Bed Burials

[rynner2]

Cross and bed found in Anglo-Saxon grave shed new light on 'dark ages'
Archaeologists in Cambridge thrilled to discover grave with body of young woman on a bed with an ornate gold cross
Maev Kennedy
The Guardian, Friday 16 March 2012

The dead are often described as sleeping, but archaeologists in Cambridgeshire have uncovered a bed on which the body of a young Anglo-Saxon woman has lain for more than 1,300 years, a regal gold and garnet cross on her breast.

Three more graves, of two younger women and an older person whose sex has not yet been identified, were found nearby.

Forensic work on the first woman's bones suggests she was about 16, with no obvious explanation for her early death. Although she was almost certainly a Christian, buried with the beautiful cross stitched into place on her gown, she was buried according to ancient pagan tradition with some treasured possessions including an iron knife and a chatelaine, a chain hanging from her belt, and some glass beads which were probably originally in a purse that has rotted away. ...

Pectoral crosses from the dawn of Christianity in England, and bed burials - where the body was laid on a real bed, now traced only by its iron supports, centuries after the timber rotted – are both extremely rare. ...

There is only one previous record of the two together, a grave found at Ixworth in Suffolk in the 19th century. The excavation records for that find are patchy, whereas archaeologists from Cambridge university will be working for years to recover every scrap of information from the Trumpington site.

A gold and garnet pectoral cross of such quality, the most beautiful and sophisticated examples of Anglo-Saxon metalwork like the contemporary jewels found in the Staffordshire Hoard or the Sutton Hoo burial, could only have been owned by a member of an aristocratic or even royal family. ...

Sam Lucy, an Anglo-Saxon expert from Newnham College Cambridge, who helped excavate the site, said the small loops on the arms of the Trumpington cross, worn shiny by rubbing against the fabric, showed the woman probably wore the cross during her short life, at a time when the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats were gradually converting to the powerful new religion.

The find sheds further light on a period once known dismissively as the dark ages, now being revealed by archaeology as a time of superb craftsmanship and complex international trade routes.

While the body of the prince who was buried at Sutton Hoo was laid in a ship under a great mound of earth, and the warrior at Prittlewell in an oak plank chamber hung with his weapons and treasures, a small group of bed burials have been discovered, all believed to be of women, all from the same region and the same late 7th century date.

Lucy said the beds may well have been the ones the women used in life, as they are all believed to be pieces of real furniture, not made specially for a funeral ceremony. At Trumpington the evidence suggests the bed was lowered first into the ground, and then the body, uncoffined, laid on it.

Scraps of textile found under the chain may reveal what she wore when she went to her grave. The same Anglo-Saxon word, leger, can mean either a bed or a grave. ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/ ... axon-grave

 

[EnolaGaia]

Newly published survey research indicates UK bed burials were reserved for high-status women during the early medieval period, when women served as agents for spreading the Christian faith through marriages into non-Christian areas.

Mystery behind medieval 'bed burials' in UK possibly solved

On rare occasions in medieval mainland Europe, the cream of the crop — those who were wealthy or noble — were sometimes buried as if they were going to sleep, interred on their beds in what is known as a bed burial. However, it was unclear how this practice spread to England. Now, new research reveals that bed burials gained traction in the seventh century A.D. along with the spread of Christianity and soon became a common burial rite for women.

After analyzing 72 bed burials across Europe, ranging from Slovakia to England, a researcher found that England's bed burials held only female remains. She concluded that the funerary practice in Europe occurred at a time when women were moving around more as Christian wives married non-Christian husbands, according to a new study published online June 13 in the journal Medieval Archeology.

"Bed burials were something that was specifically imported by women who were moving around at that very specific point in time [across Europe]," said Emma Brownlee, the study's sole author and a research fellow in archaeology at Girton College and a fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, both of which are within the University of Cambridge in England. "As part of this conversion movement, men were moving, but not at the same extent as women, who were bringing these burial rites with them as they migrated [as missionaries], causing it to take on these associations of femininity and Christianity in England." ...

Brownlee mentioned one bed burial in particular as a point of reference: the Trumpington Bed Burial (opens in new tab), which archaeologists excavated in 2011 in Trumpington, a village in eastern England. Like other burials in the study, it dates to the seventh century and contains the remains of a young woman buried in a wooden bed affixed with iron brackets. ...

According to her paper, the earliest known bed burial occurred in Eastern Europe in the fifth century A.D., and the practice spread across mainland Europe during the sixth and seventh centuries as a rite for men, women and children, including the burial of a 6-year-old boy beneath Cologne Cathedral in Germany. It wasn't until later that the burials became more common for women in seventh-century England, Brownlee said.

An analysis of isotopes, or elements with varying numbers of neutrons in their nuclei, from three of the bed burials in England revealed that the women interred there didn't grow up in Britain, the study found. This chemical evidence, along with the fact that only women received bed burials in England, "suggests that it was imported by a specific group of women, likely linked to conversion efforts in the seventh century," Brownlee said in a statement ... "Bed burial therefore acquired feminine and Christian characteristics in England that it did not have elsewhere." ...

Then why exactly were beds used as burial vessels as opposed to coffins? Brownlee thinks it could be related to a person's status, as well as a poetic metaphor regarding death.

"Not many people would've had their own bed frames back then," she told Live Science. "The ability to construct this wooden bed frame took quite a lot of labor, so it's not something that everyone could afford. Most people would've just slept on straw mattresses, but if you were important enough to have your own bed frame, that was quite a special thing."

The idea of equating death with eternal sleep may have also played a role.

"There might also be connotations of sleep going along with it," Brownlee said. "So it's telling us a little bit about how people were relating to death, and they saw it as if they're going to sleep rather than it being some final end." ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/medieval-bed-burials-england-christianity

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published research report. The full report is accessible at the link below.

---

Emma Brownlee
Bed Burials in Early Medieval Europe
Medieval Archaeology Volume 66, 2022 - Issue 1
https://doi.org/10.1080/00766097.2022.2065060

Abstract
BURIAL IN A BED IS A RARE PHENOMENON, but one which is found persistently throughout early medieval Europe. Bed burials are found across a wide geographic area, from England in the west, to Slovakia in the east, and to Scandinavia in the north; while their chronological distribution ranges from the early 5th to the early 10th century. The identities of the people buried in these graves are diverse, including men, women, adults and children, and they are accompanied by a range of grave goods, some particularly well furnished, others less so. The examples from England stand out as a unique group, being mostly adult women, and restricted to the 7th century. This paper will argue that this particularity, along with Christian symbolism in many of the examples from England, is evidence that the bed burial rite was imported into England as a result of women’s mobility associated with Christianisation.

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00766097.2022.2065060

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

Makes me think of the 7thC poem "The Dream of the Rood" - an early christian poem where Jesus's cross comes to life in the narrator's trippy dream, and talks to him. Maybe there was some now forgotten link made between the state of sleep/dreaming and christianity? It's around the same time and just as people are being converted (whether they liked it or not), this hooks in to the earlier belief system's World Tree - the idea of a magical tree being the conduit between life and death, etc etc.