'hwelcum hlwa'?

: Mounds, the Pagan Past and the Potent Dead in Anglo-Saxon England Introduction: The recent flourishing of archaeological research concerning 'the past in the past',1 aware of the mnemonic capacity of material culture, has approached the inherited aspects within the Anglo-Saxon landscape as a malleable framework for collective memory and therefore a medium through which the present may negotiate its relationship vis--vis the past, whether through the appropriation, anathematization or obliteration of its physical remains.2 Perhaps the best example of this dynamic process is the manifold appropriations (and in some case, reappropriations) undergone by earthen mounds whether prehistoric or Early Anglo-Saxon barrow mounds or natural eminences mistaken for one of the former from the fifth to the eleventh century. As illustrated by the recent works of many scholars, an analysis of the varied treatments of mounds in both textual sources and the physical landscape can shed considerable light on the various social, political, and ideological transformations that unfolded throughout the period.3 Not the least of these transformations was the conversion and Christianization of peoples with much shared cultural background coming increasingly (if only imperfectly in fits and stops) into political and religious unification. From the time of the conversion and throughout the fuller Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England, arguably at once the most immediate and most problematic aspect of the past was the pagan ancestral heritage of a society in which ancestral heritage continued to be a foundational component of its structures of power. As the story of the Frisian King Radbod's aborted baptism suggests, the adoption of Christianity, though often a process of syncretism and appropriation, had certain problematic implications for a culture's illustrious ancestors. The tension between condemnation and redemption is a primary theme of scholarship concerning early medieval attitudes towards the pagan past. On the one hand, many scholars have suggested that the assimilation of pagan history to the Old Testament and the

See especially Williams, 'Monuments and the Past', Semple, 'Anglo-Saxon Attitudes', and Bell, Religious Reuse; 'Churches on Roman Buildings'. For perspectives on landscape and memory see Tilley, Phenomenology of Landscape; Schama, Landscape and Memory; Holtorf and Williams, 'Landscapes and Memories'. See especially the works of Semple, Williams, Reynolds, Pantos, Carver and Blair cited below.

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historicization of the pagan gods allowed freshly Christianized cultures to maintain some measure of ancestral pride in their pagan heritage.4 This theme is best illustrated in an AngloSaxon context by the late ninth-century West Saxon royal genealogy which incorporates the former deity Woden in historicized form as a lineal descendant of Noah, Adam and ultimately Christ.5 On the other hand, assimilation of the pagan past to biblical history did not always work simply to vindicate the former. If former gods were made human descendants of biblical patriarchs, figures from the pagan past were, with notable biblical parallels, characterized as in some way monstrous. For example, lfric and Wulfstan in their accounts of the origins of pagan religion use entas in regard to Nimrod's people who constructed the Tower of Babel laid low by God and for the mistlice entas, 'various giants', who, along with the strece woruldmen e mihtige wurdan on woruldafelum and egesfulle wron a hwyle e hy leofedon ,6 ignorant men began worshiping erroneously as gods through the devil's teaching. Perhaps informed by the association of biblical giants with violence and rebuked pride, as well as out of genuine awe at the grandeur of the heroic past, King Hygelac, who appears in Beowulf merely as a human king whose wlanc, 'pride', was fatal, is presented in the Liber monstrorum as a monster of marvelous size whose giant bones were visited by men venturing from afar.7 Such ambiguous resonances might also have been evoked by the description of various pieces of ancient material culture in Old English poetry as enta geweorc, 'the work of giants', including in Beowulf both the treasured hoard (2774a) of a lost nation (224752a) as well as the barrow mound (2717b) in which it is interred.8
4

Bloomfield, 'Patristics and Old English Literature'; Southern, 'Aspects of Historical Writing'; Hanning, Vision of History, p. 58; Howe, Migration and Myth Making; Donahue, 'Beowulf and Christian Tradition'. ASC 855 ADE, 856 CF (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Whitelock, pp. 434). On genealogies as royal ideological tools, see Dumville, 'Genealogies and Regnal-lists'. On the assimilation of historicized gods with biblical figures specifically, see Davis, 'Cultural Assimilation' and Anlezark, 'Origins of the Anglo-Saxons'. '...violent world-men who became mighty in world-powers and were awe-inspiring as long as they lived (all translations my own unless otherwise attributed). Wufstan, De falsis deis, ll. 368 (ed. Bethurum, Homilies, p. 222). For lfric's version see lfric, De falsis diis, ll. 99103 (ed. Pope, Homilies, p. 681). LM ii (ed. Porsia, p. 138). Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, pp. 1134. The composition of the work has been dated according to the extensive corruption in its ninth- or tenth-century manuscripts to the period 650750AD by Lapidge, 'Liber Monstrorum and Wessex'. For more on the the confusing (and often confused) synthesis of biblical, Classical, patristic and Germanic traditions from which the textual community could draw concerning the relation of both antediluvian and postdiluvian giants to prideful pagan rulers of the past See Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, pp. 5885; Frankis, 'Thematic Significance', pp. 25864.

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Our appreciation of the implications of textual sources such as these is always limited if we do not also examine them in relation to the totality of evidence textual, archaeological, onomastic, etc. which may encode the un-formalized but thereby no less integral tenets of the culture which produced it.9 Barrows as a relict monument form which not only accumulated a fair amount of depictions in textual sources, but which also saw its physical manifestations, both ancient and newly built, put to a variety of uses during and after the conversion period provide a uniquely valuable lens through which to view engagements with the past in Anglo-Saxon England. In particular, reconstructing the interface of pagan and Christian ideas concerning mounds, the ancestral dead and the supernatural offers to tell us much about the process of Christianization in England and the ramifications of that process for attitudes towards society's problematic pagan heritage as commemorated on the landscape. Sarah Semple has persuasively argued that traditional ideas linking mounds to the supernatural and the ancestral dead the apparent rationale behind their positive appropriation as foci of burial and assembly in the pagan period subjected the monument-form's reputation to considerable complications in the Christian era.10 The development of negative connotations can be traced in textual and pictorial depictions of barrows, as well as in the material evidence of their negative appropriation as sites of judicial execution and burial.11 However, apparent highstatus burials inserted into prehistoric barrows continue to occur, although extremely rarely, as late as the ninth or tenth century, while the same period saw the construction of churches on or around prehistoric and early Anglo-Saxon barrows and the use of both preexisting and purposebuilt barrows as meeting-places for regional administration.12 It remains unclear to what extent this particular pattern of (re-)use in Christian Anglo-Saxon England attests to the co-existence of multiple perceptions contrasting to the point of incongruity (by no means impossible), or to something more complex that allows for major variation within a coherent paradigm of thought

10

11 12

As outlined by John Hines, this methodology of interdisciplinary culture-history is based on the mutuallyconstructive relationship between language and material culture and the central notion of culture as 'the abstract but unifying whole behind the tangible and familiar media in which it subsists, language and material life. It has no existence separate from its manifestations in these forms, but it is equally implicit in both'. Hines, Voices in the Past, p. 34. Semple, 'Fear of the Past'; 'Anglo-Saxon Attitudes'; 'Locations of Assembly'. Williams, 'Monuments and the Past'; 'Assembling the Dead'. Semple, 'Illustrations of Damnation'; Reynolds, 'Definition and Ideology'; Deviant Burial. Pantos, 'Anglo-Saxon Assembly-sites'.

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concerning the material past. Hoping to build on the foundations laid by previous scholarship, the present study will attempt to address this question by situating the evidence for the use of mounds within the broader system of ideas through which such engagements were mediated. With recourse to comparable evidence relating to barrow mounds in the Celtic and Scandinavian worlds, I suggest that the seemingly discordant use of mounds in the later Anglo-Saxon landscape becomes most scrutable when viewed in the context of the interaction of pagan and Christian ideas about the dead. More specifically, I argue that the cult of saints' relics provided a Christian framework of thought into which pagan ideas relating to mounds and the ancestral dead were assimilated. While this perspective will suggest how both preexisting and purpose-built monuments could be used as either the suitably dignified or suitably loathsome stage-settings of later Anglo-Saxon regional government, references to mounds in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Beowulf, and the Alfredian Boethius will illustrate the various resonances of the pagan past that the use of mounds in the landscape could activate.

Mounds and the Supernatural in the Early Medieval North Atlantic World: Versions C, D and E of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle record a peculiar anecdote sub anno 1006 regarding a viking army's visit to Cwichelmeshlw, a monument on the OxfordshireBerkshire border known today as Cuckhamsley Barrow, Scutchamer Knob or more colloquially as the Scotsman's Knob. A great fleet of Vikings, having overwintered on the Isle of Wight, began raiding again in Berkshire and Hampshire around Christmas before they wendon him a andlang scesdune to Cwichelmeshlwe 7 r onbidedon beotra gylpa, foron oft man cw gif hi Cwicelmeshlw gesohton t hi nfre to s gan ne scoldan; wendon him a ores weges hamwerd.13 The monument in question, demonstrated through excavation to have been a prehistoric structure, served twice as a shire assembly site in the tenth century,14 and this administrative function alone may have rendered the site appropriate as the subject of such a boast. However, it has also been suggested that the selection of Cwichelmeshlw as the subject
13

14

'...then turned along Ashdown to Cwichelm's barrow, and waited there for what had been proudly threatened, for it had often been said that if they went to Cwichelm's barrow they would never get to the sea; they then went home another way.' ASC 1006 C (ASC MS C, ed. O'Brien O'Keeffe, p. 91). Mentioned in S 1454, a 990-2 writ of dispute, edited in Baines, 'Wynfld v. Leofwine', pp. 646.

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of this boast and as an important regional meeting-place might have both been informed by some reflex of the pre-Christian notion better represented in the literature and archaeology of the Celtic and Scandinavian worlds that mounds, especially burial mounds, were considered conduits to the supernatural and centres of sentinel ancestral power.15 Sid in Irish medieval texts can refer to both the otherworld of the gods and the mounds through which it was accessed, and this semantic duality has been used to understand the complexes of prehistoric remains perceived in medieval folklore as ancient seats of regional kingship.16 The prominence of mounds at such places as Tara, Co. Meath, Navan, Co. Armagh and Rathcroghan, Co. Roscommon, suggests that royal ritual required the arbitration of the divine and sought to display a king's status as privileged intermediary for his people to the otherworld.17 Mounds, albeit frequently de novo constructions rather than ancient monuments, continued to be an important aspect of some royal sites in Early Christian Ireland, 18 perhaps suggesting that the monument-form maintained an aura even for Christian rulers. Meanwhile, a peculiar procedure recorded in an Irish law tract of the late sixth or seventh century suggests a link between burial mounds and ancestral power. An individual claiming a disputed parcel of land by virtue of hereditary right must prove the legitimacy of his claim by riding over burial mounds at the parcel's boundary the idea being that a false claimant would risk the ire of the ancestors interred there.19 The existence of similar beliefs in Wales was suggested to Thomas Charles-Edwards by the motif found in Nennius and the Second Branch of the Mabinogi in which the positioning of a fallen ruler's burial is presumed to have an apotropaic function.20 A comparable set of ideas seems to have prevailed during the Migration period and Viking Age in Scandinavia as well. Though sometimes recorded centuries later, literary sources depict the dead retaining some kind of active existence within the grave mound, place of interment or other landscape feature.21 A common manifestation of this idea is the frightening
15 16 17 18 19 20 21

The possibility is raised by Semple, 'Locations of Assembly', p. 150 and Williams, Death and Memory, p. 209. Cathasaigh, 'Semantics of Sid', pp. 14850. Warner, 'Royal Mound in Ireland', pp. 2833. Ibid., pp. 3341. Charles-Edwards, 'Boundaries in Irish Law'. Ibid., p. 86. Says a moribund king in Friolfs saga I, 'My howe shall stand beside the forth. And there shall be but a short distance between mine and Porsteinn's, for it is well that we should call to one another.' Cited in Ellis, Road to Hel, p. 91. In Landnamabok and Eyrbryggja saga, the dead of a particular family are said to reside among their forebearers in their ancestral mountains, Sanmark, 'Living On', pp. 171 2. For a general review of this material

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draugar, revenants, such as Glamr of Grettis Saga, who raise from their graves to cause mischief unless their heads are removed or body destroyed.22 The interaction between the living and the mound-buried dead is not always expected to be so antagonistic. The body of King Halfdan in Halfdanar Saga Svarta in Heimskringla (IX) is divided between four mounds in an effort to vouchsafe the prosperity of the land, and there are some references in the sagas and in the medieval provincial laws of Sweden and Norway to the worship of dead men focused on their mounds.23 As in the Celtic tradition, there seems to be a link between the continued agency of the dead within mounds and their use as seats of royal authority, where a king might literally sit in order to proclaim his inheritance. Bjorn in the Olafs Saga Helga of the Flateyjarbok claims his kingship by sitting on the burial mound of his father, while King Hrollaugr in Haralds Saga Harfagra rolls himself down from the king's seat atop a mound in order to abdicate.24 The archaeological remains at Gamla Uppsala suggest the currency of this royal association outside the world of literary motif. The temple complex at Uppsala, described by Adam of Bremen around 1090 as the setting of various ritual actions, including animal and human sacrifices, includes a series of prominent Migration period royal burial mounds, providing a tangible example of the association of burial mounds with royalty and ritual action.25 There is considerably less textual evidence from an Anglo-Saxon context depicting preChristian times, but recent treatments of Anglo-Saxon paganism envision a broad repertoire of beliefs and practices selectively adapted to local socio-political circumstances, though with some degree of inter-regional standardization.26 Considering this evidence from the North Atlantic region, it is not entirely unlikely that the boasts concerning Cwichelmeshlw rather than simply a military prognosis based on an assessment of the relative tactical advantages of Viking and English forces in the area may actually reference a comparable cluster of beliefs that existed in pagan England and survived (if in slightly diluted form) into the thoroughly Christian milieu of the eleventh century. 27 The fate of the body and soul after death and prior to judgment
see Ellis, Road to Hel, pp. 906. On draugar see Chadwick, 'Norse Ghosts' and their later medieval analogues, Caciola 'Wraiths'. Ellis, Road to Hel, pp. 1005, for references in sagas. Sanmark, 'Living On', pp. 167 8 for the provincial laws. Ellis, Road to Hel, pp. 1067. Roesdahl, 'Scandinavians at Home', p. 146. See texts collected in Carver et al., Signals of Belief, especially Carver, 'Archaeological Agenda'. Might the odd mention that the Viking army 'went another way home' suggest that the trip to Cwichelmeshlw was an out-of-the-way excursion deliberately undertaken as a display of defiance to local lore intended to

22 23 24 25 26 27

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day was according to Thompson a 'grey theoretical area' in Anglo-Saxon Christianity,28 and thus perhaps an area in which we might expect pre-Christian ideas to maintain sway. Beyond Cwichelmeshlw, the enigmatic images carved in the right panel of the Franks Casket, including what appears to be a shrouded figure lying within a mound, as well as a revisionist reading of The Wife's Lament, which sees the narrator as a deceased person entrapped within a barrow, have also been offered as evidence for the Christian incorporation of traditional ideas concerning the continued existence of the dead in the grave. 29 Moreover, John Blair has suggested that anecdotes in post-Conquest sources, such as the Vita sancte Moduenne, William of Malmesbury, Walter Map, and William of Newburgh, concerning revenants similar to both the Norse draugar and Slavic vampire reveal fears and beliefs about the 'undead' that may well have arisen ultimately from the pre-Christian era.30 The early circulation of such beliefs is at least intimated by the correspondences between the reported methods of disabling revenants in the above sources and occasional burial practices from sixth and seventh-century England.31 lfric's warning that, gyt fara wiccan to wega gelton, and to henum byrgelsum mid heora gedwimore, and clipia to am deofle, and he cym hym to on s mannes gelicnysse e aer li bebyrged, swylce he of deae arise confirms that even learned ecclesiastics of the tenth century could acknowledge at least the post-interment re-emergence of corpses.32 In terms of sentinel burial, a Norman work, the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, attributed to Bishop Guy of Amiens and dated almost immediately after the battle it depicts, provides an additional suggestion that the idea even if now only an antiquated notion fossilized as literary motif remained sufficiently accessible to be employed ironically in relation to an Anglo-Saxon
28 29

30

31

32

demoralize the English? Thompson, 'Constructing Salvation', p. 229. See Webster, 'Iconographic Programme'; Sanmark, 'Living On', p. 169; Semple, 'Fear of the Past'. Appreciation of the riddling qualities of The Wife's Lament are well recognized, even if the status of the speaker, the nature of her dwelling remains and the sense of her final lines remain debated. See Johnson, 'The Wife's Lament as DeathSong'; Battles, 'Of Cave, Graves, and Subterranean Dwellings'; Wentersdorf, 'Situation of the Narrator'; Niles, 'Ending of The Wife's Lament'. Blair, 'Dangerous Dead'. On early modern accounts of Eastern European belief in vampirism, see Barber, Vampires, Death and Burial, pp. 597. Reynolds, Deviant Burial, pp. 6195 and below pp. 145. Corresponding methods include decapitation, prone burial, mutilation of the lower limbs and the scattering of grain in the grave refill. 'witches yet go to crossroads and to heathen burials with their delusive magic, and call to the devil, and he comes to them in the likeness of the man who is buried there as though he rise from death'. lfric, De Auguriis (ed. Pope, Homilies, p. 796). Explaining revenants with recourse to demonic possession seems to have been a typical ecclesiastical strategy for the 'rationalization of theologically unacceptable phenomena', Blair, 'Dangerous Dead', p. 549. See Caciola, 'Wraiths', pp. 115 for additional examples.

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king in the late eleventh century. Infuriated and having refused to deliver Harold's body to his mother in exchange for its weight in gold, William has the last Anglo-Saxon king interred at the summit of a cliff near the sea under a stone reading: Per mandata ducis rex hic Heralde quiescis, Vt custos maneas littoris et pelagi. By the duke's commands, O Harold, you rest here a king, That you may still be guardian of the shore and sea.33 These shards of evidence may all hint at an underlying belief in the continuing existence and agency of the deceased in the place of their interment, yet we can only hope to appreciate their full import when viewing them in relation to the assortment of evidence concerning mounds and the dead in the physical landscape of Anglo-Saxon England. As in the Celtic and Scandinavian arenas, the dialogue between archaeological and literary sources is particularly illuminating. The following provides a general survey by no means comprehensive of archaeological evidence for the uses of barrows throughout the Anglo-Saxon period (from the fifth to the eleventh centuries), making reference to other source-types where appropriate. Though the sum of the evidence seems to confirm the continuing association of mounds with the supernatural and the potent dead across the conversion, these associations in the Christian era allowed mounds to be revered as much as feared, a pattern suggestive of a complex and ambivalent attitude towards the pagan past we shall explore later.

Mounds in Anglo-Saxon England (the fifth to the eleventh century): Though the re-use of prehistoric monuments for Anglo-Saxon burials has been recognized at least from the time of the barrow-digging antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the full dynamic extent and rationale for monument re-use has been an underdeveloped discussion until relatively recently. Williams's nationwide survey of the re-use of various prehistoric monuments in the Early Medieval period accounted for about seventeen percent of all early Anglo-Saxon burial sites (from the fifth to the eighth century), with re-use seemingly of roughly equal popularity across the country. 34 Round barrows were the most

33 34

Guy, Bishop of Amiens, CHP I, ll. 5601 (ed. Morton and Muntz, pp. 389). Williams, 'Ancient Landscapes', pp. 4, 19.

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common subjects of re-use, acting as the foci of communal cemeteries, smaller burial groups, and individual high-status barrows especially in the late sixth and seventh centuries. In recent years, evidence has also been mounting for the structural enhancement of complexes of prehistoric features, including the addition of square enclosures, posts and buildings near monuments, perhaps in the context of multi-functional cult sites, used for assembly, burial, ritual and administration in the early Anglo-Saxon period.35 The classic type site in this category is the sixth-to-seventh-century settlement site at Yeavering, the axis of which seems to have been orientated according to two pre-historic features, a stone circle and a Bronze Age barrow, both of which were used as foci for burial.36 Whereas Yeavering's excavator interpreted the pattern as evidence of long-term ritual continuity from the Bronze Age to the Conversion Era, such re-use is now commonly understood, following an influential article by Bradley,37 as an effort to 'create continuity' with the illustrious past suggested by ancient remains. Williams, for example, interprets the secondary burial in ancient monuments as an effort 'to fix the identities of living and dead kingroups with reference to the past and the supernatural'. 38 Whatever the extent of the migrant population in Early Anglo-Saxon England, the populations ruled by emerging elites must have been to some extent ethnically heterogeneous,39 and the ritual appropriation of ancient monuments may have legitimated the claims of these elites in a variety of ways. For migrant groups attempting to consolidate their authority over a foreign land and an indigenous population, appropriation would perhaps have legitimated their ascendancy by fabricating a link between themselves and the ancient builders who had scrawled their might on the landscape. 40 Interestingly, a number of earthworks are associated in place-names with the early AngloSaxon deities whose names are preserved in the days of the week. Thunor is usually associated with natural features such as fields and groves, but is also attached to tumuli, as in the case of Thunreslau (Essex), the name of a half-hundred in Domesday,41 and the Thunoreshlw
35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Williams, 'Assembling the Dead'; Semple, 'Locations of Assembly'. Hope-Taylor, Yeavering. The site is thought to represent Edwin's royal vill Ad Gefrin described by Bede. Bradley, 'Time Regained'. Williams, 'Ancient Landscapes', p. 25. For a recent summary of the evidence with relevant citations, Brugmann, 'Migration and Endogenous Change'. Williams, 'Ancient Landscapes', p. 25. See Gelling, Signposts to the Past, p. 161. Such a name has been thought to indicate that an unidentified mound marked the meeting-place of the administrative unit. Thurstable (Essex), another possible Thunor name for a

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mentioned in the Minster-in-Thanet foundation story.42 Place-names associated with Woden, the Teutonic deity featured prominently in Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, apply to natural as well as to man-made features. Wenslow (Bedfordshire), again recorded as a half-hundred in Domesday, apparently refers to a now unidentifiable mound that once served as the unit's meeting-place.43 Woodnesborough (Kent) may refer to an artificial mound formerly situated near the village's medieval church,44 but a more certain identification is Wodnesbeorg in Alton Priors (Wiltshire),45 a neolithic long barrow thought to have suggested the naming of Wansdyke (wodnes dic), a long linear earthwork stretching from Somerset to Wiltshire.46 Considering the Celtic and Scandinavian comparanda rehearsed above, we might reasonably hypothesize from the place-names such as these that a perceived connection between ancient remains and the supernatural existed also in England. If so, intrusive and associative monument re-use in the context of elite burial or settlement may be seen as reifications in a suitably impressive and durable medium of the same ideology expressed in the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies recorded in later texts. As especially prominent monuments with origins beyond living memory, though perhaps recognized by migrants as similar to features remembered from their ancestral homelands, the prehistoric barrow landscape of Britain provided a valuable material medium through which descent from the supernatural could be reified.47 The individual graves of the late sixth and seventh century superimposed on earlier monuments at Cow Lowe, Galley Low (Derbyshire), Swallowcliffe Down, Roundway Down, Ford, (Wiltshire), and Lowbury Hill (Berkshire), as well as the imitative de novo construction of barrows for high-status burial at Taplow (Buckinghamshire) and Sutton Hoo (Suffolk), may then
half-hundred which contains the element stapol ('post') may also reference a physical feature marking an administrative meeting-place. See references to Meaney below pp. 156, n. 94 for the possibility that some late Anglo-Saxon administrative meeting-places had their origins in pre-Christian cult sites. See below p. 15, n. 87. Gelling, Signposts to the Past, p. 161 According to eighteenth-century tradition, some 'grave-goods' including a spear head and fragments of bone and pottery were recovered from this mound, see Davidson and Webster, 'Burial at Coomb', p. 8; Behr, 'Early Medieval Kent', pp. 434. Now called Adam's Grave, wodnesbeorg is listed as the site of battles in ASC E 592 and 715 (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Whitelock, pp. 158, 171). The name appears in a series of charters, beginning with S 368 (KCD 335) in 903 AD. On the dating, see below pp. 2930. Citing Tacitus, Moisl, 'Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies', p. 216 suggests that descent from a deity was an important ideological principle among early Germanic peoples, conferring ethnic coherence to a gens and royal authority to its rulers.

42 43 44

45

46

47

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be seen as a development of this previously less exclusive folk tradition.48 Such innovation has often been attributed to the emergence of new elites of superordinate status, who required a grand medium to express their dynastic claims to regional authority, monopolizing the use of an ancient monument form, and thus perhaps to divine descent or ancestral legitimation of power. 49 Though the visibility of the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo from the entrance point to the East Anglian Kingdom via the river Deben has been questioned,50 a significant number of highstatus barrow burials of the late sixth to eighth century do occur in prominent locations near territorial boundaries or entry ways.51 This pattern is particularly characteristic of the Avebury region of North Wiltshire, an area remembered in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a location of confrontation with the British from the late sixth century and contested between Wessex and Mercia from the seventh to the ninth century. Semple has hypothesized that this contentious political environment motivated an ideologically potent form of burial rite characterized by intrusive secondary high-status interment in prominently positioned prehistoric barrows.52 These sentinel-type barrows would have demonstrated polities' land claims not merely by appropriating ancient features, but also, perhaps, by evoking the notions we have seen reflected in the literary sources above regarding the dead's continued existence and protective capacity within the grave.53 Considering the evidence that the intrusive secondary interments at Roundway Down 7 in North Wiltshire and Swallowcliffe Down to the south incurred considerable damage to primary prehistoric remains, such burials could have functioned as aggressive statements of the ascendancy of a new elite community, assuming the role of sentinel ancestors by violently appropriating ancient remains.54 Though the particular intentions and contexts of monument re-use must have varied across time and space,55 the appropriation, elaboration or fabrication of conspicuous and durable relics in the landscape could work to embed the identities of the appropriators into the land,

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Williams, 'Ancient Landscapes', pp. 213. Shepherd, 'Social Identity', pp. 6477. Williamson, Sutton Hoo and its Landscape, contra Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?, p. 106. Williams, 'Placing the Dead', pp. 6283. Semple, 'Burials and Political Boundaries', pp. 823. Ibid. Semple, 'Burials and Political Boundaries', pp. 801. For a contrast to the Avebury region, see the predominance of associative communal cemeteries rather than intrusive, single barrow burial in her regional case-study of West Sussex, Semple, 'South Saxon Kingdom'.

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whether those identities were defined by Germanic or divine ancestry or more simply by shared local history, culture and political allegiance. The appropriation of ancient monuments may even have been employed to obscure perceptions of ethnic difference between migrant and native groups by amalgamating formerly separate ritual traditions.56 Indeed, Blair has recently argued that Romano-British prototypes of square enclosures frequently superimposed upon prehistoric remains may lie behind the few Anglo-Saxon sites which seem to fit the descriptions provided by Bede, Gregory and Aldhelm of the fana, 'shrines' presumably used among the pagan English at the time of conversion.57 Scholars have also suggested that Christianity, either directly through conversion or more indirectly through its proximity as a competing ideology, may have contributed to the monumentalization of cult in the late sixth and seventh centuries.58 The burial ground at Sutton Hoo may indeed represent the act of a proud but insecure and newly established pagan dynasty defining its cultural allegiance with reference to an imagined Scandinavian past in defiant opposition to the cultural imperialism of Christian Francia, 59 but these potentates' predilection for 'permanent and conspicuous commemoration' may have been influenced in part by the stone churches built by rival dynasties.60 We may perceive barrow burial as a distinctly pagan practice, but the Mound 1 burial at Sutton Hoo, just as the females interred at Roundway Down and Swallowcliffe Down,61 included artifacts infused with Christian iconography, and there is some evidence that traditional barrow burial continued into the later eighth century and beyond. 62 Indeed, the metal coffin fittings found at the isolated grave at Ogborne St Andrew (Wiltshire) is thought to place the latest apparent high-status burial inserted into a prehistoric mound as late as

56 57

58

59

60 61

62

See Williams, 'Ancient Landscapes', p. 26 and Hrke, 'Context for the Saxon Barrow', p. 205. Blair, 'Anglo-Saxon Pagan Shrines'. For the description of the fana see Bede, HE i.30, ii.13, ii.15, iii.30 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 1069, 1827, 1901, 3223) and Aldhelm, Letter 5 (to Heahfrith) (ed. Ehwald, Aldhelmi Opera, p. 489). For this phenomenon in a wider European context see Wood, 'Historical Re-Identifications' and van de Noort, 'Early Medieval Barrows'. Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?. See also Carver, 'Early Medieval Monumentality', p. 6; Carver, 'Meaning of Monumental Barrows', p. 133. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, p. 53. On the implications of these 'Christian' artifacts in later seventh-century wealthy female barrow burials , see Crawford, 'Votive Deposition', pp. 945; Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, pp. 2305; Geake, Grave-goods, pp. 1267. See for example Alfriston, Harting Beacon, Bevis's Grave and Kemp Howe (Geake, Grave-goods, pp. 1834, 154, 158).

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the ninth or tenth century. 63 Although the increasing incorporation of the new belief system into dominant modes of thought and behavior would eventually bring major changes in the perceptions and uses of prehistoric features and the monument-form of the barrow, at the beginning of the conversion process, the church seems to have adopted some measure of toleration perhaps pragmatically so for traditional places of burial and ritual. Rare insight into the Gregorian conversion initiative's policy towards sites of preChristian importance is provided by Bede's transcription of Gregory's instructions to Bishop Mellitus that the heathens' 'well-built' shrines should not be destroyed, but merely the idols within, and the shrines rededicated to Christ.64 Although Bede had little reason to depict pagan practice accurately and Gregory may have been assimilating any available knowledge of AngloSaxon paganism with Classical paganism and biblical convention,65 the technique of appropriation outlined by Gregory would seem to provide a theoretical model for approaching the subject of Christianization in Anglo-Saxon England in general and in particular for the archaeological evidence for that process. Unfortunately, identifying instances of a clear development from pagan sacred site to Christian church has met with limited success. The firmest case is at Yeavering where building D2, interpreted from its cache of ox skulls as one of the few 'well-built' pagan shrines on record, was superseded by a church around the mid-seventh century.66 At this early stage, ancestral places and monumental prehistoric features, such as those present at Yeavering, may have still retained an aura that churchmen thought it best to exploit in order to facilitate the transition to the new lore. This pragmatism seems to have been at the center of Gregory's mandate: When this people see that their shrines are not destroyed they will be able to banish error from their hearts and be more ready to come to the places they are familiar with, but now recognizing and worshiping the true God...It is doubtless impossible to cut out everything at once from their stubborn minds: just as the man who is attempting to climb to the highest place, rises by steps and degrees

63 64

65 66

Semple, 'Borders and Political Boundaries', pp. 789. Bede, HE i.30 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 1067). Aldhelm's letter to Heahfrith would seem to provide additional evidence for the appropriation of pagan cult sites by the church: 'Where once the crude pillars of the same foul snake and the stage were worshiped with coarse stupidity in profane shrines, in their place dwellings for students, not to mention holy houses of prayer, are constructed skilfully by the talents of architects', trans. Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm: The Prose Works, pp. 1601. For Latin edition see citation above, p. 11, n. 60. See Page, 'Anglo-Saxon Paganism' and Church, 'Paganism in Conversion-Age Anglo-Saxon England'. Hope-Taylor, Yeavering, pp. 2779; Hamerow, 'Special Deposits', p. 12; Ware, 'Space at Gefrin', p. 156.

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and not by leaps.67 Two of the other more convincing candidates for the Christian appropriation of pagan sites in the early conversion era involve the re-use of preexisting mounds. At Ripon (Yorkshire), St Wilfrid seems to have deliberately aligned his late seventh-century church according to a prominent natural hillock (perhaps mistaken for a barrow)68 previously used for burial in the early seventh century. The hill top, presumably fulfilling the burial needs of the adjoined religious community, remained the focus of exclusively male high-status coffined burial into the ninth century.69 A similar instance of appropriation seems apparent at Bampton (Oxfordshire), whose incorporation of the place-name element beam may suggest the focus of a pre-Christian cult site.70 Here two Bronze Age barrows attracted a church, a chapel and an associated cemetery, which radiocarbon evidence suggests had been initiated by the ninth century. 71 John Blair has recently suggested that the church at Goodmanham, the place according to Bede where Edwin's chief priest destroyed a pagan shrine whose remnants could still be seen in the eighth century, may also overlay a prehistoric mound.72 Even in centuries after the conversion, ecclesiastical establishments seemed to have been attracted to preexisting monuments that may have accumulated folk legends in the course of time. Taplow and High Wycombe (Buckinghamshire), barrow burials of the early seventh and late seventh century respectively, were adjoined by later churches, as was the unusually late barrow burial at Ogborne St Andrew (Wiltshire).73 Insight into the motivations underlying the adjoining of churches to preexisting monuments may actually be provided by textual and archaeological evidence that mounds were sometimes considered malignant. The most famous instance of a church having been built in association with a barrow is provided by Felix's Vita Guthlaci, an eighth-century Latin hagiography which relates how the hermit Guthlac, much like his exemplar Anthony, was
67 68

69 70

71 72 73

Bede, HE i.30 (ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 1067). Its thirteenth-century place-name Elveshowe (Elf's barrow) may suggest this, see Hall and Whyman, 'Monasticism at Ripon', p. 65. Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, pp. 1856. The beam of beam tun is thought to refer to a hallowed tree, post or pillar, such as that around which a series of radial burials were oriented at Yeavering, and such as have been argued to have acted as cult foci in a preChristian context. See Blair, 'Anglo-Saxon Pagan Shrines', p. 2; Meaney, 'Pagan English Sanctuaries', pp. 30, 35. Blair, 'Bampton', pp. 12830. Blair, 'Anglo-Saxon Pagan Shrines', pp. 224. Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, p. 374.

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plagued by demons when he sought out isolation. Rather than a tomb in the desert, however, the loathsome space taken up by Guthlac is a barrow (tumulus) situated within an uninhabited fenland. The barrow has formerly been dug into in hopes of treasure,74 but it is never clearly deemed sepulchral, nor the demons reckoned the spirits of pagan men buried within.75 In any case, his eventual appropriation of the barrow seems not to be the redemption of some positively valued ancient place, but rather the purification of a particularly loathsome one.76 Guthlac A, a poem of uncertain relation to Felix's Vita recorded in the tenth-century Exeter Book but possibly composed much earlier, borrows from the diction and conventions of heroic poetry to focus especially on the saint's combat with the demons. Here, according to a recent article by Alaric Hall, Guthlac is described as undertaking a divinely inspired campaign to cleanse mounds, perhaps to connote the conversion of pagan places.77 This paradigm of the conversion of an old and fearsome, if not explicitly pagan place, could apply to some of the barrows adjoined by churches just as much as the Jelling model of retrospective conversion intended to incorporate the ancestral dead into the Christian fold.78 If churchmen had initially relied on accommodating themselves within pre-existing sacred places to facilitate conversion, Christianization eventually brought about the circumstances under which ancestral places could be superseded or even demonized. The possible loathsomeness of ancient earthworks in the Christian era is perhaps reflected in the emergence of a distinctive cemetery-type from the seventh century. Previously, deviant burials marked by unusual features such as decapitation, binding, and prone burial occur among more typical burials in community cemeteries.79 The advent of Christianity seems to

74 75

76

77 78

79

VG xxviii (ed. Colgrave, pp. 925). See also below pp. 212. A clearer association between a mound and malevolent pagan power is found in Stephen of Ripon, VW xiii (ed. Colgrave, pp. 289), a near contemporary hagiography in which a staff-bearing pagan priest mounts a barrow to summon his wicked magic against Wilfrid's household. Whereas Hines, Voices in the Past, pp. 6870 suggests that Guthlac's transformation of haunted fenland is designed to assert a joint Mercian-East Anglian claim to the cultivation of valuable fenland resources contested with Lindsay at the time, Siewers, 'Landscaps of Conversion' argues that the primary opposition constructed by Felix's Vita is Christian Mercia against the indigenous pagan connotations of the landscape. Guthlac's triumph over the demons who once take the guise of a Welsh army is designed to articulate the ascendancy of Christian Mercia over the area's indigenous population. Hall, 'Anglo-Saxon Sanctity', pp. 2136, 22430. Harold Bluetooth seems to have exhumed his parents from their burial mounds at Jelling and reinstalled their remains in an adjacent church, Roesdahl, 'Scandinavians at Home', pp. 157 8. Reynolds, Deviant Burial, pp. 20334.

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have enhanced the need to separate the unwanted dead from the community at large, 80 and from the seventh to the twelfth century, earthen mounds, especially those situated near administrative boundaries and major thoroughfares, provided the most common focus for cemeteries used exclusively for the interment of deviant burials, many of which appear to represent the victims of judicial execution.81 Twelve of the twenty-seven execution cemeteries listed by Andrew Reynolds are associated with mounds (though only six are known to have been preexisting monuments, while many others may represent purpose-built features)82 and among these are Roche Court Down (Wiltshire) and Sutton Hoo (Suffolk), monuments hypothesized to have been important centers of cult in the seventh century.83 Semple argues that the supernatural associations of barrows, the root of their importance in the pagan era, survived the process of conversion and were responsible for the anathematization of such features in the Christian era, when barrows seemed to have been characterized as loathsome places by churchmen so as to discourage residual links to ancestral places and the pagan past.84 Tracing the development of associations surrounding barrows in texts and manuscript illuminations, Semple argues that associations with pagan practice and malevolent supernatural entities evident in eighth-century sources, including, Stephan's Vita Wilfridi, Felix's Vita Guthlaci and Beowulf (for which she accepts an early date), survived into the tenth and eleventh century, as attested by Guthlac A, Maxims II and Wi Frstice, when they were augmented by associations with the imprisonment and punishment of wrongdoers. Examples illustrating the latter include the beorg into which the sinful Mermedonians are washed by the purging flood in Andreas,85 and the Thunures hleaw which marks the spot where the
80

81 82 83

84 85

The earliest reference to the exclusion of criminals from consecrated ground occurs in II thelstan, ch. 26 (ed. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1, pp. 1645), though Bede, HE v.14 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 5045) provides an early anecdote suggesting the custom of consigning sinners (in this case a monk) to the periphery of cemeteries. Gittos, 'Consecrating Cemeteries', pp. 2058 suggests that the heightened sense of sacred and profane in Irish Christianity may have imparted some early influence in England, where a tradition of formal cemetery consecration is attested sooner than on the continent. Reynolds, Deviant Burial; 'Definition and Ideology'. Reynolds, Deviant Burial, p. 156. Radiocarbon dated to the late seventh century, the commencement of deviant burial at Sutton Hoo could overlap with high-status barrow burial in the vicinity as part of a multi-functional ritual complex, Carver, Sutton Hoo: A Seventh-Century Princely Burial Ground, pp. 3479; Semple, 'Locations of Assembly', p. 144. Regardless, the exclusive use of the site for deviant burial thereafter suggests that the collocation of high-status and deviant burial was no longer considered appropriate. Semple, 'Fear of the Past'. See Andreas 1587B1600 (ed. Brooks, Andreas, p. 51).

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wicked counselor Thunor is swallowed by the earth in the earliest versions of the so-called Mildrith legend.86 A series of unique illuminations in the early eleventh-century Harley Psalter provides the starkest representation of this association with punishment and hints at its possible origins. Manipulating the hollow-hill motif of his exemplar, the Utrecht Psalter, Harley scribe F depicts what appears to be a distinctly Anglo-Saxon vision of hell as comprising 'a living-dead existence, trapped within the earth, often within a hollow beneath a hill or mound, tormented by demons'.87 The landscape context of these hell-holes as well as the depiction of the tormented souls as decapitated or bereft of other limbs corresponds closely to what we know about contemporary execution practices, and the decision to illustrate the psalms' descriptions of hellish torment in this way suggests the fate that mounds were thought to have in store for deviants barred from Christian burial. It may not be too bold to suggest that traditional ideas concerning mounds as the locus of continued existence after death were assimilated to the Christian conception of hell such that mounds became fearful places particularly suited to the disposal of the morally untouchable.88 It is noteworthy in this regard that the landscape context of execution sites at cross-roads as well as their frequent description as hena byregelsas, 'heathen burials', in charter bounds corresponds exactly to lfric's understanding of where witches go to summon corpses from the earth.89 Mitigating what might otherwise seem like the outright anathematization of barrow mounds, is the regional limitation of identified execution sites most are in south and central England with only one, Walkington Wold (East Yorkshire), from the north90 and the evidence for the use of mounds as the meeting-places of administrative units, especially hundreds, in the later Anglo-Saxon period.91 Mentioned as an organizational system only in the tenth century, the origins of the hundredal system are obscure,92 though Meaney has suggested from
86

87 88 89

90

91 92

On the dating and content of the relevant narratives, see Rollason, The Mildrith Legend, pp. 1520, 74 and 76, and for a summary, see Hollis, 'Minster-in-Thanet Foundation Story', p. 49. Semple, 'Illustrations of Damnation', p. 240. Ibid. On references to execution sites in charter bounds, including a handlist of suspected examples, see Reynolds, Deviant Burial, pp. 21922, 27281. On lfric, see above, p. 7. Buckberry and Hadley, 'Execution Cemetery at Walkington Wold'. See Reynolds, Deviant Burial, p. 152 for distribution map. See Pantos, 'Anglo-Saxon Assembly-places', 'On the Edge of Things'. Loyn, Governance of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 1405; Reynolds, Later Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 768; Blair,

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correspondence of a few theophorous place-names and hundred meeting-places that some sites at least may have made the transition from pagan shrines to administrative meeting places.93 Tracing any deeper connection between cultic assembly practices in the early Anglo-Saxon period and later administrative systems is extremely problematic, not least because place-name evidence suggesting moot-mound sites has hitherto been subject to only limited archaeological evaluation.94 One of the few hundred mounds which has undergone modern excavation is Secklow (Buckinghamshire), which proved to be at least post-Roman and lacking in any early Anglo-Saxon phase of activity.95 The excavators suggested the mound was purpose-built for assembly in the tenth century and then provided a list of eleven other suspected moot-mounds previously excavated. Of these, only one proved sepulchral and one demonstrably prehistoric.96 Another on their list, however, Scutchamer Knob, the Cwichelmeshlw of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which functioned twice as a shire assembly site in the tenth century, 97 was proven subsequently to have been a prehistoric construction.98 Given the Chronicle's reference to Cwichelmeshlw and the apparent influence of superstitious notions on the placement of execution sites, ideological considerations regarding mounds' association with ancestral power likely influenced the use of old or even purpose-built monuments as sites of assembly. However, mere practical considerations (conspicuousness, ready platforms for speech-giving) would have encouraged the use of old and new mounds as meeting-places, as would the simple force of tradition, even if the ideological principles which may have originated that tradition had in some areas lost relevancy or simply fallen out of memory. To summarize, the monumentalization of cult in the late pagan era may have been partly influenced by the proximity of Christianity as a competing ideology and in the early phases of conversion, the church may have tactfully dovetailed itself into pre-existing ritual landscapes. However, the importance of barrows in pre-Christian ritual and belief, perhaps especially their

93 94

95 96 97 98

Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 2369. Meaney, 'Pagan English Sanctuaries'; 'Hundred Meeting-Places', pp. 22832. The existence of moot-mounds is largely deduced either from elements referring to mounds in the name of the hundredal units themselves or from the other place-names compounding words for speech or assembly with those for mounds, Pantos, 'Vocabulary of Assembly'. Adkins and Petchey, 'Secklow Hundred Mound', pp. 2456. Ibid., pp. 24650. Mentioned in S 1454, a 990-2 writ of dispute, edited in Baines, 'Wynfld v. Leofwine', pp. 646. Sanmark and Semple, 'Places of Assembly', pp. 2535.

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association with the ancestral dead and the supernatural, subjected their reputation to significant complications as the process of Christianization continued and the new belief system became more firmly entrenched. In the centuries following conversion, it appears that preexisting mounds could be subject to both positive and negative appropriation, while purpose-built mounds used for either execution burial or administrative assembly were capable of providing either a suitably loathsome or suitably dignified stage for the actions of regional government.

Avenues for Interpretation: Malleable Space and The Potent Dead The question remaining is what this varied pattern of re-use in Christian Anglo-Saxon England might suggest about the attitudes of Christians towards their pagan fore-bearers. As dissonance is to be expected concerning what must have been a contested issue, we should militate against overly deterministic or mechanistic interpretations. Yet, without reconstructing anything approaching a dogmatic view (which certainly never existed) of the pre-Christian past, it is possible, at least to some extent, to reconcile the evidence for what seems like the outright anathematization of ancestral places with the evidence for lingering respect for earlier traditions of burial, assembly and monument building and place them into a coherent framework of thought that allows for major variation across time and space. As shown above, scholars have found Gregory's Letter to Mellitus instructive in this regard. Viewing this text and the evidence for mounds within the broader theological system in which they existed, I hope to show that notions of empowered space which underlie the cult of saints' relics provides a useful contemporary theoretical framework within which the challenging pattern of mound (re-)use in Middle and Late Anglo-Saxon England might be better understood. Admittedly, Gregory's advice to Mellitus is offered as a practical technique to approach a specific type of site. His rationale is that the familiarity of these places could, when rededicated to a Christian end, facilitate conversion by mitigating the disjuncture between the old and new ritual systems. However, his technique of appropriation as well as the physical ritual he prescribes for the consecration of a pagan shrine aqua benedicta fiat, in eisdem fanis aspergatur, altaria construantur, reliquiae ponantur99 is underpinned by a more general theory

99

'Take holy water and sprinkle it in these shrines, build altars and place relics in them', Bede, HE i.30 (ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 1067).

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of empowered space, which can be shown to have applied more broadly in the Christian period. The most familiar contemporary manifestation of empowered space is the cult surrounding saints' relics. Saints were considered to be especially sanctified people who enjoyed a privileged connection to the divine and could therefore act as intercessors for their devotees. Veneration of these individuals focused around their bodily remains, ideally (but not essentially) preserved uncorrupted. These 'primary relics' retained the holiness of the saint, his or her spiritual power, and could even be used, according to Gregory, to consecrate a profane space. The transferability of sanctity also underlies the notion of 'secondary relics', otherwise dull matter that manages to absorb the holiness of the blessed either through contact with the living saint or with his or her primary relics.100 Just one among countless examples is the buttress upon which Aidan leaned when he died, which later, as related by Bede, proved invulnerable to fire (though luckily not to splintering, as these were taken to work cures).101 The potency of any space or material was thus considered essentially malleable, able to be imbued with spiritual power given the presence of a suitable vector, whether primary or secondary relic. Sanctity was contagious. The theology of the cult of saints and its fundamental notion of the malleable potency of space (almost so fundamental as to be taken for granted) has significant ramifications for our investigation as it provides a framework within which all modes of use for barrows old and new in the Christian era may be made more scrutable. First, we may suggest that the assimilation of Christian and pagan beliefs which accounted for the identification of barrows as hell-mouths, was only one aspect of the interaction of inherited and imported beliefs which underlies the Christian use of barrows. Notably, the Christian cult of saints and the ritual role envisioned for sites combining burial and prehistoric monuments in Anglo-Saxon paganism share a fundamental similarity in that the revered dead have some access to a supernatural realm, yet also retain some potent and accessible presence in their remains or site of interment. Though the cult of saints had no explicit dogma, this idea of dual presence was intermittently made explicit.102 Abbo of Fleury in the tenth century said as much in relation to
100 101 102

See Rollason, Saints and Relics, p. 11. Bede, HE iii.17 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 2645). Perhaps, as quoted by Brown, Cult of Saints, p. 4, in the foruth-century epitaph of St Martin of Tours: 'Here lies Martin the bishop, of holy memory, whose soul is in the hand of God; but he is fully here, present and made

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the primary relics of St Edmund, the martyred king of the East Angles: De quo constat, sicut et de aliis sanctis omnibus iam cum Christo regnantibus, quod, licet eius anima sit in caelesti gloria, non tamen per visitationem die noctuque longe est a corporis presentia, cum quo promeruit ea quibus iam perfruitur beatae immortalitatis gaudia. Of him it can be said, as of all the other saints who are now reigning with Christ, that, although his soul is in celestial glory, it is through daily and nightly visitation not removed from the body, along with which it has merited the enjoyment of the joys of blessed immortality. 103 Geary has pointed out the unique preeminence of the cult of corporeal relics in Western Christianity and suggested that its development may have been fed in part by its similarity with preexisting notions concerning the position of the dead in society. 104 His argument perhaps gains force from the specifics of the cult of saints' translation into some of the cultures Christianized through Western European colonialism. For example, an anthropological investigation of modern pilgrimage practices in Mexico found that the small figures and images that replace corporeal relics as the foci of pilgrimages are a direct continuation of pre-Columbian traditions.105 A different pattern of assimilation may have prevailed during the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England where indigenous traditions aligned in important ways with the incoming relics cult. It is not unlikely at least that the similarity between an inherited cluster of beliefs concerning the ancestral dead and the imported theology of saints meant that each exerted some influence over the development of the other.106 Griffiths mentioned this idea briefly in his exploration of AngloSaxon paganism. Of saints he writes, ...the veneration of their relics may seem to possess (and may have been feared or even encouraged to possess at the time) something of the sort of superstitious regard for ancestral remains I assume for the pagan Anglo-Saxon period.107 Supposing an interaction of these traditions, it is possible to contend that the apparent
103

104

105 106 107

plain in miracles of every kind'. Abbo of Fleury, Vita Edmundi xvi. 2731(ed. Winterbottom, Three Lives, p. 86; trans. Rollason, Saints and Relics, p. 7). Geary, Living with the Dead, pp. 414. The absorption of pre-existing ideas concerning the relationship between the living and the dead by Christian society, and specifically the role of the church in mediating the system of gift giving between the living and the dead, is also discussed by Fell, Feasting the Dead, in an Anglo-Saxon context and by Innes, State and Society, pp. 3447, in a Carolingian context. Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Griffiths, Anglo-Saxon Magic, p. 45 mentions this possibility in passing. Griffiths, Anglo-Saxon Magic, p. 45.

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anathematization of the ancestral pagan dead suggested by the re-use of barrows for deviant execution and burial developed through a kind of inversion of the cult of saints, wherein proximity to or association with an accursed dead or former pagan practice was sufficient to render a space accursed, and hence suitable for the interment of execution victims. This circumstance would accord with the common use of hena byregelsas, 'heathen burials', in charter bounds to refer to contemporary execution sites and with Semple's contention that by the late Anglo-Saxon period, barrows both prehistoric and early Anglo-Saxon in origin were viewed as products of the same 'heathen' past and were selected for execution sites for that reason. 108 Four of the twenty-seven execution sites listed by Reynolds occur in association with early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, and notably one of these, Ashtead (Surrey) is one of the only four execution sites not found in association with any monument. 109 Supporting evidence for the mutual influence of Christian and pagan beliefs concerning the potent dead is perhaps provided by a unique episode in an eleventh-century manuscript of the Historia de sancto Cuthberto,110 in which Cuthbert's remains when transported to a hill rather than the ancestral dead actually situated in the landscape fulfill the role of legitimating a royal claimant. Appearing in a vision, Cuthbert instructs the abbot of his community to search out among the Danes and elect as king a certain Guthred son of Hardacnut, saying hora vero nona duc eum cum toto exercitu super montem qui vocatur Oswigesdune et ibi pone in brachio eius dextero armillam auream, et sic eum omnes regem constituant.111 Bishop Eardulf later brings Cuthbert's body to the hill in question and Guthred swears an oath of peace and fidelity over the saints remains. Although not explicitly a barrow, the landscape context of this ceremony as some manner of eminence112 ascribed to an Oswig113 is tantalizing. The scene may represent a kind of
108 109 110

111

112

113

Semple, 'Anglo-Saxon Attitudes', p. 377. Reynolds, Deviant Burial, pp. 156, 2346. Although traditionally dated to the mid-tenth century (see Craster, 'Patrimony of St Cuthbert'), the work's most recent editor, still acknowledging clear evidence based on patterned scribal errors that the earliest surviving manuscript is copied from an earlier exemplar, is inclined towards an eleventh-century date nearer the extant manuscript. See HSC (ed. Smith, pp. 2536.) '...at the ninth hour lead him with the whole army upon the hill which is called Oswigesdune and there place on his right arm a golden armlet, and thus they shall all constitute him king' HSC XIII (ed. and trans. Smith, pp. 52 53). The Latin word used is mons, which is usually translated mountain, but can also refer to smaller eminences, such as hills. OE dun likewise may refer to either hills or mountains. The semantic ambiguity of dun and its interaction with beorg is discussed by Kitson, 'Fog on the Barrow-downs?'. The site is unidentified as is the Oswig in question, though Oswiu was the name of the Northumbrian king who

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conciliatory assimilation occasioned by the reintroduction of pagan belief by Scandinavian settlers, but it may just re-enact the same manner of interaction between pagan and Christian ideas during the period of conversion that preceded it. Some comparison may be made between the use of a saint's relics in this coronation episode and evidence from Early Medieval Ireland that saints' graves began to take on the legal functions formerly fulfilled by ancestral tombs in traditional cemeteries. According to Carragin, uniquely in Ireland, the cult of corporeal relics developed in tandem with the notion of Christian burial as a requirement for salvation in the eighth and ninth centuries.114 To expedite this transition, the church seems to have positioned the remains of saints as substitutes for that of the ancestors. Not only did proximity to a saint's remains now supplant proximity to ancestral graves as a mark of dignified burial, Christian cemeteries focused around a saints' remains seem also to have taken over the secondary functions of the ancestral cemeteries they sought to replace, including their use as the site of oath-taking, regional fairs, and judicial assemblies.115 Gittos has suggested a link between the development of a notion of Christian burial in Ireland and England,116 and the possibility of parallel developments with regard to the interaction of ideas about saints' remains and the ancestral dead is not unlikely given the ecclesiastical connections between the two regions. An additional piece of anecdotal evidence from Anglo-Saxon England might also be brought to bear on this issue. The well-known Fonthill Letter, a vernacular document addressed from Ealdorman Ordlaf to King Edward the Elder regarding a disputed estate in Wiltshire, mentions amid the misadventures of the thief Helmstan an apparently penitential trip to the tomb of Alfred, the king under whom he had been given a judicious settlement in a previous dispute. After Helmstan is pronounced an outlaw for wrangling cattle, Orlaf continues: a gesahte he ines fder lic 7 brohte insigle to me, 7 ic ws t Cippanhome mit te. a ageaf ic t insigle e. 7 Du him forgeafe his eard 7 a are e he get on gebogen hf.117 Of the seal Whitelock says in a footnote to her edition: 'Probably a document authenticated by a seal, to show that he had
114 115 116 117

oversaw the Synod of Whitby, Bede, HE iii. 25 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 294309). Carragin, 'Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland', p. 146 8. O'Brien, 'Pagan and Christian Burial'. Carragin, 'Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland', p. 149 51. Gittos, 'Consecrating Cemeteries', pp. 2058. 'Then he sought your father's body [i.e. Edward the Elder's father, i.e. Alfred the Great], and brought a seal to me, and I was with you at Chippenham. Then I gave the seal to you, and you removed his outlawry and gave him the estate to which he still has withdrawn', edition and translation from Keynes, 'The Fonthill Letter', p. 88.

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taken an oath at the king's tomb'. 118 In this case the oath seems to have been a procedure sufficient to restore one's lawfulness. 119 The common practice of swearing oaths over a saint's relics was based on the understanding, as mentioned above, of their continued presence within the physical object itself. An oath over the body of a king is perhaps better seen as a strictly symbolic act not necessarily based on the preconception of actual supernatural presence as with saints' relics. However, it is important not to take what may appear as the ritual's obvious and straight-forward symbolism for granted. There is nothing logically inevitable about choosing a tomb as the site to perform an oath under the authority of the dead man buried there. I would suggest only that the perceived logic of the ritual's symbolism in this tenth-century context likely owes something to the currency of beliefs associated with the cult of relics' (if not also to preChristian ideas about the dead). Hence, the anecdote at least raises the possibility that the theology of the cult of saints could inform thinking about more than just the saintly dead. Whatever the case, the development of an attitude towards the pagan dead as a kind of antithesis to the cult of saints would have allowed barrows with both uncertain and known pagan histories to be incriminated as 'secondary anti-relics' (a loathsome designation reinforced through their use for judicial execution), while the monument form itself maintained some potential dignity. This would explain why ten of the eleven excavated suspected barrow-moots proved to be purpose-built, perhaps to provide monuments of certain, untainted history. 120 Nevertheless, the other fundamental aspect of the cult of relics, the principle of malleability, could help explain the use as a meeting-place of a monument formerly used for pagan ritual and burial, such as is hypothesized for Lovedon Hill (Lincolnshire).121 Justification for continued use could be achieved, if felt necessary, by the ritual cleansing of the sort prescribed by Gregory. Blair's thoughts in relation to the re-use of pagan sites for churches could apply equally well to their re-use as administrative meeting-places: The ritual cleansing of any such places, as both a necessary and sufficient
118 119

120 121

EHD I.102 (ed. Whitelock, p. 545). Keynes, 'The Fonthill Letter', p. 88 suggests the practice of vouching a dead man to warranty attested in Ine ch. 53 and II thelred ch. 9.2 (ed. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1, pp. 1123, 2267) as a possible analogue for Helmstan's oath, while Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs, p. 13, n. 2 compares it to four late eleventh- and twelfth-century writs in which abbots of Westminster certify that individuals, in one case a thief, have taken sanctuary and begged the sheriff's pardon at the shrine of the yet uncanonized Edward the Confessor. Pantos, 'Anglo-Saxon Assembly-places', pp. 1723. Williams, 'Ancient Landscapes', p. 23.

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condition for re-use, will have made sense to the English as well as their ecclesiastical mentors. On the whole it is likely that both living pagan shrines and abandoned older monuments were used, or not used, as other requirements dictated, without anxieties about pollution posing any insuperable problem.122

Avenues for Interpretation: The Heroic Pagan Past: We have already seen how the notions of malleability and conversion if not explicitly from pagan to Christian usage play out in relation to mounds in the Guthlac narratives. Interestingly, the same notions may also be argued to operate in relation to mounds in Beowulf, even though the theme of the Christianization of space is precluded by the poem's pre-Christian setting. According to Alaric Hall, one of the traditional story elements of heroic poetry redeployed by Guthlac A is barrow-breaking, a familiar motif in Old Norse and Icelandic narratives.123 Though we can only speculate that similar stories of young warriors proving their mettle by invading barrows also circulated in Anglo-Saxon England, the most elaborate survival of Old English heroic poetry, Beowulf, does include an aged hero invading a barrow. Like Guthlac, Beowulf's deeds effectively transform the connotations surrounding the monumentform, though the process is achieved through replacement rather than conversion. The mounds of Beowulf also hint at positive, alternative aspects of the pagan heritage which features in the landscape might evoke in the Christian era. The barrow as the proverbial abode of the dragon according to Maxims II and exemplified in Beowulf is cited by Semple as evidence of the negative associations of barrows in the Christian period.124 This is warranted, for the barrow-dweller wreaks disorder by destroying the gifstol Geata, ('the gift-throne of the Geats', 2327a), the locus of the gift-exchange that appears throughout the poem as society's strategy for social integration.125 However, we must reckon with the full history of that barrow and its connection with the monument newly built for Beowulf's own interment.126 The dragon's barrow existed long before its appropriation by the
122 123 124 125

126

Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, p. 184. See citations of Chadwick and Ellis above, p. 5, n. 22. Semple, 'Fear of the Past', pp. 10910. For the most sophisticated recent analysis of gift-giving in Beowulf and the 'socio-genetic' character of Beowulf's exploits see Bazelmans, By Weapons Made Worthy. For an investigation of the links between the barrows of the dragon and of Beowulf with a slightly different focus than what follows, see Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest, pp. 8694.

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dragon. The earliest use we hear of is by the so-called Last Survivor. At that time, Beorh eallgearo wunodeon wonge wteryum neah, niwe be nsse, nearocrftum fst. r oninnan br eorlgestreona hringa hyrde hordwyrne dl... A barrow stood all ready on open ground near the sea-waves, new by the headland, secure in its powers of confinement. Into this the keeper of the rings carried a large amount of what was worth hoarding, noble treasures.127 Here the barrow is open, ready, prominently sited, and a useful confinement of the lost nation's legacy. In the narrative present, after the coming of the dragon (given as three hundred years earlier, 227881a), the barrow's history is apparently forgotten, and its entrance eldum uncu, 'unknown to men' (2214a). Following the destruction of the dragon and the winning of his hoard, Beowulf requests a new mound to be constructed for his own commemoration. Hata heaomre hlw gewyrcean, beorhtne fter ble t brimes nosan; se scel to gemyndum minum leodum heah hlifian on Hronesnsse, t hit sliend syan hatan Biowulfes biorh, a e brentingas ofer floda genipu feorran drifa. Bid those famous for war to build a fine mound after the pyre on the headland by the sea; it shall tower high on Whale's Cape as a remembrance to my people, so that seafarers when they drive their tall ships from afar across the mists of the flood will thereafter call it Beowulf's Barrow.128 Later, the construction of the barrow is described: Geworhton a Wedra leode hlw on hoe, se ws heah ond brad, wegliendum wide gesyne, ond betimbredon on tyn dagum beadurofes becn; bronda lafe wealle beworhton, swa hyt weorlicost foresnotre men findan mihton. Then the people of the Weders constructed on the promontory a mound which
127 128

Beowulf 2241b5 (ed. and trans. Swanton, Beowulf, pp. 1412). Beowulf 28027b (ed. and trans. Swanton, Beowulf, pp. 1689).

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was high and broad, to be seen far and near by those voyaging across the waves, and in ten days had built up a monument to the man renowned in battle; they surrounded the remains of the fire with a rampart, the finest and most skilful men could devise.129 The topographical situation of Beowulf's barrow closely corresponds with that of the Last Survivor's barrow, but this parallel positioning makes the contrasts between them stand out all the more starkly. The clearest contrast is between anonymity and commemoration: The Last Survivor and his people are anonymous, as is the nsse upon which his forgotten barrow is sited. Meanwhile, the new barrow at least at the moment is widely seen by sailors, associated in its name with one man and presumably his people, and positioned on a promontory that itself seems to have a specific name, Hronesnsse, 'Whale's Cape' (2805b). Moreover, Beowulf's barrow, one might argue, is as much of an ethical as a physical mnemonic reference point, a reminder of his illustrious example of sacrificial heroism to guide the behavioral as well as nautical navigating of its onlookers (and perhaps even to the poem's audience).130 The communal effort undertaken to gather the wood for the pyre, heap up the mound and redeposit the treasure in Beowulf's mound may be understood as a final counter gift to their fallen lord that symbolizes the Geats re-dedication to the integrating system of reciprocal exchange that the fleeing thegns have so recently failed to maintain and which the Geats will certainly require should the forebodings of renewed feud come to fruition.131 Whatever the Geats' eventual fate, the events set in action by Beowulf's deeds restore the form of the barrow from the abode of the dragon paragon of destabilizing niggardliness, who begrudges even that a single drinking vessel should enter into the circulation of humans' exchange to the enduring medium for the commemoration of human achievement, however transient and uncertain it might be. The parallel histories of Beowulf's barrow and that of the anonymous Last Survivor especially the king-less Geats inheritance and re-deposition of the lost nation's dubiously cursed

129 130

131

Beowulf 315662 (ed. and trans. Swanton, Beowulf, pp. 1845). Even if the quality of Beowulf's example was as debated among its original audience as ardently as it is today, the poem's portrayal of barrow burial is free of the unadulterated condemnation reserved for the Danes' sacrifices to idols (17588). See Lash, 'Useless Treasure'.

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hoard132 may well have been meant to foreshadow the eventual destruction of the Geats and the consigning of Beowulf's name to oblivion. To suggest the transience of the achievement commemorated in Beowulf's barrow, rather than diminishing its value, may actually highlight its preciousness. The tone of Beowulf's final evaluation (if only by the Geats and not explicitly the poet) is elegiac, not scornful. a ymbe hlw riodan hildedeore, elinga bearn, ealre twelfe, woldon ceare cwian, kyning mnan, wordgyd wrecan ond ymb wer sprecan. Eahtodan eorlscipe ond his ellenweorc duguum demdon. Swa hit gedefe bi t mon his winedryhten wordum herge, ferhum freoge, onne he for scile of lichaman lded weoran. Swa begnornodon Geata leode hlafordes hryre, heorgeneatas; cwdon t he wre wyruldcyninga manna mildust ond monwrust, leodum liost ond lofgearnost. Then those brave in battle, the children of princes, twelve in all, rode road the mound, would lament their grief, bewail their king, recite a lay and speak about the man. They praised his heroism and acclaimed the nobility of his courageous deeds. It is fitting that a man should thus honour his friend and leader with words, love him in spirit, when he must needs be led forth from the flesh. Thus the people of the Geats, the companions of his hearth, mourned the fall of their lord; they said that among the world's kings he was the gentlest of men and the most courteous, the most kindly to his people and the most eager for renown. 133 In the context of a Christian work depicting a culture's imagined heroic heritage, Beowulf's barrow becomes in the poem's final image the focus of a lament for the end of what was best of a flawed age. Regardless of the poem's date of composition, a necessarily insurmountable uncertainty, 134 the sole extant manuscript from c.1000 AD would have presented the form of the barrow as a poly-valant image that could evoke both ancient evil and ancient glory, and it is possible that positive connotations of barrow burial in Beowulf may attest to
132 133 134

On the curse or curses surrounding the hoard, see Cooke, 'Cursing of the Hoard'; Thayler, 'Double Curse'. Beowulf 316982 (ed. and trans. Swanton, Beowulf, pp. 1857). For a general summary of the various considerations bearing on the poem's origins see Fulk et al., Klaeber's Beowulf, pp. clxiiclxxxviii.

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associations that informed the use of barrows for both burial and assembly in middle and late Anglo-Saxon England. There is one additional stray reference to the use of a barrow as a pagan funerary monument that also perhaps hints at the existence of a positive association between the monument-form and the Germanic heroic past. One of the oft discussed alterations made by the Old English translator of Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae is the perhaps pun-intended inclusion of Weland, the famous smith of Germanic legend, in place of 'Fabricius' among the classical exempla cited by Boethius to illustrate the transience of worldly glory. The prose rendering of Boethius's book two metre seven in the B-text, preserved in a manuscript of the late eleventh or early twelfth century, reads: Hwr sint nu s foremeran and s wisan goldsmies ban Welondes? (Fori ic cw s wisan fory am crftegan ne mg nfre his crft losigan ne hine mon ne mg onne e on him geniman e mon mg a sunnan awendan of hiere stede.) Hwr synt nu s Welondes ban, oe hwa wat nu hwr hi wron? Where now are the bones of the famous and wise goldsmith Weland? (I said wise because the craftsman can never lose his skill nor can it easily be taken from him any more than the sun can be moved from its place.) Where now are the bones of Weland, or who knows now where they were?135 Though preserved in an earlier manuscript from around the mid-tenth century, the Old English metrical version of this section is rendered from an Old English prose translation of the sort reflected in the text above rather than the original Latin. As such it follows the text closely yet includes one notable addition of detail, likely to fit the requirements of the metre. Hwr sint nu s wisan Welandes ban, s goldsmies, e ws geo mrost? Fory ic cw s wisan Welandes ban, fory ngum ne mg eorbuendra se crft losian e him Crist onln. Ne mg mon fre y e nne wrccan his crftes beniman, e mon oncerran mg sunnan onswifan and isne swiftan rodor of his rihtryne rinca nig. Hwa wat nu s wisan Welandes ban, on hwelcum hlwa hrusan eccen?
135

ECP B text chapter 19, ll. 1621 (ed. Godden and Irvine, vol. 1, p. 283; trans. Godden and Irvine, vol. 2, p. 30).

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Where now are the bones of wise Weland, the goldsmith, who was previously very famous? I said the bones of wise Weland because the skill which Christ grants to any earth-dweller cannot be lost by him. Nor can anyone ever deprive a wretch of his skill more easily than any man can divert and turn aside the sun and this swift firmament from its correct course. Who now knows in which mound the bones of wise Weland cover the earthen floor?136 Bones were a common type of primary relic among saints, and the unknown whereabouts of Weland's bones in this ubi sunt formation is intriguing, especially when one recalls that the Liber monstrorum claims that the bones of rex Higlacus, King Hygelac in Beowulf, in insula Rheni fluminis reservata sunt, et ostensa sunt hominibus venientibus de longinquo , as if the focus of some heroic (or monstrous) pilgrimage.137 Though it is difficult to decipher what may have been the Christian moral evaluation of Weland from a few references in verse in and his most famous appearance on the eighth-century Frank's Casket, which juxtaposes his vengeance with the adoration of the Magi,138 he appears here as a 'symbol of craftsmanship and a consoling image of permanence amid the flux and decay of earthly existence'. 139 Perhaps doubly suggested by Biblical precedent and the Latin saying frequently cited about the figure Weland replaces, 140 the great smith's skill is heralded as an inalienable human faculty gifted by God. Meanwhile, the lost burial mound is an ambiguous image that conveys a sense of both transience and endurance by simultaneously evoking the mnemonic capacity of material commemoration and its regretful limitations. A mound might still continue to memorialize Weland, if only its location had not slipped from our memory. This sentiment is echoed in the prose section preceding this metrical excerpt in Cotton

136

ECP C text metre 10, ll. 3343 (ed. Godden and Irvine, vol. 1, p. 427; trans. Godden and Irvine, vol. 2, p. 126). 137 '...have been preserved on an island in the Rhine River and have been shown to men visiting from far off'. LM ii (ed. Porsia, p. 138). 138 For example, Abels, 'What has Weland to do with Christ?' claims Weland and the Magi were thought to inhabit the same moral universe, in which good or bad lordship is suitably requited, while Osborn, 'Lid as Conclusion' sees a moral contrast as fundamental to a syncretic program that puts pagan motifs to Christian use. 139 Bradley, 'Sorcerer or Symbol', p. 40. 140 Romans 11: 29 'The gifts and call of God are irrevocable' is suggested by Bradley, 'Sorcerer or Symbol', p. 40, while the Latin saying Ille est Fabricius, qui difficilius ab honestate quam sol a suo cursu auerti posset, 'He is Fabricius, who may be turned from honour with more difficulty than the sun from its course' that may have appeared in now-lost glosses of Boethius is suggested by Bately, 'Classics and Late Ninth-Century England', pp. 512.

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Otho A.vi, where the adapter observes, with some alteration to the tone of his base text,141 that worldly renown is limited not strictly by its vanity, but through the negligence of writers, who for hiora slwe and for gimeleste and eac for recceleste forleton unwriten ara monna eawas and hiora dda e on hiora dagum formroste and weorgeornuste wron.142 If Weland's inclusion here among the other classical exempla indicates that he was such a figure, then it seems again that the linking of a pagan figure's fame with a barrow as a symbol of both transience and endurance is to some extent a positive one meant to evoke elegiac emotions. In these last two cases in which barrows are arguably invested with 'positive' connotations connected to their use as pagan funerary monuments, namely biowulfes biorh and Weland's hlw, the identity of the associated individual is interesting and perhaps instructive. Both are figures from Germanic heroic legend, that liminal once upon a time continental Europe fitting somewhere between pagan myth and remembered post-migration history. Though Weland's status may be said to be even more legendary or closer to mythic as he appears already as the ancient archetype of smith craft, one step of legendary history removed from the literary present in the multi-tiered past of Beowulf,143 both are arguably a stage removed from the figures thought in the Christian period to have been euhemerised Gods, figures like Woden who were recorded in Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies and who gave their names to landscape features perhaps once implicated in their worship. Likewise, Beowulf and Weland's situation in an imagined premigration Scandinavian world separates them in time and place from more immediate historical personages, the local pagan ancestors of the early Anglo-Saxon period whose burial locations might still be preserved in local tradition and their physical presence in the landscape a cause of fear. The contrast between the remoteness of the heroic era and the relative immediacy of Anglo141

142

143

On the gentle resistance of the Old English translator to the stoicism of his source see Whitelock, 'Prose of Alfred's Reign'; Bately, 'Literary Prose of Alfred's Reign'; Godden, 'Misappropriation of the Past'. '...because of their sloth and carelessness and also because of lack of attention, left unwritten the customs of those men and the deeds of those who in their day were most famous and most worthy of honour', ECP C text prose 9, ll. 1057 (ed. Godden and Irvine, vol. 1, p. 424; trans. Godden and Irvine, vol. 2, p. 124). The pointed ridicule of negligent writers, which later becomes a trope in tenth and eleventh-century hagiography, does not appear so forcefully in the Latin, which emphasizes the written record's own vulnerability to obscurity. Sed quam multos clarissimos suis temporibus viros scriptorum inops delevit oblivio. Quamquam quid ipsa scripta proficiant, quae cum suis auctoribus premit longior atque obscura vetustas?, Boethius, LCP, 2p7, ll. 1314 (ed. O'Donnell, p. 41). 'But the weakness of writing has confined to oblivion how many men most famous in their time? And yet, how may such records avail when they, like their authors, are confined to obscurity through the great passage of time?' See Frank, 'Beowulf Poet's Sense of History'.

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Saxon paganism correlates with the apparent contrast in attitudes towards the perceived physical remains of each era's denizens. Whereas the physical remains of early Anglo-Saxon pagans may have been viewed as loathly 'anti-relics', we have seen the loss of Weland's bones lamented as if they might well have been wondrous heroic relics, marvels worthy of preservation like the bones of rex Higlacus. Of course, what we might separate as history, Germanic legend, and pagan myth were not necessarily perceived as discrete entities in the Anglo-Saxon period. The Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies would seem to illustrate a perceived continuity between the present and the remotest past of historicized gods, even if the conflation was not absolute. The figure of Woden, for example, perhaps because worship of his Norse counterpart Odin by Scandinavian settlers refreshed memories, seems never to have been entirely disentangled from the memory of pagan practice, and yet he remained in historicized form as an illustrious ancestor included in all but one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms for which royal genealogies survive. 144 An example of Woden's lingering connection to pagan practice comes from Maxims I, which, perhaps in some iteration of the euhemerist perspective, juxtaposes Woden, who worhte weos, 'brought forth idols' (132a), with the one true Christian god.145 thelweard, whose late tenth-century Latin Chronicle mentions Woden eight times in royal pedigrees, accounts him merely a king of the barbarians, but recalls his former worship as a god. 146 lfric's and Wulfstan's reworkings of Martin of Braga's De correctione rusticorum are similarly euhemerist in their treatment of the Danish god Odin, though their avoidance of explicitly identifying him with Woden might suggest a hesitancy either to associate Englishmen's prized ancestor with contemporary paganism or perhaps to broach the difficult topic at all.147 If the names of former gods could still evoke uncomfortable memories, it was precisely the historicization of these figures that allowed for their continued reverence as prestigious ancestors. Woden for instance is conflated in certain genealogies with figures, like Finn and Sceaf, who appear elsewhere in poetic sources as legendary human kings of the heroic age.148 As Davis observes,
144 145 146 147

148

Moisl, 'Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies', p. 216. Maxims I 1323 (ed. Muir, Exeter Anthology, p. 256). See thelweard, Chronicle I.3 (ed. Campbell, Chronicle of thelweard, p. 7). Johnson, 'Euhemerisation versus Demonization' argues that a politically conscious lfric mitigated his source's demonization of the pagan gods out of respect for his patron thelweard. Notably, Finn appears beyond Woden in the eighth-century Lindsey genealogy, while Sceaf appears in ninth-

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In England, traditions of fallen Germanic gods and legendary heroes were collapsed into a single 'heroic age' succeeding that of the antediluvian patriarchs but fore-shadowing the foundation of current dynasties. 149 The temporal and geographic remoteness of the Germanic 'heroic age' and its liminal position somewhere between heretical pagan myth and remembered local pagan history, albeit simultaneously linked to both may have been integral to its toleration and popularity, and perhaps, the reason why the only evidence in literary sources for the positive connotations surrounding barrows as the burial places of pagans comes from within references to this milieu. So, was this general association with a more remote, legendary, and therefore safer past, rather than the memory of the former use of specific barrows as centers of cult or assembly in the more immediate ancestral past, partly responsible for the continuing reverence for the dignity of the monument-type as evidenced by the apparent predilection for barrows as assembly-places in the later period? The fact that barrows do not always connote the same fear in texts that refer to the heroic past as they do in other sources may tell us more about the nature of the heroic past than about the perception of features in the landscape, but the naming of Wansdyke (wodnes dic), first attested in 903,150 may suggest otherwise. Recently Reynolds and Langlands have advanced a persuasive revisionist dating for the construction of the field monument in the Middle Saxon context of the West Saxon Kingdom's administrative development and its contested frontier with Mercia to the north.151 If their conjecture is true, the appellation of 'Woden's Ditch' would not have arisen in the pagan period as a preexisting feature's ascription to a god, but perhaps in the Christian context of the eighth or ninth century as the honouring of an illustrious ancestor in the name of a major new construction. This hypothesis parallels Yorke's suggestion that Offa's Dyke, which would represent a close contemporary parallel for a Middle Saxon Wansdyke, may have been christened to honour not only Offa of Mercia, but the Anglian King Offa, who appears in Beowulf and Widsith (in the latter case famously establishing a boundary). 152 When viewed alongside the prehistoric barrow recorded as welandes smian, 'Weland's smithy', amid the

149 150 151 152

century West Saxon genealogies as an apocraphal fourth, ark-born son of Noah that links the Germanic lineage of historicised gods to the biblical line of Adam; Davis, 'Cultural Assimilation', pp. 2933. Davis, 'Cultural Assimilation', p. 33. S 368 (KCD 335). Reynolds and Langlands, 'Maximum View of Wansdyke'. Yorke, 'Origins of Mercia', p. 16. See Widsith, 3544 (ed. Muir, Exeter Anthology, p. 242).

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bounds of a mid tenth-century charter,153 these conjectures, however speculative, at least suggest that people could choose to see aspects of Germanic heroic legend reflected in both immeasurably ancient and memorably recent aspects of the landscape around them.

Conclusion: Our investigation has shown that the Christian culture of Anglo-Saxon England could and did take various positions towards the pre-Christian past during the initial period of conversion and throughout Christianity's fuller incorporation into the everyday workings of society. Gregory's policy in the letter to Mellitus and its apparent implementation at Yeavering suggest that Christianity at first relied to some extent on the appropriation of sites of preexisting importance. However, Christianization and its concomitant developments overcame this early dependency, perhaps by offering rulers both alternative otherworldly sanction as well as the new technology of writing as arguably a more sophisticated medium to display illustrious ancestry (from now historicized gods) in the form of easily distributable and manipulable genealogies. These factors may have fostered the circumstances under which traditional ideas concerning the supernatural and the ancestral dead were assimilated within a Christian framework such that ancestral places and the presence of the ancestors themselves in the landscape could become loathsome. This loathsomeness was, however, neither a necessary nor an insurmountable result of the application to barrows of Christian ideas of empowered space as exemplified by the cult of saints. There was undoubtedly some chronological and regional variation (for example the relative rarity of execution sites in the north) and future archaeological research may reveal additional later assembly mound sites or churches prefaced by pagan burial or ritual.154 With the existing data, I have suggested that evidence for the positive appropriation of the monument-form in the Christian period may have derived in part from its capacity to echo a remote, heroic age of hero-kings and historicized gods-cum-illustrious ancestors as a distant model of temporal grandeur and the focus of nostalgia. As valid as this hypothesis may be, we
153

154

S 564 (Charters of Abingdon, ed. Kelly, vol. 1, no. 50, p 203). Grinsell, 'Wayland Smith and his Relatives' suggests that the features 'beahhild byrigels' and 'hwittuces hlwe' recorded in the same area in S 564 and S 317 respectively reference the woman, Beadohild raped by Weland, as hinted at in Deor, and the product of their union, Wittich. University College London's ongoing 'Landscape of Governance', a multi-disciplinary investigation of Early Medieval meeting-places in England may well produce evidence for instance concerning the frequency of purpose-built assembly sites which could impact the present analysis.

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should not underestimate the potential which the ambiguous poly-valence of the local past may have offered. As mentioned above, the reference to Cwichelmeshlw in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle may represent the persistence of some reflex of pre-Christian belief concerning barrows as centers of sentinel ancestral power, but the dubious history of its purported namesake may also have been integral to its use as a meeting-place in the eleventh century. Williams identifies the site with the West Saxon King Cwichelm remembered elsewhere in the the AngloSaxon Chronicle and in Bede for a mixture of good and ill: as the slayer of some two-thousand Welsh at 'Bea's mount', the would-be assassin of King Edwin, but also as the contestant of the maligned pagan Penda of Mercia (who did slay that first Christian king of Northumbria) and as the king baptized at nearby Dorchester, the first West Saxon episcopal see.155 Whether the mound was reckoned the site of his burial or of his great victory, Williams contents that 'the juxtaposition of sin and repentance...the remembrance of a pagan king who converted to Christianity before death may have made Cwichelmeshlw a monument commemorating morality as well as heroic kingship'.156 Such resonances may have been considered appropriate for a site where grave judgments were rendered, whether of criminals or armies. Admittedly, the continuing attraction of mounds in the Christian era may have been in part simply a function of their fundamental physical properties. The size and durability of the monument-form meant that its manifestations could remain conspicuous representations of investment mediating between present, past and future. However, this mnemonic power was augmented by the remembered history of the form: its tradition of use in the pagan period and the lingering supernatural associations that motivated such use. Association with a dubious, multifaceted pagan heritage, which included not only the immediate, native past but also a more remote, heroic legendary past with which it was increasingly conflated, left the barrow form with a cluster of varying connotations, positive, negative and ambiguous. The symbolic ambiguity of the form meant that a barrow's context of use especially with de novo monuments without histories would have determined which among the cluster of connotations surrounding the monument-form were to be activated, obscured or overcome. These insights, such as they are, suggest that the essential value of the ancestral pagan
155

156

See Bede, HE ii.9, iii.7 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 1645, 2323). ASC E 614, 628, 636 (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Whitelock, pp. 160, 162). Williams, Death and Memory, pp. 20910.

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and Germanic heroic past lay in their own malleability, the ability of the Christian present to obscure or enhance whatever aspects proved most useful or most interesting. Hence, evaluation of this inheritance varied according to the context in which its contemplation occurred and the aspect of the past in question. When approaching the landscape, the local pagan past may have inspired more negative than positive appropriation, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle could still glorify thelstan's victory at Brunanburh by framing it as the culmination of the conquest of Britain initiated by his pagan ancestors.157 Likewise, the heroic past of Beowulf, Widsith and Deor is populated with both positive and negative models of behavior. Integral to the allure of the past seem to have been its multifaceted dubiousness and the variety of instructive exempla it presented whether models of extreme fame, pride, greed, skill, courage, achievement or downfall. Whatever its quality as an inheritance, the pagan past, like the bones of Hygelac, was marvelously 'big' and worth viewing. The aesthetic allure of the pagan past is not easily extricated from its social utility, and the strength of one likely strengthened the other. Scholars tracing the emergence of a precocious state-like society in Ango-Saxon England have emphasized the importance of mythic narratives constructed to foster a sense of shared religious and cultural history, a collective past mustered to advance a collective future. The mobilization of the past to foster social integration or to legitimate hierarchies at times of increasing social differentiation or political consolidation is well documented across time and space,158 as is the implication of landscape and material culture in such processes.159 This case-study emphasizes the interaction of these with other forms of mnemonic technology (particularly writing and oral poetic traditions) as mediums through which competing narratives about the past and its relation to the present are consciously and unconsciously molded. The evidence from Anglo-Saxon England as whole suggests that the endurance of ambiguity and unresolved tensions in such discourses has a kind of value in allowing for rich and diverse manipulations of the past. Bede's Historia ecclesiastic gentis anglorum had presented the notion of the gens anglorum as a group defined by their shared Germanic heritage and religious history as a new chosen people of migrant pagans sent to Britain as divine punishment and converted from Rome
157 158 159

ASC 937 C (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Whitelock, p. 70). See Foot, 'Rethinking Contexts', p. 131. See for example Hobsbawm and Ranger, Ivention of Tradition. See for example, Smith, Political Landscape.

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by divine love.160 This was the historical framework later elaborated and employed by Alfred and his successors in a campaign designed to foster a collective identity that could facilitate political unification under West Saxon leadership.161 In this scheme, the pagan past and its eclipse remained important parts of the shared history defined by, for example, the Old English translation of Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Yet, propagation of this perspective was not achieved through textual sources alone. Ideas about the past and notions of identity could be reiterated through engagement with relict forms in the landscape. For example, by assimilating the morally corrupt with former paganism (and vice versa), the use of mounds in association with execution cemeteries would implicitly define the agency behind such sites in contradistinction to the loathsome heathenism of the past. In contrast, the use of a purpose-built mound as a hundred assembly-place might align contemporary proceedings with the glory of a distant heroic age. Meanwhile, the use of Cwichelmeshlw as a shire assembly site might even have evoked, arguably most usefully of all, the conversion itself and the values of both the pagan and Christian cultural inheritance. With their use structured according to notions formulated through the interaction of Christian and pre-Christian ideas concerning the empowerment of space and the potent dead, mounds as both physical monuments and literary images proved particularly rich mediums through which a constantly-evolving society could negotiate its relation to a pagan heritage that, whether scorned or revered, remained relevant to the self-understanding of the Christian present.

160 161

See Howe, Migration and Myth Making. Foot, 'English Identity'.

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Abbreviations:

ASC ASE Bede, HE

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Anglo-Saxon England Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (ed. Colgrave and Mynors) Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae (ed. O'Donnell) Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (ed. Morton and Muntz) Old English Boethius (ed. Godden and Irvine) English Historical Documents (ed. Whitelock) Historia De Sancto Cuthberto (ed. Smith) Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Liber Monstrorum (ed. Porsia) Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters Felix, Vita Guthlaci (ed. Colgrave) Stephen of Ripon, Vita Wilfridi (ed. Colgrave)

Boethius, LCP CHP ECP EHD HSC KCD 335 LM S 317, 368 etc. Felix, VG Stephen of Ripon, VW

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