The Trumpington bed burial
Christian women of all ranks might be expected to have been buried in simple, unadorned graves without the trappings of material wealth often found with pre-Christian interments and cremations.
For the most part, they were; but there are notable exceptions. Some time in the late seventh century, in a small settlement at Trumpington‡‡ just south of Cambridge in the East Anglian fens, a young woman aged between fourteen and eighteen was buried with some rather precious items of jewellery: a gold and garnet pectoral cross – one of only five found in Britain – and a pair of gold and garnet linked pins. A chatelaine or key fob hung at her waist, along with an iron knife, a bone or antler comb and a small wooden box. For her last repose, she had been clothed in fine linen tabby-woven garments and a bead-edged shawl. Amazingly, she had been laid out on a wooden-framed bed whose headboard was graced with decorative carving. A wool blanket lay across the bed beneath her.Even more remarkably, the Trumpington girl is not unique: she is one of fifteen known Anglo-Saxon bed burials, found mostly in East Anglia and southwest England, all of a very similar date. One of these, from Swallowcliffe Down in Wiltshire, discovered in 1966, had been buried on her bed in a chamber built into a Bronze Age barrow or tumulus. She took with her a wood and leather satchel decorated with Christian motifs, an iron spindle, a bronze bucket, brooches and pendants. Another, from Bloodmoor Hill in Suffolk, included such important everyday items as shears, a strike-a-light and spindle whorls, without which no woman, rich or poor, could carry out the domestic tasks of spinning, fire-lighting and clothing her dependants.
The wood of the beds has rotted in almost every case; but the iron fittings and nails that survive allow archaeologists to reconstruct them.
These were no mere ritual props, but real beds, seemingly the personal possessions of the women. The dates of the burials, in the middle or second half of the seventh century, during which most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were converted to Christianity, together with the high incidence of fine crosses and the splendour of their possessions, inclines one to think that these are the burials of elite Christian women – fashionable converts among the Anglo-Saxon nobility who had embraced the new religion with enthusiasm and whose thinking about their place in the afterlife seems to have been a matter of more than passing interest. Did these women take literally the consoling idea expressed by St Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians that believers fall asleep with Christ?In the case of the Trumpington woman, the presence of the chatelaine suggests that she held a position of authority, perhaps in a religious institution. Her youth is not necessarily a paradox. The Christian kings of the seventh century were wont to give their daughters to the church; a young woman of sixteen might very well have been ‘married to Christ’ and placed at the head of a religious community whose lands had also been gifted to the church by a king. In 626 the Northumbrian king Edwin, who had been contemplating the merits of conversion for a decade, was at his Easter feasting hall with his family and companions when an assassin from the rival kingdom of Wessex struck. Chaos reigned in the hall. The king was severely injured; a loyal thegn called Lilla, placing himself between the assailant and his target, died from the wound inflicted by a poisoned sword. The king survived, just. On the same night, his first daughter, Eanfl?d, was born – prematurely, it seems – to his queen, ?thelburh. In thanks for his and their survival, the king promised that his daughter would be given to the church and that he himself would now undergo conversion. Eanfl?d grew up to become a highly influential queen, abbess and patron of many monastic communities.§§
Was the Trumpington woman a royal princess? It is hard to say.
But the site of her burial is no more than a day’s travel from Ely, where ?thelthryth,## the incorruptible Northumbrian virgin queen, founded her great monastery in the 670s. Perhaps the Trumpington woman, who died so young, was her protege.
* See the quotation at the front of this book; and page 242.
† The Synod resolved the primacy of the Church of Rome over the unorthodox Irish practices favoured by Iona, a matter of hitherto bitter dispute.
‡ For the unlikely circumstances of her birth, see the story of the Trumpington bed burial later in this chapter.
§ See also the story ‘Peace-weavers’ in chapter 4, page 116.
# See chapter 3, page 74.
∫ In a mummy bundle, the corpse was wrapped in numerous layers of different cloth; seemingly, the more layers, the more valued and respected the individual.
Ω See page 114.
≈ Cicero and Tertullian (the so-called Christian Cicero) are conspicuously misogynistic; their rediscovered works, some of them copied by Islamic women scribes, seem to have influenced attitudes towards women, especially in the church.
∂ In the tradition of the cephalophoric miracles of Juthware and Gwenffrewi, recounted in chapter 1.
π The irony of the fine, a unit of female slave value, seems lost on the compiler.
∆ See page 26.
** See page 44.
†† See Postscript, page 260.
‡‡ The grave was discovered during archaeological excavations in advance of development works, on a site with no previous hint of Early Medieval occupation or burial.
§§ See page 43.
## See page 59.