Abstract
The ten Byzantine silver bowls included amongst the grave goods interred in the chamber of the Mound 1 ship burial at Sutton Hoo remain one of the most puzzling features of this site. It has been suggested that these items, which lay separated from the rest of the silver in the burial and close to the head of the body-space (where no body was found), may have had some special meaning which has never been discovered. This paper will argue that one of the possible keys to unlocking their significance may be found in the central roundel that adorns the centre of each bowl in the form of a rosette. These bowls, which are thought to have been manufactured in the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire in c. 600, entered the British Isles in unknown circumstances before coming into the possession of the man buried in (or commemorated by) the Mound 1 burial. Through comparison with contemporary sculpture and vernacular literature, I will suggest that this central rosette, which was associated with both the cross of Christ and sacred trees in Byzantine sculpture, may have served as a conventional bridge between Christian and pre-Christian religious traditions associated with sacred trees in Anglo-Saxon England. The central rosettes adorning each of these bowls may have been understood as the flower of a sacred tree. Since the latter appears to have figured in Anglian paganism it is possible that the bowls may helped to convert the Anglian aristocracy, bridging a gap between Germanic insular religious traditions and those that were being introduced to Britain at the time that the ship burial itself took place.
Highlights
The ten silver bowls found beside the bodyspace most commonly identified as the burial or cenotaph of the East Anglian king Rædwald (d. 624-5; see Bruce-Mitford 1974: 33), appear somewhat obscurely at first in Rupert Bruce-Mitford’s popular British Museum handbook to the Sutton Hoo ship burial: Three feet out from the west wall a dome-like lump, with purplish stains, proved to be a nest of eight inverted silver bowls, one inside the other, and all except the top two perfectly preserved
The question of whether or not there may have been a coffin in the burial assemblage is an interesting point, it is less important in this context than it is to note that these ten bowls were accorded the same apparent dignity by those who organised the grave goods as the iconic helmet positioned to the left of the body space
For one reason or another, the veneration of trees was perceived as a threat in later Anglo-Saxon England in ways that it may not have been at the time of Wihtred, in the seventh century, whose laws had been recorded whilst the Sutton Hoo burial ground was still in active use
Summary
The ten silver bowls found beside the bodyspace most commonly identified as the burial or cenotaph of the East Anglian king Rædwald (d. 624-5; see Bruce-Mitford 1974: 33), appear somewhat obscurely at first in Rupert Bruce-Mitford’s popular British Museum handbook to the Sutton Hoo ship burial: Three feet out from the west wall a dome-like lump, with purplish stains, proved to be a nest of eight inverted silver bowls, one inside the other, and all except the top two perfectly preserved. Whilst the equal-armed crosses decorating these bowls are not revealing, having been an all but ubiquitous feature of both pre-Christian and post-conversion art in Anglo-Saxon England, the central symbol of each of the bowls, a rosette, may bear the weight of greater interpretative significance (Bruce-Mitford 1972a: 66-68).
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