The Prittlewell princely burial, and Hertfordshire parks
by Lyn Blackmore, Ian Blair, Sue Hirst & Christopher Scull mola May 2019
£35 pp544 hb isbn 9781907586507 Reviewed by Chris Fern
Outstanding scholarship and attractive t illustration characterise the monograph of the royal burial at Prittlewell. Its publication was greeted by the usual daft national newspaper headlines: “All hail the Aldi Prince” (Telegraph, May 9) was my favourite. The results of the years of painstaking research, needless to say, are far more profound for understanding of the East Saxon kingdom and early England.
The 2003 surprise discovery presented a unique opportunity to excavate to modern standards an intact tomb of the Anglo-Saxon “princely” burial horizon (around ad570– 640). The high standard of the MOLA excavation that followed has allowed detailed consideration of the original 4m by 4m wooden plank-built chamber, coffin and the carefully chosen royal grave-goods (Chapter 4) t that were still largely in position, d despite the tomb’s inevitable collapse u under the weight of its mound.
Study of the objects (Chapter 5), the ca catalogue (Chapter 9) and specialist m material analyses (Appendices) take up the bulk of the 500 pages. Each ob object was selected with symbolic pu purpose, or in the case of the gold cos costume buckle was actually made for the burial. Significantly, the items from or inspired by the material cult culture of Italy and the Byzantine Med Mediterranean (iron folding stool, bron bronze flagon, gold-sheet crosses and a silver il spoon) indicate a clear Christian identity. This is surprising given the likely date of the burial around the 580s/90s (Chapter 6), derived by coin and radiocarbon dating, which is very close to the historical start of the conversion in Kent ( ad597), and is in contrast with other “princely” burials, such as at Sutton Hoo (Suffolk), Taplow (Buckinghamshire) or Asthall (Oxfordshire), which are more recent.
Why this was the case, can be suggested from the archaeological and historical contexts (Chapters 7 and 8).
The chamber grave was sited within an existing “flat” cemetery of the East Saxon “folk” (known since 1887, synthesised in Chapter 3), possibly a warrior-retainer community that supported the emergence of royal power from the later sixth century. That the East Saxon kingdom survived until the ninth century shows that it was resilient, though its rulers were not among the named overlords of early Anglo-Saxon England, as were contemporary kings of neighbouring kingdoms: Æthelberht of Kent (d 616) and Rædwald of East Anglia (d around 624).
Thus, when the man was buried at Prittlewell the East Saxons likely had more powerful neighbours north and south, with the kingdom of Kent the dominant force. Kentish influence, if not overlordship, is hinted at by the marriage of the first king of the East Saxons to Æthelberht’s sister and possible early Christian convert, Ricula of Kent, as well as by the fact that the Kentish king founded the first church on East Saxon soil, at St Paul’s in London. The most likely pathway for the luxury imports in the grave might also have been via Kentish patronage of its client rulers. If the identification of the burial as that of prince Seaxa is correct, therefore, it is possible (as Barbara Yorke states, p 348) that his mother Queen Ricula played a lead role in creating for him a Christian-Kentish identity!