Barbarians: Secrets of the Dark Ages by Richard Rudgley

Author:Richard Rudgley [Rudgley, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2014-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

RECONSTRUCTING THE ANGLO-SAXONS

West Stow is a constant reminder of the debt we owe the past, particularly to those early Anglo-Saxon communities who laid the foundation of society today.

Stanley West, excavator of West Stow

The Anglo-Saxon site of West Stow is in the same county as Lakenheath – Suffolk. It is set on a small hill on the banks of the river Lark a few miles to the west of the town of Bury St Edmunds. After its excavation, it was decided that an attempt should be made to reconstruct, as authentically as possible, the old village. This was a large-scale and long-term project in experimental archaeology. The idea was to try to make things (buildings in this instance) in the way that they would originally have been made. The durability of buildings naturally needs to be monitored over a number of years, and the reconstruction of the material culture of the Anglo-Saxons of West Stow has been on-going since the early 1970s. It is the realisation of this project that greets the visitor today.

West Stow is open to the public, who can get a flavour of what life in a typical Anglo-Saxon village might have been like. Some days it is populated by members of Angelcynn (Old English meaning 'the English people'), a re-enactment society who not only dress the part but seek to recreate the cuisine, the crafts and many other aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. As they are part-time dwellers at West Stow, actually using the village as their living space, the Angelcynn also have some interesting ideas about how the village might have been used. They understand it in a way that perhaps the archaeologists and other visitors are unable to do. One of the members told me that it was almost as if each building worked rather like one room of a large dwelling. The largest of the reconstructed buildings at West Stow acts as a lounge-cum-kitchen-cum-dining room. It is the 'room' where the main socialising goes on. The weaving house on the site is like a workshop off to one side, while other buildings would have played the role of bedrooms.

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