He was trying to argue that they looked like things that were their images and that the Anglo Saxons were sort of copying images of such things. Well, maybe actually they were copying things that they had seen themselves. There is this really weird iron stand about as tall as the chamber and it's got spike on one end and this weird kind of cage thing at the top. Well, when you sort of look for parallels, what might be. Lots of things have been suggested. The thing that it strikes me as being most like and has struck others too is that it looks like the kinds of military standards that you see on Trajan's column and that what was on top of it would have been something like an animal, a ball or something like that, an image. So these things seem to be not half witted copies of things that they've seen, but instead they look to be really, you know, up to date versions. To the extent that I even wonder whether they might have been importing imperial smiths and commissioning them to make objects because they are, you know, so much like contemporary pieces of armour that we can see were being used by the Byzantines at the time.

Dr. Helen Gittos (27:40)

See that's quite a mind bender and you've got a really nice sentence. You said these weren't men dressed up as Roman soldiers, they were Roman soldiers. I find that a fascinating comment to make. So we can imagine, based on the logic of what you're saying is the people buried in Sussanu and when we say Sussanu want man one, by the way, that's the big dog ship, isn't it? That's the famous one. Right.

David Musgrove (27:59)

I think that's the point about calling the Roman Empire at this time the Roman Empire rather than about othering it as being something different and weird and Byzantine as that. Once you do that, we've had this kind of tendency to think that things that were Roman were backward looking, they were about some kind of pre 4th century past. And as soon as you start realizing how connected they were with the Roman Empire at the time, then you start to see that they're not play acting and stuff, they're not looking backwards, they're very much part of a contemporary world that goes all the way, you know, to modern day Syria from Britain and Ireland too.

Dr. Helen Gittos (28:41)

Absolutely. And I've been thinking as we've been having a chat actually, that we haven't drilled into the question of what the Byzantine Empire is quite as fully as we might have. So could you just detail how that Empire sort of came to be in the light of the fact that we think about the Western Empire falling in the 5th century. What's the story there failed to get.

David Musgrove (28:59)

You to talk about only really that modern historians have invented a word to talk about the eastern half of the Roman Empire that survived after what we call the barbarian invasions that happened in the West. And so Rome continued and Constantinople and its rulers continued to think of themselves as ruling the Roman Empire, but that empire was a smaller territory than it had been. And I think one of the things that I've come to think from having done all of this is that there are lots of different ways of ruling an empire, and some of it is about territory which you control yourself with your own troop, but others it's about the diplomatic connections you have with people at some distance. And it looks as though that's what we're talking about for the Western Empire at this time, and that maybe we shouldn't think so much about it coming to an end in the 4th and 5th centuries. But actually it continues on, but in.

Dr. Helen Gittos (30:02)

A different way and with a slightly different locus, I suppose. Where's Christianity in all of this? So you said that, you know, the famous date at which Christianity is reintroduced into the Anglo Saxons is 597, with the mission that Bede talks about. What's your view on the nature of Christianity in this particular story?

David Musgrove (30:19)

So that is really, really intriguing. And it's intriguing because the army that was fighting against the Sasanians at the time thought of itself as. Or at least the people who were leading it, and Morris in particular, thought of himself as leading a Christian army. And so we can see in his manual about how to fight that you should pray before fighting, and that everyone, led by the priests, he says, by the general and the other officers should recite prayers in Greek and that every unit before they leave camp should shout God be with us three times. So what did those Western mercenary troops, not all of whom were Christian, what did they think they were doing? This actually came out of a project that I was doing on people celebrating or people who were Christians in Eastern Britain before the arrival of Augustine's mission. And I was trying to piece together what I think now is quite considerable evidence for that. And it's hard not to think then that some of these men, if I'm right, consider themselves to be Christian. And of course, that argument has raised about Mound one, Sutton Hoo since the time that it was found, not least because it has in it things that people have thought of are Christian symbols as well as things that are thought of as being pagan. We can't prove any of this, but it's really interesting to think about it from this perspective.

Dr. Helen Gittos (31:52)

Yeah. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with Professor Martin Carver, who's worked on Suss and who a lot, and his view on Suss and Hoo was it was very much kind of a dying of the light kind of thing. A pagan king railing against the incoming Christianity and wanting to sort of protect himself. And what you're saying, I think would rather go against that concept.

David Musgrove (32:09)

There are three burials that were excavated in Folkestone. They're actually for the Channel, where the Channel Tunnel comes out of Folkestone. There was a cemetery there of around that time. And there you've got three mounds which are like little versions of the Sutton, smaller versions. Two of them are soldiers buried with swords and weaponry, with horse harnesses. And indeed, one of them has got his horse in a burial next to him. The third in the row is a woman who was buried just a bit later. And she was buried wearing a necklace which has on it a coin of Maurice Tiberius. And she is part of a group of women who are wearing his coins, some of which are displaying the crosses in them as well. So does that suggest that she knew that Maurice had fought that for. It almost looks as though she is the daughter of one of those men. And I wonder whether she is quite consciously wearing an image, a Christian image, as she considers it, of the men for whom they were fighting. She's part of a group of women in the sort of 620s who were wearing very, very ostentatiously Christian stuff before. We've got the foundation of lots of churches.

Dr. Helen Gittos (33:28)

Interesting. Very interesting. Right. We're kind of running out of time a bit, so I'm just gonna get straight into it. So Suttonhoo, the guy buried in the big boat burial, traditional orthodoxy would say that he's Radwald. I'm never quite sure how to pronounce his name. Or Raudwald, a king of the Anglo Saxons. Can it still be him on the basis of your story? And if so, do we need to reposition him as a Roman Christian?

David Musgrove (33:51)

I. It's very weird. That's a debate that people have had for a very long time. And it's one of those things I actually have struggle to really care about the answer to. And. But I think the reason for that. No, it's. It's. It's a very good question. But I think the reason why I've always been anxious about it. It seems to me that there are other people at the time, there are so many people whose names we don't know, that I'm always a bit anxious about reaching for the very few that we do. And one of the things about this model is it presents an example of a group of people who might have received such burials who were not kings, but who were adventurers, who had had very high rank, potentially serving overseas, who were renowned for their warrior deeds, the places they had been and seen, and that they may have received burials with such great honor. And maybe they don't all have to be kings. And I guess that's one of the things that the Staffordshire hoard, that amazing collection of gold fittings from swords provided us a window into a world where maybe most of the army had a gold sword pommel fitting on their sword, that such things that we might once have thought of being as very, very special and only owned by a few, perhaps that was rather more widespread. Now, Sutton, who mound one was an incredibly special burial, but it may be that he doesn't have to be a king and he doesn't have to be somebody whose name we know, but it could be someone else who we know so much about, but don't know his name.

Dr. Helen Gittos (35:32)

Excellent. Good. Thank you. To wrap up, we've covered a lot of ground here. I wonder if you've got any sort of closing reflections on what this bit of work, this thing you've been worrying about for a decade or so tells us about and why other historians haven't come to the conclusion that you have, when there seems to be quite a lot of evidence to support what you're saying.

David Musgrove (35:51)

I think there has been a real reluctance to think about the Anglo Saxons in particular as being so connected with the wider world. But that has really changed in recent times. And this is part of a sort of a bigger moment, I guess, where historians are interested in connectedness. And we're going to see some of that in an exhibition that will be opening at the British Museum quite soon on the Silk Roads. And some of the material I'm talking about here, I hope, will be on display there. And that will really showcase how much more connected the world was in the early Middle Ages than we have sometimes thought. And we have to be kind of cautious about wanting to see such connections and think quite carefully about how they come about. They don't always have to be direct. Some of them are about much more micro relationships which end up with things traveling a long distance. But I think we should also be willing to consider that some people were traveling very large distances indeed. That was Dr. Helen Gittos. Her article on this subject, Sutton Hoo and Syria the Anglo Saxon Saxons who Served in the Byzantine army, was published in the English Historical Review. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.