Paul Cobb

If you watched the Digging for Britain programme on BBC2 last Tuesday you will have seen the fantastic 5th and 6th century finds from a dig south of Canterbury in Kent. This Anglo-Saxon cemetery site has revealed a sword described in the Guardian by Duncan Sayer, the professor who leads the team of archaeologists at the University of Central Lancashire on the dig as ‘really incredible’, as well as other weaponry and some beautiful ornamental work. The location of the site is being kept secret but I was privileged to visit on a lovely summer’s day while the team from the University were at work last year.

The sword (which had been removed by then) has a silver-and-gilt hilt, with a fine decorative pattern, and a blade with a runic script (the alphabet used by people in Northern Europe before the adoption of Latin). It was so well-preserved in the chalk soil that traces of the leather and wood scabbard lined with beaver fur were also recovered. The sword has a ring attached to its pommel, perhaps symbolising that its bearer made an oath to a king or another high-status individual.


Photograph: Prof Alice Roberts/BBC/Rare TV

Twelve burials have been excavated so far and there are thought to be 200 more. Other treasures found on the site include spears, shields and other swords, primarily in men’s graves, and knives, buckles, brooches, and other artifacts in women’s graves. There’s also a well preserved wooden bucket! Buried in the same male grave as the sword however was a gold pendant, inscribed with a serpent or dragon. Pendants like this would have been worn by high-status women, so it’s thought to have been a treasured keepsake from a female relative or ancestor.

Kent is rich in jewellery finds like this. A beautiful 7th century tear-shaped gold pendant with garnets and blue glass and a filigree rim was found at Faversham. The largest known Anglo-Saxon composite brooch ever found was unearthed near the village of Kingston. With its fine zoomorphic filigree, narrow bead and twisted-wire rim decoration, inlaid with blue glass, white shell and flat-cut garnet, it’s one of the finest examples of Anglo-Saxon art. It is now in the World Museum Liverpool, but Kingston village uses it on its entrance signs! There is a very similar Anglo-Saxon disc brooch from a cemetery at Monkton in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Gold pendant found at Faversham (source: Wikipedia) 


The Kingston brooch on the village sign


Anglo-Saxon disc brooch from Monkton (source: Wikipedia) 

The delicacy and the intricate craftsmanship of these pieces is extraordinary – and we often call this the ‘dark ages’! In Thegn of Berewic, King Edward’s chaplain Osbern, who in the book came from Normandy with him (he possibly actually came later) uses the example of Anglo-Saxon jewellery making to illustrate to Felip who has just arrived the many contradictions of England at that time. Such as upholding men’s freedoms while relying on slaves!

Back to the dig in Kent, and there was something else that excited me, which I did see when I was there. In one of the graves featured on Digging for Britain as well as a spear and shield a male was buried with a seax, a one sided cutting weapon. Professor Alice Roberts calls them Anglo-Saxon knives, which they are… but a bit more than just a knife. The seax was such an everyday object that it is thought that it gave its name to the Saxons themselves. Worn in a belt on the front (or sometimes as a backdraw by women), it indicated a free English man or woman. In The Book and the Knife it is a badge of honour for one of my characters when she is given one by her mother just before she turns fourteen.

But the seax had another purpose, and the clue is in that term ‘cutting weapon’. Swords were expensive for the Saxons to make, and fighting men needed a blade that could be used for everyday work and double as a combat knife or sword. They and warriors of many other Northern European cultures chose the seax, which can be considered either a large dagger or a short single-edged sword. You won’t need to read far in Thegn of Berewic to find it being used as a weapon!

The Anglo Saxon seax often has a distinctive "broken back" blade shape, and its long form in this style, which could reach a length of up to 24" or 30", seems unique to Britain. In its shorter forms, sometimes just a few inches long, the seax typically was worn across the stomach with edge upright and with the hilt at the right-hand side. This orientation prevented the weapon from resting on its cutting edge. This is exactly how the seax in the Digging for Britain burial is being worn – the weapon is lying at a right angle to the bones of the body shape across the waist, blade-up. I was absolutely thrilled to see this seax, still ready after 1500 years for the warrior of Kent to reach to his belt and draw it.

The seax in the grave site, lying across the body at waist level

Kent Archaeological Society (KAS) brought a replica seax they had made to the Kent Show last year, and you can see from it how beautiful a newly made seax would have been. The runes inscribed on the blade are a copy of those on the seax of Beagnoth, a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon seax found near Battersea in 1857 and now in the British Museum. On one side of the blade of this seax is the only known complete inscription of the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet, as well as the name "Beagnoth" in runic letters. It is thought that the runic alphabet had a magical function, and that the name Beagnoth is that of either the owner of the weapon or the smith who forged it. A southern (Kentish?) origin for the seax has been proposed because its inscription uses only the original twenty-eight letters of the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet.


Replica seax made by KAS 

PS It was great to see Dr Andrew Richardson, the guest speaker at my book launch last November, on the Digging for Britain programme too! He was just as good on TV as he was in front of a PowerPoint.