Sutton Hoo is the richest Anglo-Saxon burial ever discovered. I visited it with a group this summer, and we got a tour of the mounds (if you go, I do recommend paying extra for the tour!).

Nobles were buried in a number of separate mounds. Mound 2 is the most impressive-looking; the mounds were in fact leveled over the centuries, especially for farming in the Early Modern period, and Mound 2 was reconstructed by archaeologists after they finished an excavation to look roughly as it would have looked in Anglo-Saxon times. Here is Mound 2:

To give an idea of the scale, here are photos with the Pretty House in the background (Mrs. Pretty owned the land on which the burials were discovered very shortly before WWII--and note, it's quite far in the background) and people to the side.

Mound 17 held a buried horse and rider; like most of the mounds, it had been penetrated by grave robbers long before the twentieth-century digs--but unlike most, the robbers had missed. They bored a hole between the horse and the rider! Here is an overview of some of the finds from Mound 17:

The horse doubtless looked impressive, but the on-site archaeologist told us that it was not completely healthy: later another archaeolgist said it was lame and deaf! (No, I never did get a chance to ask how they knew it was deaf.)

The finds included objects of cloisonne enamel (where small cells are created, usually with thin gold wires, and enamel is put into each cell):

Some of the gold objects found with the horse and rider:

My photos of Mound 1 do not give any sense of either the length of the boat or the original height of the mound, so I haven't included them. For good photos, see the Wikipedia page on Sutton Hoo.

Mound 1 contains the richest burial: a full-sized ship was buried (about 27 meters or 90 feet) with a chamber containing a body (probably; a concentration of phosophates indicate that something large and organic dissolved in the acid bath that would have been created by the rain meeting the acidic soil inside the burial chamber) and many valuable objects.

The most famous of these objects is the Sutton Hoo helmet, which adorns many a cover of Beowulf editions, translations, and knock-offs. Here is a reconstruction of the helmet:

The museum at Sutton Hoo not only contains some of the finds, it reconstructs the burial chamber in Mound 1 as it might have looked. Cloth did not survive well at all; the "yellow shag" you see is a modern imitation of a rich woven material of which they found traces.

Nobles weren't the only ones buried at Sutton Hoo, however. The same ground was used later for criminals executed a short distance away. Some of their bodies were dismembered or buried face down, in humiliating poses. The so-called Plowman's body is gone, but here's a cast made at the site where he was buried:

Sutton Hoo is not a huge tourist destination, but I found it well worth visiting.

I did get to do a little more sightseeing in London, including St. Paul's Cathedral; Christopher Wren designed it. Unfortunately for me (and my dear readers), they do not allow any photographs inside, but I have several of the outside:

I also have a few pictures from the Stone Gallery, about halfway up, looking down.

If you look carefully in the middle of this photo, you can see Tower Bridge:

This picture includes the Millenium Bridge:

This picture attempts to give you a sense of how high up the Stone Gallery is; I'm not sure it's entirely successful. My brochure tells me the Stone Gallery is 53 meters or 282 steps from the church floor.

Outside you can see the Law Bounds gate

Two views of Lambeth Palace, one of the residences of the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament at night (yes, I know it didn't turn out very well, but all the others are worse):

The Museum of London lies not far from St. Paul's, and I recommend it highly! I was a little disappointed it didn't have more medieval material, but its galleries of prehistoric and Roman London are awesome.

I was astounded to learn that bison and aurochs lived in prehistoric England!

Moving up to late Celtic or early Anglo-Saxon times:

I loved their diorama of a Roman London complex (basilica at the top):

Alas, they are apparently still working on the find called the Prittlewell Prince and did not have any of the material displayed. Its chamber rivals Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo! Fortunately, they have a great website: The Prittlewell Prince. Do try the links at the site; they have a lot of images and a few 3D reconstructions!

I had a wonderful trip and am looking forward to returning to London sometime in the not too distant future!

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