Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths created work of astonishing complexity. Looking at the finished work that survives from that time, we are left awestruck by the precision of what they did. For us, today, it’s virtually impossible to create anything similar without using magnification, but we know they did not have access to magnifying glasses.
We don’t understand how they did it. Some people have suggested the goldsmith had children doing the detailed work under his supervision, but we don’t know. It’s possible that a goldsmith taught his children how to do the work and they did it until their eyes went and younger eyes that could focus tighter had to take over, but we just don’t know.
To make interlace jewellery, Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths ran the beaded gold wire over and under other threads of gold wire and soldering them into place as you went, creating the interlocking patterns that we see.
For the cloisonné, the goldsmith fashioned individual cells from flattened wire to accommodate each garnet and then cut and filed the garnets to shape. Once the garnets were shaped and sized, but before they were finally fitted into the design, the goldsmith backed each garnet with a layer of gold foil. The base of each garnet was indented into a shallow pyramid, and this the goldsmith fitted onto a pyramidal extrusion punched into the backing plate and foil on which the garnet would sit. So, each garnet sat upon a small golden pyramid, catching and reflecting the light and making the garnet glow a deeper red.
There are two main styles of Anglo-Saxon jewellery. The more gold-based one has interlacing designs of gold thread weaving over and under each other with garnets as occasional highlights. The cloisonné had a largely garnet design set into thin gold fixtures with a gold surround of interlace.
To create the piece, the goldsmith took the gold thread and laid it out on the backing. With the richest jewellery this was gold; less expensive items had a silver or base metal base. Once the goldsmith had twisted the wire into place, making either interlay or cloisonné cases, he soldered it into place. The soldering iron that early medieval goldsmiths used was a red-hot, pointed iron poker. It was heated in the fire to get to temperature and then applied to the gold where it met the base plate. Gold has a high melting point: 1,064 degrees centigrade. But the point application of a red-hot soldering iron to very thin pieces of gold will raise the temperature of the gold to melting quickly – and removing the soldering iron allows the heat to dissipate just as quickly, setting the soldered joint into place.
In principle, this sounds simple enough, and it is. It’s the application that makes it difficult, particularly when you see the delicacy of some of the work these goldsmiths did.
Much of the gold that went into Anglo-Saxon jewellery such as the Sutton Hoo buckle was recycled Roman gold, taken from Roman coinage. Rome still had prestige and a nimbus of power that was reflected in the use of old Roman gold as the basis for the jewellery of kings.
The prestige of Roman gold was greatly enhanced in the seventh and eighth centuries by the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. Rome was both the name of the giants who had made the still hugely impressive ruins that covered the landscape and the present residence of the Pope, God’s representative on Earth, who had, in the person of Gregory the Great, personally sponsored the mission to the Anglo-Saxons. The pilgrim path to Rome was well trodden by Anglo-Saxons from their conversion onwards, beginning with the extraordinarily well-travelled Benedict Biscop – who made five trips to Rome – and continuing throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, culminating in the two trips Alfred the Great made to Rome when still a child.
Of course, few Anglo-Saxons had the resources or time to make the pilgrimage but the fact that Rome existed, suspended in imagination somewhere between reality and Eden, added lustre and gravitas to the remembered Rome while surrounding papal Rome with the nimbus of Empire.
Adam’s Bridge, or Rama Setu, is a long chain of low-lying shoals and reefs connecting a spur from Sri Lanka’s north-east coast to the long ribbon of Dhanushkodi beach running south-west from Pamban Island into the ocean, pointing its long finger to Sri Lanka.
It’s a haunting place to visit. In places the spit of land is so narrow that the houses that remain have the Indian Ocean across their front gardens and the Bay of Bengal lapping against their back gardens. There was a town on the spit of land, reachable by railway. But on the night of 22/23 December 1964, a tropical storm intensified to a cyclone and hit Dhanushkodi town, killing 1,700 people there as well as the 115 passengers aboard the Pamban-Dhanushkodi train that was only a few hundred yards short of its terminus when the storm wave struck, washing the train away. The town was abandoned after the storm and remains uninhabited and largely submerged today.
Trade links between Sri Lanka and India go back to antiquity. Garnets from the island were traded up the west coast of India to the trade ports and held there, waiting for the merchants who sailed over the sea to arrive in the summer, carried by the monsoon winds. The merchants sold their own goods, bought garnets and other commodities, particularly spices, from India and returned with the autumn trade winds.
Having crossed the Indian Ocean, it was a relatively quick passage up the Red Sea before unloading and making the short crossing to Alexandria, where the garnets were sold on to merchants eager to take them further west and north until, finally, the bag of red garnets took ship again, crossing the rough waters of the outer ocean to reach Britain.
The monsoon, and its accompanying winds, provided a regular and reliable way for boats to cross the Indian Ocean. At some point before 100 BC, mariners discovered that it was possible to sail directly to India, cutting across the Indian Ocean, rather than following the coast.
Taking their courage in their hands, sailors had sailed out into the Arabian Sea in late spring, leaving the sight of land behind. Through most of history, mariners were better described as coasters, hopping along beside the land and rarely leaving sight of it. Only three peoples in history discovered blue-water navigation: the Norse, the Polynesians and the Portuguese. The Indian Ocean mariners were not true blue-water navigators, but what they had discovered was the rhythm of the monsoon. In late spring and early summer, India heats up. Hot air rises off the panting earth and pulls in moist, cool air from the south-west. Mariners discovered that if they put out into the Arabian Sea at the right time of year, they could hitch a ride with the steady north-east winds blowing up to India. These late spring, early summer north-easterlies blow steady and true, carrying ancient sailors to the ports along the coast of north-western India and monsoon rain, blessed, holy rain to the parched interior.
Merchants riding the monsoon winds arrive in India in the summer, renew their old contacts, sell, buy and wait. They wait for the hot earth to cool down as summer draws down to autumn. Then, as the ground cools, in October and November, dry, cool air blows down from the Himalayas, out over the sea: regular, reliable winds blowing south-west to carry the ships and the merchants back over the ocean.
The monsoon cycle allowed merchants to make regular trips to and from India within six months, thus freeing the other half of the year to sell on the goods bought from the great trading ports in India to merchants selling into the Mediterranean and beyond.
The major sources for the garnets that adorned Anglo-Saxon swords and jewellery were Sri Lanka and India.
That is a long way for the garnets to travel. We think of the people of this time as insular and little travelled, and that was true for many, but it was not true for all. While there’s no evidence to suggest that any Anglo-Saxon gem merchants travelled all the way to Sri Lanka before returning with sacks of red gems, the trade was sufficiently well established to ensure an excellent supply of garnets for Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths.
Sue Brunning, curator of European Early Medieval Collections at the British Museum, noticed something else about the Sutton Hoo sword. One side of the pommel was subtly more elaborate and ornate than the other. Brunning realised that the more ornate side faced outwards when the sword rested in its scabbard.
The most common way to wear a sword then was for it to hang at rest quite high up the trunk, with the pommel just below the heart, alongside the torso. As such, the pommel made an ideal hand rest.
With this high position for the sword, the natural way to draw the sword was with the opposite hand, drawing it across the body.
So, a right-handed swordsman would carry the sword on his left. But the Sutton Hoo sword had the richer side of its pommel design on the wrong side if it was worn on the left: sitting there, the less elaborate side of its design would have been on display. The wear patterns on the pommel were also wrong if it had been worn on the left.
Brunning realised that the only sensible explanation was that the wearer of the Sutton Hoo sword had been left-handed.
It’s not often that we can learn such an intimate detail about a person who lived 1,500 years ago and whose name we do not even know for certain. If the sword’s wielder was Rædwald, king of the East Angles, history has left us no tale of him being Rædwald Left-Hand. Only the sword tells us that.
The new issue of All About History is on sale, in shops and online, and I’m proud to say that I wrote the cover feature on the great Spanish hero, El Cid. My interest in Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar was sparked by watching the great Charlton Heston/Sophia Loren film, El Cid, when I was a child: the real man was, if anything, even more extraordinary than the Hollywood version. Get issue 153 of All About History and learn about the knight who never lost a battle.
The original Sutton Hoo sword and a modern replica
There’s a secret hidden in plain sight on the Sutton Hoo sword. The pommel was on display at the British Museum for 70 years before Sue Brunning, the curator of European Early Medieval Collections at the museum, noticed something interesting about it.
There is a string of wound gold wire running around the pommel. Looking carefully at the wound wire, Brunning noticed that, at one end of the pommel, the wire was worn, the clear ridges of the rest of the wire smoothed down to little more than undulations.
Gold is a soft metal. A hand resting upon one side of a pommel will wear gold wound wire smooth.
Brunning realised that the pommel of the Sutton Hoo sword had the wear it displayed because the man who had worn and wielded the sword in life had habitually rested his hand upon its pommel when the sword rested in its scabbard.
It was one of those details that suddenly draws back the veil of years and brings us face to face with the real, living man who had worn the sword.
