Lordship and Landscape in East Anglia AD 400-800

Lordship and Landscape in East Anglia AD400-800. The Royal Centre at Rendlesham, Suffolk and its contexts (2024), Christopher Scull, Stuart Brookes, Tom Williamson (eds).

This new volume, detailing how 5,000 items of metalwork discovered by local metal detector users during 10 years of archaeological fieldwork in Rendlesham, Suffolk, have helped change the way academics think about the earliest English kings and their kingdoms.

The journey started in 2008, when a landowner contacted Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service (SCCAS) for assistance following finds made on their property. Over the following decade, SCCAS co-ordinated archaeological investigations of the local area that identified the site of an East Anglian royal settlement.

UCL archaeologists and colleagues, funded by a Leverhulme Trust research project grant (2017-21), and working in partnership with the University of East Anglia, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service, reconstructed the layout and history of the settlement, its place in wider landscape, the social connections and trade networks of those who lived there, and details such as the metalworking techniques of the master crafters who worked there. 

The resultant book examines the origins and development of the East Anglian kingdom in the fifth to eighth centuries AD through the lens of the elite settlement complex at Rendlesham, Suffolk using an interdisciplinary approach involving field survey, landscape history, excavation and metal-detecting finds. It also examines the wider regional context and proposes a new narrative of kingdom formation.

According to Christopher Scull (Honorary Professor of Practice, UCL):

“Since its discovery on the eve of the Second World War, the royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo has stood alone as an enigmatic memorial to the East Anglian kings of the seventh century. But our ground-breaking research involving Rendlesham has not only identified the places where these kings lived, and from which they ruled, but also how their ancestors fought to establish a kingdom after the collapse of the Roman world.

These societies were more sophisticated, and more widely connected, than we previously thought. We are able to show how local leaders from what is now south-east Suffolk established a wider rule over what is now Norfolk and Suffolk, and how they ruled their kingdom through royal centres such as Rendlesham. We also believe that the legacy of Roman rule helped shape the geography of the early East Anglian kingdom."

Lordship and Landscape in East Anglia AD 400–800 is published by the Society of Antiquaries of London, with grants from the Marc Fitch Fund, The Sutton Hoo Society, University College London, Historic England, and the Scarfe Charitable Trust.

Stuart Brookes (Lecturer (Teaching) in Medieval Archaeology) indicated:

“The book Lordship and Landscape in East Anglia AD 400–800 makes a major contribution to our understanding of this formative period. By bringing together the evidence of archaeology, place-names, landscape history, numismatics and materials science, it describes a truly inter-disciplinary method for characterizing the socio-economic character of an elite settlement, its place in the local social and political landscapes, and the long-term development of the settlement landscape.

The result is a model of how such places developed over time, which through comparison to other elite sites, provides for a new and important narrative of kingdom formation in England. We’re pleased to make not only the monograph, but also the underlying data available Open Access." 

Links

• Purchase the hard copy volume (ISBN 9780854313075) via Pen & Sword Books
• Read the open access version of the book via OAPEN 
• Access the data underpinning this research via the Archaeology Data Service (ADS)

Read more

• Suffolk County Council news
• BBC News