Formative Britain by Carver Martin;

Author:Carver, Martin;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

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Figure 4.68 Prittlewell (Essex). Chamber grave of the 7th century. A: Reconstruction of the chamber and the burial tableau. B: Excavation of the chair. C: Gold buckle. D: Byzantine copper alloy flagon with medallions of figures on horses.

(Images from interim publication MoLAS 2004, with permission)

These ideas no doubt fuelled the second wave of horse burial in England, in the later 6th century, when the horse reappears as a companion in inhumation graves and is found in the expanding periphery of English settlement north and west. The sacrifice is now rare and special: 31 horse-and-rider graves and 38 bridle sets in England compared with 700 horse burials and 600 harnesses on the Continent.211 In its new context it takes up its role as a war-horse in alignment with the ideology of the heroic male. Chris Fern sums up the distinction like this: horse burials in cremations refer to ‘a funerary expression of communal animal-human shamanism’ and look to Scandinavia; while horse burial in inhumations ‘align with equestrianism, masculinity, leadership and military prowess and look to the Rhine’.212 A change in the horse-burial scenario has been remarked to occur around 600, when the horse is buried in a separate pit to its rider. This may signify a change in their relationship: has the horse graduated from a possession, a grave good, to a companion? Or is the horse, still a disposable asset, too tainted with the old religion to share the grave of a reconstructed 7th-century pagan?213

At Sutton Hoo Mound 17, created about 590–600 AD, it is the rider who has the tack – saddle, bridle and bran tub – in a heap at his head, and the horse lies in a pit adjacent (Figure 4.27). Both were covered by a single mound. The young man’s grave is furnished with considerable affection, with weapons, a little purse with trinkets, a comb, a bucket, a cooking cauldron and a haversack with traces of ribs of lamb. The horse too is decked in its best, with gilded strap-distributors and silver pendants. This seems like the ministrations of a family giving their young hero a sympathetic send off in the way they wanted him to be remembered and recommended to the future.

The horse burials at Sedgeford (Norfolk) offer an interesting late instance of buried horses, at least one of which is dated to the period 670–820 at 95%. The horses occurred in three contexts, the first a composite burial of a horse, a woman and a child in close association. The woman of about 40 years was laid with her head on the hip of a male horse with the child over the horse’s head. Parts of other animals, cow, sheep, pig and chicken, were included in the grave pit. This was the horse radiocarbon-dated. A second burial was of a horse about 8 years old, on its own. And the third context was a quantity of horse parts that had been spread about in the area. This would appear to combine many of the aspects of divinity, ritual and taboo collected by Fern, but in a later and feminine context.

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