Sublime

Within a year of the battle at Chester, whether or not Æðelfrið’s campaign had been directed at Edwin or at those who would shelter him, the exiled prince left, or was encouraged to leave, the protection of his British sponsors and seek sanctuary with a king whom he must have believed lay beyond Æðelfrið’s reach. Rædwald, he of the Sutton Hoo ship

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The fort at Banna (Birdoswald) on Hadrian’s Wall is, perhaps, the best place to catch sight of localized lordship in its early development.b The last army pay wagons cannot have arrived here much later than the 390s; the last visit by a Dux Britanniarum probably occurred in the same decade. Banna’s fifth-century commanders responded by expediently

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In Hungary a lump of red ochre was placed near the head; in Romania and Bulgaria, in addition to a lump placed near the head, red ochre covered the floor or stained the skull, feet, legs, and hands. At Kétegyháza, where there was no local source of hematite from which to make red ochre, a lump of clay was painted red to imitate true ochre, a clear

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In these mid- to late sixth-century phases are hints, no more, of Yeavering’s magnificent future as a royal residence under Kings Edwin and Oswald, complete with church, great hall and a unique grandstand. But that lack of early architectural pretension may be illusory. If occupation was annual or seasonal, based on a mobile encampment of tents inv

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Thanks to the sensational discovery of a hoard of battle-booty in a field near Lichfield in Staffordshire in 2009, we now have an idea of just what the spoils of Dark Age warfare looked like. Here are more than seventeen hundred objects of gold and silver, precious stones, millefiori and cloisonné, the peak of Early Medieval craftsmanship, equal in

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