We’re on YouTube! The talk Paul and I gave about the Warrior and all things Anglo-Saxon is now up on YouTube so if you missed it you can see the whole thing here:
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Webinar Q&A
There were many more questions than we had time to answer during our talk for the York Festival of Ideas. But luckily, we have all the questions that were submitted during the webinar and here are the answers!
Warrior: A life of war in Anglo-Saxon Britain – Saturday 7 June 2020, 1.00pm
York Festival of Ideas 2020 Online
Audience Questions, captured from the Zoom Webinar:
Stan Tan 01:25 PM
Hello from Singapore!
What is a “Bowl Hole” / why is the “Bowl Hole” termed as such?
Answer: Because it is a bowl shape: a depression amid the surrounding sand dunes.
Geoff 01:25 PM
Would the bodies buried face down with legs raised maybe infer a disposal rather than a burial?
Answer: we go into this in some detail in the book but in short, there are two explanations advanced for this type of burial: that it’s a sign of the person buried being in some form of disgrace or that, with the bloating that occurs in dead bodies and the corpse being put into the grave simply wrapped in a shroud, that it can be impossible for the burial party to know which way up they were burying the body.
Jack 01:37 PM
Given the classification of “warrior” to the finds and the idea they are elites are there any traces of this in their skeleton? healed broken bones or sign of a violent death etc?
Answer: Yes, there are. We go into this in detail in the book, but some of the skeletons show clear evidence of a very violent death: I am thinking in particular of one body where the skeleton was basically cut diagonally in half, from shoulder to waist.
Beverley Hallam 01:47 PM
What evidence can be gleaned about diet?
Answer: both direct and indirect. Remains of various foods have been excavated at Bamburgh, indicating a protein-rich diet with much meat eaten and various exotic imported foodstuffs, ranging from wild crane to lentils. The bones of the people excavated are uniformly free of the stress marks that indicate periods of starvation, so they were a well-fed and wealthy elite. Among the men, there is more evidence of tooth decay than among the women, which may be the result of drinking lots of sweet, and very alcoholic, mead.
Chris U 01:49 PM
Was there any evidence of cause of death on any of the skeletons?
Answer: there are some skeletons with clear evidence that they died violently, including one unfortunate man who was cut diagonally in half, from shoulder to waist.
Ruth 01:21 PM
Don’t forget the story of Grace Darling too. Women of the North East ….. strong women!
Answer: Indeed! There is an excellent Grace Darling Museum in the village.
Anonymous Attendee 01:25 PM
Why is it called the Bowl Hole?
Answer: because it’s shaped like a bowl!
Raffi Thomas 01:31 PM
Do you know if the broad axe was found in the same context as the sword? I’d be interested if they belonged to the same individual.
Answer from Paul: In the same garage, yes 😉 Until the archives are fully analysed and published I suspect this is uncertain.
henselmd 01:46 PM
Did you find a workshop at Bamburgh or implications of one–or are the artifacts thought to be spoils of war/raids?
Answer: There is some evidence for a smithy over towards St Oswald’s Gate.
S 01:46 PM
Did you find any female burials? If not, where would the women have been buried?
Answer: Yes, there were many female burials.
Sue Cumberpatch 01:47 PM
Is the book a fictionlised recreation, or a factual account?
Answer: the book is a factual account of the archaeology and history of Northumbria and the life and times of the Warrior: to bring this to life, I also interweave episodes in the Warrior’s life written with the techniques of historical fiction but always alive to the reality of the history and archaeology.
Lesley Hagon 01:47 PM
Can you talk more about the technology of the sword making – and is this a craft that died out?4
Answer: We’d need a whole book to do that – and we’re hoping to write one next, on how to make the perfect sword.
Anonymous Attendee 01:47 PM
The materials used particularly on the sword furniture are not local so where did these come from and so what does this say about the kind of trading relationships that these people had?
Answer: it tells us that trade links were much wider, and further reaching, than might be supposed for the time. For instance, some of the garnets used in Anglo-Saxon jewellery came from as far away as Sri Lanka. These luxury items were probably traded through a succession of middlemen before fetching up on the coast of the North Sea.
Anonymous Attendee 01:51 PM
Hi Paul, thank you for the interesting sharing. May I ask how do archaeologists tell from skeletons that these people are well-fed?
Answer: bones have a growth pattern that in some way resembles the rings in the trunk of a tree. If the person suffered periods of famine, particularly when growing up, this is shown in the patterns of bone growth.
Paul Bernardi 01:19 PM
Has any evidence of the early Angle fortress ever been found? From the time of Ida and his wife Bebba? (appreciate i may be jumping the gun here!
Answer: Yes, there has. St Oswald’s Gate and the structures around it date from the seventh century, and the well in the castle was probably cut down through the rock at this time.
Alison Offer 01:38 PM
These warriors living in a parallel world – are they exclusively young – do they settle down if they survive – thinking of Cuthbert who seemed to have fought as a youth – would he be one of these warriors – do you see the warriors as a separate community (say like the monks) or is been a warrior a rite of passage for all elite men?
Answer: Not exclusively young, but fighting is a young man’s game, then and now. However, experienced warriors still had to be prepared to fight at need. Having proved themselves among the king’s retinue, the best of his warriors were probably granted land and became, in effect, the king’s local representative.
Simon Thomas 01:39 PM
What date was the layer in which the window glass was found?
Answer: seventh century.
Walter Van Opstal 01:42 PM
beautiful gate!
Anonymous Attendee 01:44 PM
Having visited Bamburgh many times over recent years I have to say the information boards about the project could do with updating and expanding! Can members of the public support the project in some way to facilitate updating the information boards?
Answer: any support is gratefully accepted! If you would like to help, please email graemeyoung@bamburghresearchproject.co.uk.
Ruth 01:45 PM
What is the connection with Bradford Kaims?
Answer: Bradford Kaims is about five miles from Bamburgh. The BRP is excavating an ancient (Mesolithic to the Iron Age) wetland site there. For more information about the finds, please see here: https://bamburghresearchproject.co.uk/index.php/bradford-kaims/
Danny 01:45 PM
Presumably there was a larger Anglo-Saxon settlement at Bamburgh at this time. Can you say something about that?
Answer: Not too much, archaeologically, as we haven’t excavated there. But certainly, historical sources suggest a settlement around the castle, and there was probably a beach market on the strand.
Valerie Coyne 01:46 PM
Any females amongst the burials?
Answer: Yes, and in particular a young Norwegian woman (early 20s) who died and was buried in the cemetery in the sixth century, long before the better known contacts between Britain and the Viking world.
Valerie Coyne 01:51 PM
thanks very informative
Answer: Thank you!
Nic 01:46 PM
Why do you think one of the skeletons was buried face down?
Answer: we go into this in some detail in the book but in short, there are two explanations advanced for this type of burial: that it’s a sign of the person buried being in some form of disgrace or that, with the bloating that occurs in dead bodies and the corpse being put into the grave simply wrapped in a shroud, that it can be impossible for the burial party to know which way up they were burying the body.
Susan Palmer 01:47 PM
Are you still excavating in Bamburgh?
Answer: Yes, and you can join in! The Bamburgh Research Project excavates each summer (although this summer’s dig is still up in the air for obvious reasons) and it’s open to members of the public interested in trying archaeology hands on. See here for more details: https://bamburghresearchproject.co.uk/index.php/archaeology-field-school-2/
Gavin Welch 01:47 PM
How long does it take to acquire a burial licence? And how do you secure such an important site for that time frame whilst you wait?
Answer: It’s all in the book! But the short answer is, a while. And the BRP secured the site by reburying the bodies while they waited for the licence to come through.
Anonymous Attendee 01:47 PM
Why were the swords so extravagantly decorated?
Answer: Wouldn’t you? These warriors lives depended upon their weapons, and the blades were things of beauty in themselves. Further, the wielder’s status would be enhanced by the sword’s accompanying ‘bling’.
Andrew Sefton 01:48 PM
Why were they buried away from the church, were they fully Christian?
Answer: while the earliest graves in the Bowl Hole date from the pre-Christian era, most of the people buried there would have been Christian. In the book, we suggest that the Bowl Hole cemetery was reserved for non-local people who died while in Northumbria, as many of the bodies show evidence of having been born and brought up elsewhere.
Rick Brookes 01:48 PM
Did all of the graves have the same orientation?
Answer: roughly, yes, towards the east and the sea.
Jan Garrill 01:50 PM
Are these people of a similar size in height and physical stature to modern man?
Answer: Yes. And probably much stronger.
Karl&Vicky 01:50 PM
Have any other examples of pattern welded blades been excavated eleswehere in the country? Are they specific to the Anglo-Saxon period?
Answer: Yes. The best known is the sword buried at Sutton Hoo but there have been others. Pattern-welded blades are not specific to this era, but the time and effort that went into making such a sword was best repaid at a time when armies were small (often less than a hundred men), rather than the much larger armies of the late Anglo-Saxon/early Norman era.
James Pennock 01:51 PM
The book is superb – the crossover of 2 different approaches to history works really well. What have you both taken away from the other? Can the other approach influence your own?
Answer: Thank you! That’s really kind of you. I think we were trying to do something different – dare I say, unique – with this book, hammering together different strands of narrative to make a whole that lights up the subject from different angles, rather like the way the garnets of the period were cut and polished.
Walter Van Opstal 01:53 PM
Do you know exactly where the sword was excavated from? r were the records lost in that garage?
Answer: We have a reasonable idea of the context of the swords.
Paola 01:54 PM
In terms of pathologies… was there any evidence of inter-personal trauma in the skeletons? Paul showed one skeleton buried prone which in Saxon times this is interpretated as possible ‘deviant’ and as such they’re likely to present some form of trauma…
Answer: yes, some of the skeletons did show very clear, indeed quite horrific, evidence of injury, in particular one unfortunate man who was sliced diagonally in half, from shoulder to waist.
Anonymous Attendee 01:54 PM
Where were the metal workers buried?
Answer: We don’t know.
Stan Tan 01:55 PM
Hello from Singapore!
How did the Indian or Japanese influences get imported?
Answer: There probably weren’t any Japanese influences, but some garnets did come from Sri Lanka, traded through middle men via the Middle East.
Barry 01:55 PM
Had most of these people died of natural causes or had they been killed?
Answer: You can only tell for certain a violent death if the skeleton was damaged (as happened with one man who was cut diagonally in half). Others may have died through blood loss or injury to internal organs without that leaving any trace on the body.
Raffi Thomas 01:55 PM
Do you think the Dalriadan would’ve been a Christian, and if so is this reflected in his burial?
Answer: Yes, we think the Warrior was a Christian. He has no grave goods, and the portion of the cemetery where he was buried has a number of other graves buried in a typical Dal Riadan fashion.
Helen Butt 01:58 PM
Thank you for such a fascinating talk. Can’t wait till I can visit….
Answer: You’re welcome! You should visit: Bamburgh and Northumberland are wonderful.
Adventures in Bookland: The Colonel’s Monograph by Graham McNeil
There was a question, extant in publishing in the 1990s, that I think I can now answer: who (or what) killed horror? Back in the 1980s, on the back of the huge success of Stephen King, Clive Barker, James Herbert and Peter Straub, horror was the big genre, with publishers greenlighting pretty well everything calculated to scare the reader.
And then, horror died. The readers stopped buying, the publishers stopped publishing and those writers who had started off in the genre had to find another outlet for their talents – or another career entirely. The usual reason given for the sudden collapse of the market was over saturation: too many books by too many mediocre authors. But that has scarcely been a problem for chick lit, or detective fiction so why did horror fiction crash?
I think it was because, for horror to be truly frightening, there has to be an underlying belief, on the part of the writer as well as the reader, that there is something worse than dying. There has to be consequences for moral choices that transcend merely pain and suffering, which, however bad, will terminate in death, and a sense of the possibility that we, as human beings, can fall into an eternal state that cuts us off completely from what we are and what we should be. For horror to work, there has to be a profound sense that, while human beings enter this world as human beings, it is possible for us to leave it as creatures anywhere on a hierarchy from the basest and most depraved to the highest and most exalted, and that these possibilities carry on after death. For a horror that is based purely on this world becomes, in the end, nothing more than torture porn, variations on the suffering that can be inflicted on to the physical body and a mind that is conceived as nothing more than an emanation of the physical. As such, horror loses its horror, for death brings down the curtain on all suffering and cuts every story, well, dead.
This is exactly what happened with the decline and fall of the horror genre: it devolved into variations on how to cause pain, with Clive Barker’s Cenobites representing the terminal perfection of this view of horror: pain as ecstasy, horror devolved into a sado-masochistic forever.
But in the Warhammer 40k universe, there really are things that are worse than dying. Accepting the premises of the universe, with its pervasive dread of a corruption that can continue far past death itself, there is the possibility of reworking the necessary tropes to make horror work, to return it to its Victorian prime, and I’m pleased to say that Graham McNeil takes the opportunity in his stride. Indeed, with the nods to M.R. James, doyen of Victorian ghost fiction, in the book, it’s clear that he knows exactly what he’s doing in The Colonel’s Monograph. There are worse things than dying and McNeil lets that deepening dread seep through the controlled prose of this taut novella. A fine addition to the 40k universe.
York Festival of Ideas
Paul Gething and I are talking Warrior and all things Anglo-Saxon at 1pm on Sunday 7 June @YorkFestofIdeas. It’s an online webinar so anyone can attend (and see what we look like after 10 weeks without haircuts!). Book tickets here: http://yorkfestivalofideas.com/2020-online/calendar/warrior-life/#yorkideas
Warrior – Out Now in Paperback
Warrior: A Life of War in Anglo-Saxon Britain is out now in paperback. The Bookseller called it ‘enthralling…brilliantly written‘. The Spectator said it ‘reveals the disruptive and imaginative force of archaeology‘. Find out what they mean, and how the bones of an anonymous warrior excavated near Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland can reveal the deep foundations of Britain. Get it from Amazon and other good booksellers.
Adventures in Bookland: Low Lives by Denny Flowers
Number 9 of 10 and the standard of this Black Library novella series remains incredibly high. In fact, Denny Flowers’ tale of Caleb Cursebound, ninth-most dangerous man in the Underhive, rates among my favourites for its wit, its vividly unusual antihero and its evocation of the Underhive. Caleb is a chancer, a gambler and a man whose mouth too often catches his brain by surprise – with consequences that usually involve being precipitated into danger among dangerous people. That’s the case here, where overindulging in the local brew leads Caleb to tell a group of Underhive miners that he can get back their find from the gangers who have claimed it without bloodshed, unpleasant disagreements or the array of dead bodies that normally accompany Underhive disputes. It doesn’t turn out that way. But Caleb is unusual in the Warhammer universe as being a character who genuinely would prefer to solve a problem without killing people – and it makes for a refreshing change. Highly recommended.
Adventures in Bookland: Thieves’ Paradise by Nick Horth
It really is set in a paradise for thieves. To be precise, the Latchkey Isle, the place where thieves, rascals, adventurers and general scallywags go when they die in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar universe. And, as a welcome antidote to the general grimness, Latchkey Isle sounds like the sort of place that would be a rather enjoyable home for eternity: night-time feasting and partying and days spent cracking the ever changing puzzles and challenges set by the island. All rather splendid.
Of course, following the Necroquake the whole place is under threat from various forces but the island still stands and to it comes a splendid Elven anti-heroine – a phrase not often written in fantasy literature – with the job of finding and retrieving a treasure from the island before the bad guys get it. Shev Arclis is an engaging character – it’s good to find someone who relies on wit rather than not very marked fighting skills – but the real draw is the fantastical setting: I would love to read more stories set on Latchkey Isle.
Adventures in Bookland: Fairacre Festival by Miss Read
I don’t know how it is with you, but my wife and I have a running joke that one way of ensuring either of us never read a book is for the other to recommend it. We have very different reading tastes: my wife’s ideal, as she says herself, is a book where nothing much happens, there are no particularly high stakes, and everyone ends up reasonably happy ever after. The wife (Harriet) is the most voracious reader I know, probably reading over 200 books a year, whizzing through them at the rate of three or four a week! She reads to calm what is the most active, imaginative and empathic of minds, one that will engage so completely in the drama on the page that it’s for her own good that she avoids the grimmer reaches of modern fiction (although she is kind enough to read my stories in manuscript and, at times, when the mood is right, she will whizz through a whole shelf of classics).
Among her favourites has long been an author named ‘Miss Read’, a rather precious pseudonym it seemed to me, the pen name of one Dora Saint. Miss Read wrote tales of rural English life set in two villages, Fairacre and Thrush Green, where, as would be expected in any English villages outsider Midsomershire, nothing much happens. The Fairacre novels are written in partial first person by, in a metafiction device before anyone else had ever heard of metafiction, Miss Read herself: an unmarried teacher who is headmistress of the the one-form village school (it literally is one form, not one-form entry, with everyone above the infants taught in the same class by Miss Read). Harriet has read and reread every single one of the Miss Read books (the smaller set featuring Miss Read and the larger set written by ‘Miss Read’), returning to them in times of stress and difficulty to settle back into life at Fairacre. The stories are set in a slightly indeterminate time, both between the Wars and in the two or three decades after the end of the Second War.
There, you can tell how much and often Harriet had recommended the books to me by the amount I know about them without even reading one. But then, finally, barricaded in the small room to find some peace and solitude during this lockdown, I realised my only companion, and reason for staying longer in this grabbed-for chance for privacy, was a Miss Read book, Fairacre Festival, left on the floor by Harriet. So, I picked it up. I started reading it. And ended having the family check on me that I hadn’t died on the toilet!
It’s a delight. The story itself is light: a storm damages the roof of the parish church and the village rallies round to stage a festival to raise funds for its restoration. But the skill and dexterity of its telling revealed a master literary craftsman at work. The story is written in partial first person, with some chapters told from Miss Read’s (that is, the village headmistress) point of view and others in third person. The shifts between perspective are done effortlessly, without the reader realising any of the craft that went into smoothing out these transitions. The style itself, apparently so simple and unaffected, serves to put all the reader’s attention on the story and characters: it is the purest of storytelling and among the cleanest examples of prose writing I have read, comparable, if truth be told, to the literary cleanness and clarity of no less a writer than Evelyn Waugh.
The hardest thing of all is to write simple stories. Ornamentation serves to hide any underlying weaknesses, but strip this off and all that is left is story: people and plot. Miss Read (her real name was Dora Saint) wrote simple stories of ordinary people leading normal lives and infuses them with a particularity and place that makes them, effectively, timeless. A masterclass in writing. I will have to read some more of Harriet’s recommendations.
Adventures in Bookland: Marik’s Way by Nick Brown
Nick Brown is one of my favourite contemporary writers of historical fiction, bringing some much needed intelligence and character insight to its Roman Empire sub-genre with his Agent of Rome series. Now, with Marik’s Way, Brown tries his hand at fantasy and he proves as adept and engaging a writer in this field as he is with historical fiction. Admittedly, the world building does not stray that far from the tropes of historical fiction, being a largely medieval creation, but it’s sketched in well enough to make a convincing setting for the story’s main focus, Marik himself, which allows Brown’s greatest talent, the creation of interesting, engaging protagonists, to come to the fore.
With Marik, Brown has written a worthy companion to Cassius Corbulo, the Agent of Rome. Like Corbulo, Marik is a man who relies on his intelligence to get him out of bad situations (although if it does come down to fighting, he’s far better at it than Corbulo without becoming the sort of ridiculous invincible warrior that disfigures so much historical fiction), with a proper moral code and sufficient motivation, by way of shame and guilt, to keep driving him on to fresh adventures. I, for one, hope that Nick Brown will write further adventures for Marik and reveal some more about the world he has begun sketching out. Highly recommended.
Adventures in Bookland: Little, Big by John Crowley
How do you write about something that escapes words? It might sound like a relatively restricted problem – after all, we are an incessantly garrulous species whose rise has been intimately intertwined with our ability to speak and, later, to read – but in fact there are whole classes of experience that are almost impossible to speak or write about in any other way than by appealing to a shared experience of the subject in question. Take the smell of a rose. How on earth would it be possible to describe the perfume to someone who has never pushed their nose into one? The vocabulary we have for smells is dependent on analogies that only work if you have experienced something similar – simply an extension of the impossibility of describing red to a blind man. So language has limits of application to common areas of human experience.
But what about its application to uncommon areas of human experience? In Little, Big, John Crowley tries, and almost succeeds, in doing this. The area of human experience he deals with is the borderland between humanity and the Otherworld – not the spiritual realm of the heavens but the crossing dimensions of the Grey Folk. The people and places glimpsed in peripheral vision, the sudden recollection of a dream dreamt a month ago, the shimmer between being there and not being there. There is no language for this because it is an analogue, in human experience, to the quantum realm where the more precisely one knows the momentum of a particle the less one knows its position. The closer one looks the more it escapes from view (in astronomy, one has to look from the corner of the eye to see the faintest stars as the light-sensitive rod receptors are richer in peripheral vision).
In Little, Big, a family lives, in a house of indeterminate size and interdimensional complexity upon the story borders between this, prosaic, world and an Otherworld that is so other that, for the most part, it escapes description. Its presence is felt by its effect and the silence of those who have slipped over the border and come back changed. Crowley attempts to convey this through a rich prose style, studded with unusual words (Little, Big required me to repair to a dictionary to look up unknown words once every three or four chapters) and an allusive, elliptical story telling style. And he succeeds extremely well for most of the book, suggesting without stating the other worlds that impinge upon Edgewood, the big house on the edge, and its generations of inhabitants. In fact, I think it only really breaks down a bit when Crowley, towards the end, imposes a narrative upon the events, with manners all rushing towards a conclusion that has slipped from my memory in the way that the overall feel and mood of the book has not. A remarkable book that almost manages to express the inexpressible.