ADAPTING TO LIFE WITHOUT THE LEGIONS

From the End of the Fourth Century to the Mid-Sixth

If gold and silver are a measure of wealth, late Roman Britain was very rich. Hoards of coins, jewellery, and plate buried in the early fourth and early fifth centuries show that their owners’ lifestyle was coming to an end as central imperial authority broke down , troops were withdrawn from the island, villas fell into disuse , and towns lost their markets and trade. Raiders threatened by land and sea : Irish from the west ,Pictish from the north, Frisian, Saxon, and other from the east; and as civic order broke down, the likelihood of robbery by people living south of Hadrian’s Wall grew worse. The hoards’ owners were right to worry , and their subsequent failure to retrieve their valuables must testify to many personal catastrophes. Hoards containing dishes, bowls, and spoons as well as coins and jewellery have been found on the east side of  Roman Britain from Canterbury, Kent, in the south to Whorltorn, Yorkshire, in the north. Further west, coin-hoards are quite plentiful , although none has any plate. Some contain jewellery, like one found in 1843 at Amesbury, Wiltshire, that included 3 silver finger-rings; in the same area, another hoard with 8 gold coins and one of silver was found in 1990, apparently concealed in a pot around the year 405, to judge from the date of the latest coin. But as with plate so with jewellery ,the contrast with the east is still considerable ; Thetford, Norfolk, has gold finger-rings as well as ornamental chains, bracelets, and a buckle; Hoxne, Suffolk, has gold bracelets, and again chains, these with elaborate mounts. Some of the craftsmanship show in these pieces is of a high order, that only well-off patrons could have afforded. The plate suggests displays of tableware  by a society that set great store on being able to offer lavish feasts and entertainment. These late Roman treasures may be giving a slightly false impression of Britain’s prosperity. Silver was probably extracted from the same native deposits that yielded lead, so would have been more available than in most parts of the Empire. Some may also have entered Britain from Ireland, where evidence of Roman intervention is accumulating. With exports of precious metal subject to imperial restrictions, there was good reason to hang on to it. On the other hand , the amount of gold extracted from Dolaucothi in central Wales is unlikely to have been enough to account for all the jewellery at Thetford and Hoxne; the gold coins known as solidi were certainly not minted in late Roman Britain, yet more than 500 were in the latter hoard alone. All the silver coins- nearly 15,000 at Hoxne- were minted abroad also. Much of the goldwork in the Thetford hoard seems unworn, and could be taken as jeweller’s stock but that some of its spoons have inscriptions associating them with a deity, Faunus, so the collection may have been a temple treasure rather than an individual’s. Whether the god’s cult was still active is a moot point ;some late Roman objects have Christian motifs, and one large hoard of silver plate found at Water Eaton, Cambridgeshire, could have been specifically for use in the Christian liturgy. Christianity had become the Empire’s official religion in the fourth century , but how deeply it had penetrated British society remains controversial. The jewellery that people were actually wearing in Britain while the imperial administration was withdrawing from it may not be fully represented in hoards; in particular, base-metal ornaments were not valuable enough to be worth storing. Brooches were produced in various different styles ,although manufacture of those with brightly coloured enamels made from glass seems to have ceased during ,if not before, the fourth century. A few brooches of types used by people living beyond the Empire’s frontiers have been found ; the “tutulus” ,for instance, suggests that there were some Germanic people in the country. Such outsiders cannot be assumed to have been forerunners of any migrations that were to take place during the next two centuries, any more than a man buried at Gloucester with silver buckles and strap-ends that had probably been made in south-east Europe was the advance guard of an invasion of Goths. Absent from the late Roman hoards are any examples of the gold “cross-bow-brooch”, an imperial badge of authority. Crossbow brooches were copied in lesser metals – unfinished copper-alloy castings have been found at Wroxeter, Shropshire- but the official ones were presumably not things to be bought and sold ,and would not have seen as part of a normal display of wealth; nor were they things to be used as a pledge, or for hoarding or melting down, however extreme the need . Certain types of belt- or strap-buckle were also associated with imperial authority, originally for soldiers, but subsequently for civilian officers, and some came to be buried with women. They have frames shaped as dolphins or sea-horses, and plates engraved with a range of animals, fishes, birds, and plants, some of which carry recognizably Christian meanings; many were worn with distinctive shapes of strap-end. The silver chape at Patching was almost certainly made well after the end of the fourth century, and is further evidence of the hoard’s late date; unlike the coins it was not from the continental south, but had probably been made somewhere in modern Germany, though a few others like it have been found elsewhere in England, in graves. The hoard therefore shows a mixed range of sources and contacts. There is no other contemporary Visigothic material in south-east Britain, such as pottery, so the gold may have come not directly from Southern France or northern Spain, but by the way of the increasingly powerful Franks centred in northern Gaul, conceivably sending subsidies to an ally rather than trading for goods. The second half of the fifth century is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a time of political change in Sussex, and the Patching hoard may reflect these troubles, although its owner’s allegiance is not clear from its contents. He –political power was almost invariably expressed in documentary sources as wielded by males in the early Middle Ages – might have been a local leader, either the heir of someone who had taken over authority in the region from whatever structures had operated there during the Roman occupation, or a newcomer challenging for power. People like that needed treasure-stores to enable them to create warbands  for protection and raiding ,or to buy alliances, perhaps through a marriage and a dowry payment. A hoard like Patching represented success, showing that here was someone whom overseas kings were anxious to cultivate by sending him gifts, or who was able to get gold and silver in return for slaves and other booty won in raids. Patching is near a large cemetery at Highdown , in which are burials containing objects that, before the hoard was found ,has already suggested the possibility of people with a mixture of cultural ideas. In particular, it had a buckle-frame and belt-end , a belt-slide, and a brooch in what is usually called the “quoit-brooch” style because the frames have openwork centres and a series of concentric rings, in Highdown’s case set within a square panel. The buckles probably owe their origins to the Roman “official” series , and the style is particularly interesting because it was originally used on formal male costume but was adapted for female use, some of the buckles and all the brooches being found in women’s graves. This may be an instance of males showing their political position vicariously , by transferring the expression of their status to their womenfolk, and the brooches may also be part of a long-term trend towards greater signalling of gender difference in the way that people were buried. If the owner of quoit-brooches felt that expression of Roman authority, or at least of its memory ,mattered ,they did not pursue it to the point of including contemporary coins in their graves; yet coins with emperor’s heads and inscriptions are the most overt statements of that authority , and Patching now shows that , at least in the Highdown area, a few were available. Because of known practice on the continent, and because the British writer Gildas decried British leaders for making a treaty , foedus, with barbarians who agreed to defend the province against raiders in return for land, fourth and fifth century objects have long been scrutinized for evidence of shape or decoration that could signify either official imperial issues of military equipment; or copies of such things aimed at  people  who wanted to be thought entitled to them; or, like the tutulus-brooches, alien costume fittings worn by people either form other parts of the Empire or from beyond its frontiers. That the quoit-brooch style’s palmettes, rosettes and fairly naturalistic animals derive from general late classical sources seems agreed, but the direct sources are not; paired animals, for instance, can be seen as evidence either of continuity from late Roman-Britain, exemplified by the Amesbury rings or by images such as peacocks with the Fountain of Life; or of continuing contacts with late Roman Gaul  ;or of new contacts either with the Franks or with southern Scandinavia. In the fifth century such things could be evidence of people whose forebears had lived on the island, though in that case Christian motifs ,as on the earlier buckles and strap-ends, might be expected; or of contracted settlers, foederati; or of mercenaries, not expected to stay after their period of hire; or of uninvited newcomers who were wresting land away from the natives, using quoit-brooch-style objects to claim a special position for themselves as inheritors of Roman power and thus of its control of land. The quoit-brooch style was used on a belt-set found in one of Roman London’s extramural cemeteries, in a grave that also contained a gilt cross-bow-brooch. In another grave were 2 tutulus-brooches. Their inclusion within an established cemetery implies that their wearers were as acceptable to London’s citizens as had been the Goth to Gloucester’s, and the belt-set could well have been given either to an early fifth century foederatus or to a mercenary brought in by its local administrators for the city’s defence, rather than to a member of the imperial forces whose troop was subsequently withdrawn from the province. A similar belt-set found at Mucking, Essex ,could have belonged to a soldier hired to defend the Thames estuary and the approach to London. The circumstances there were different in that belt-set was not in a Romano-British cemetery but in one that was newly established and that subsequently remained in use, probably for the burial of people who lived in a small group of adjacent farmsteads; its owners could have been the leader of a small group of incoming settlers. Both the London and the Mucking belt-sets were in good enough condition to make it quite possible that those buried with them had also been their only owners. Two quoit-brooch-style buckle-plates found in different cemeteries in Kent are so similar that manufacture by the same craftsman , or by men sharing tools in a single workshop, seems likely ;use of a particular punch can sometimes be identified if it had a distinctive mark, as has been suggested of the stamps on 2 objects found as far apart as Wiltshire and Kent. The smiths may have worked in established centres, or travelled from place to place with their punches and tools, but no debris from their workshops has yet been found. This raises a problem that applies to most of the metalwork of the early Anglo-Saxon period.  Some of these quoit-brooch-style pieces may well have been made in Kent , but they are found quite widely across southern Britain , and the number excavated in Gaul is sufficient to indicate that some were made there as well. Another group of copper-alloy buckles and strap-ends that appears to have late Roman antecedents but which may have been used long into the fifth century seems to concentrate west of the quoit-brooch objects, particularly in Gloucestershire. This is an area in which things were not usually put in graves, so the finds are effectively without context. Different again are various brooches, such as “cruciforms” ,mostly but not all in graves, which are also thought to be from the first half of the fifth century and a little later; most of those are from East Anglia and the upper Thames valley, with a couple from Dorset. Their direct antecedents were not made in the Roman provinces but in modern Denmark and north Germany. Not only are they very often found in women’s graves, but many are from cremations, a rite practised in those areas; the burning of corpses had ceased to be an accepted practice in late Roman Britain, so its reintroduction strongly supports the old interpretation that whole families were migrating, and in sufficient numbers to have a greater effect on the culture of the areas in which they settled than in other parts of the island. Furnished inhumation burials alone could more plausibly be put down to the disproportionate effect that quite small numbers of migrants might have had on a native population unsettled by the Romans’ abandonment, and therefore less likely to insist on retention of their established ways of talking and doing things. Cremations were usually in urns, of shapes and with decoration that also hark back to north Germany and Scandinavia, notably faces and stamped animals ,birds, and what look like oared ships. These regional distributions are not without overlap, but it has been pointed out that there is a broad correlation with the old provinces of Roman Britain, which could indicate that those institutional structures were part of the formation process of cultural regions in the fifth century. The fifth century objects are often very well made; the casting of some involved high quality craftsmanship , as on the Mucking belt-set. The arrangements of some of the animals, plants, human faces and other elements of the quoit-brooch style may even conform to a set of rules. What seems surprising in viewof the quality of the casting and finishing is that precious metal was not used more frequently ; a few quoit-brooches and a pair of pendants are in solid silver , three of the Kent brooches being gilded with a thin gold coating, as are parts of the Brighthampton scabbard. One or two had settings, , but those that survive are merely glass pellets. All the others are in copper alloy, occasionally gilded ,more often embellished with silver wire or plating, which had sometimes been stripped off before burial. None is in solid gold. The same is true of the western belt fittings , and the cruciform and other brooches. Nor do the furnished graves in the south and east have any silver plate, either whole or chopped into hack-silver. Also like the metal-work ,the basic technology was retained , probably dependent on waste glass ( cullet)collected for recycling because freshly manufactured glass ingots were more difficult if not impossible to import- the raw materials used in making glass would never have been readily transportable to Britain. There are even a few exotic pieces that probably came from the Mediterranean, and their shapes and decoration suggest that they were made there in the fifth century, not that they were already old when buried, heirlooms handed down from Roman Britain. Whatever mechanism had brought gold and coins from southern Gaul into the Patching hoard may also have supplied occasional luxuries, like a narrow-necked flask in a HIghdown grave, though mostly it was glasses to drink from, not to store perfumes or spices in , that were sought. The Chronicle’s statement that all the treasure in late Roman Britain was buried or taken to Gaul seems to get further support from excavated sites in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wales and further north , none of which has yielded a nest-egg like that at Traprain Law. Nor do they have any  trace of pewter, which had also been plentiful  in Roman Britain, nor of copper-alloy bowls. Because these are areas effectively without furnished graves, there is much less recovery of whole objects from them than from the south-east, but by contrast there is plenty of evidence of metalworking ,mostly from sites that are likely to have had use by local potentates ,who may have succeeded to the powers exercised by the magistrates who had helped to run Roman Britain. Much of the post-Roman metalworking cannot be very precisely dated, but among the discarded waste and accidental losses are examples of copper-alloy penannular brooches a type that had already had a long history and which takes many forms. Some are large, like one found within the Roman town at Caerwent that has terminals cast in the shape of fairly abstract animals’ heads ,its findspot justifying a date perhaps back in the fourth century. Various zoomorphic forms have been found elsewhere in Wales. It is usually assumed that the kings’ system of control would have given them command of supplies of metals sought by Mediterranean merchants- tin from Cornwall and Devon is substantiated by finds of ingots, but lead and possibly silver from Devon, Somerset, north Wales, the Peak District and Cumberland, and perhaps iron from various different ore deposits, have no such direct evidence, nor is there any from excavations that metals were stored at the potentate sites. Other commodities may have been hides or finished leather- though both would have been susceptible to damage on the return voyage- slaves captured in a king’s raids, or hunting-dogs, reflecting another aristocratic activity. As there is no imported pottery from any enclaves of British administration that may have survived in the east, such as the London/St Albans area, this was an exchange system in which they did not take part, at least directly. That British kings should have wanted  to acquire olive oil, despite two generations having passed  who may have had no experience of food cooked or soaked in anything but animal fat, is probably even more of an indication that they wanted to affect a Romanized lifestyle  than is their anxiety for wine , surely an easier taste to reacquire. Glass vessels were also coming to these sites , some from the Anglo-Saxon parts of the country ,like a funnel  beaker from Dinas Powys. A lord who could serve exotic food  and wine in fine vessels at feasts both displayed his success and invited his followers to share in it. The middle of the fifth century may have marked a turning point , with new efforts to establish dynasties and to use new systems of control, based on fortified power-bases. A similar aspiration is implied by the use of Latin for inscriptions on memorial stones and on a piece of slate found at Tintagel, Cornwall ;both also stress the importance of family and lineal descent. The metalworking could indicate that the kings controlled the main craftworkers, but as the evidence is not confined to the residential sites, they may not have had a complete monopoly on penannular brooches and the like. Nevertheless ,at least in Wales, the relative lack of metalwork and of anything else of value at farmsteads implies that their occupants could produce enough surplus to pay the food renders demanded of them ,but not to acquire things for their own enjoyment or social enhancement. The Phocaean and African red-slip wares seem to have been imported for about a hundred years; the supply then dried up ,not because of any wish on the part of the British elites, but because of events in the Mediterranean and beyond. By that time pottery tableware and perhaps glass from south-western France was entering Britain, some of the former stamped with the Christian chi-rho; it reached the same sorts of site as the Mediterranean wares , but in no greater quantity. Although pottery imports are the best indicators of British sites in the early post-Roman period , they are not always found ; in the whole of the Severn valley there is only a possible sherd at Wroxeter. North of Hadrian’s Wall, Traprain Law and its hoard show that local chiefs outside the Empire had established power-bases long before those inside it. The contents of that hoard  show awareness of Roman culture, but little interest in sharing in it. The absence of imported Mediterranean pottery for such places is not only a factor of geographical distance, but also of there being no enthusiasm for a Roman lifestyle. Traprain Law seems to have been abandoned by or soon after the end of the fifth century ,its role perhaps taken over by the coastal promontory fort at Dunbar, a move that could show increased concern for maritime connections. Dating at the latter is dependent on radiocarbon, not on artefacts, so no accompanying change in the material culture can be seen. A very different site, on the western coast , is Whithorn, Galloway, where a Christian community may have been created in the fifth century. The contrast between the 2 places is visible in the pottery at Whithorn, which includes both the Mediterranean and southern French wares , and small amounts of glass. The only other site in modern Scotland to have yielded any Mediterranean pottery is Iona, also a Christian community – and even there only a single sherd has been found. In between the church sites is the hillfort at Dunadd, Argyllshire, which was probably in use by the sixth century. Moulds show that penannular brooches were produced in quantity there, though perhaps in the seventh rather than in the sixth century; there was no gold or silver at the site at that early time, nor certainly at other sites in present-day Scotland. Dunadd was a strongpoint for control of Dàl Riata , a Gaelic kingdom said to have been created by the Scotti from Ireland in the sixth century; this is now disputed, not least because some types of object found in Ireland do not occur in Argyll. Away from the ecclesiastical and aristocratic sites, farmsteads in the north had little metalwork. Wood and leather might give a rather different picture, of course, if they had survived, and the drystone structures well to the north of Forth-Clyde at sites like Birsay that can be dated to the period are certainly substantial enough to deny abject poverty. Still open to debate for the Anglo-Saxon areas in the ascription of close dates both to objects and to the graves in which many occur, not least because of similar difficulties on the continent. In the second half of the fifth century further new brooch types appeared. “Great square-headed “ brooches have recently been reappraised and a revised chronology proposed , which sees their earliest variants in England  as few but very widespread at the end of fifth century and early in the sixth ,with many more in the Midlands but still with some south of the Thames in the next phase, and then in the later sixth century spreading north beyond the Humber and east into Norfolk and Suffolk, but with none any longer in the Thames valley or further south. They are more or less contemporary with “saucer-brooches”, which are found in more or less the same areas- until the later sixth century, when the saucers failed to impact on East Anglia, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire. Is the difference in any way an indication of differences between groups of people- do they conform to differences in the manner of burial, to language and dialect as those are later recorded, or to divisions between the later kingdoms? The last phase of the great square-headed brooches allow them to be seen as “Anglian” because they are broadly found in the areas that Bede, writing in the eighth century, said had been settled by people from the Angulus area of north Germany, explaining names like East Anglia in England. But in their earlier phases these brooches were not confined to the area north of the Thames, so if their distribution has any meaning , it is that “Anglian” culture only emerged as distinct from “Saxon” quite a long time after the majority of the migrants are thought to have been on the move. Some saucer-brooches have geometrical ornament probably derived from late Roman and quoit-brooch styles, providing another examples of the transfer of designs from male to female gear. Others have what is known as Style I decoration , which also occurs on great square-headed brooches. This creates complex patterns of strange animals and human masks  thought to have emerged from Scandinavia, but much affected by late Roman motifs and brought to England in part at least through Kent. Saucer-brooches are nearly all found a long way from the east coast. Was Style I nevertheless being used to claim ancestral descent from faraway places overseas? Why does Style I occur on brooches worn by women so much more than on sword fittings or shield mounts that would better have asserted male affiliations? How many people would even have stood close enough to the wearer to see them? Why are some of the punch-marks similar to some on pottery urns, but not all? The complexities of claims to origins can be explored further through another type of square-headed brooch, which has a different terminal shape from the others, but often also has Style I ornament. In Britain, such brooches are found mostly in Kent, and since their parallels are mostly with Jutland, they have been used to argue for the truth of Bede’s eighth-century assertion that the people of Kent were of Jutish origin. An early sixth-century solid silver example was excavated in a cemetery at Apple Down in West Sussex, in the grave of a young  woman who was also wearing a buckle of Kentish type; she had two saucer-brooches as well which are very rarely found in Kent. Because “Sussex” derives from “South Saxons”, the Kentish-style objects demand explanation. West Sussex is not far from the Isle of Wight , whose people Bede said were Jutish like those of Kent, as were those on the mainland opposite Wight. Bede may have explaining a link between Kent and Wight that need not have been a matter of race, but which certainly shows up in some of the objects found in graves on the island. Was that where the girl had come from, taking some of her own things with her when she married someone in West Sussex – and, since saucer-brooches are not known on Wight, had she been given them by her mother-in-law? Or, since there were fly pupae on two of her brooches, showing that there had been sufficient time between her death and funeral for “flies to have been attracted to the corps and laid eggs there”, could she even have died somewhere a long way from west Sussex, and been brought to Apple Down to be buried in the community in which she had been born, rather than where she had spent her brief married life? Had she gone to be married in the Isle of Wight , or even in Kent ,taking with her saucer-brooches that had belonged to her mother, returning with them in death together with a Jutish brooch from her mother-in-law, which thus only entered Sussex after its final owner’s death? If the latter is the explanation, then nothing in any grave should automatically be assumed to have had much meaning for those living locally. In other words, this single grave neatly demonstrates some of the problems in discussing a person’s origins, for one object signals in one direction and another in the opposite. The costume in which the women had been  buried might not even have been what she had worn in life, as those who saw to her last rites may have preferred to dress her according to their own customs, which she herself might have rejected. Not only were many brooches old and much worn or repaired when buried, but some were sewn in place, suggesting that they may not have been taken on and off as everyday clothes-fasteners. It cannot even be taken for granted that what accompanies someone in a grave had accompanied them in life, or that the number or quality of the objects directly reflected their status or wealth. Occasionally an object is found which suggests that it was being worn by someone who did not know what it was. Pairs of metal fittings are found in positions indicating that they held sleeve-ends together on costume worn in the Midlands and the north ; there are one or two of these wrist-clasps in Kent and Sussex, but there they are single pieces, apparently worn as though they were brooches. Were they spoils of war; or had they originally been brought to Kent by a bride, but not buried with her and perhaps passed on to a daughter? The appropriate way to wear them was subsequently forgotten because Kentish costume did not include wrist-fastenings, but they nevertheless retained some value as heirlooms, a reminder of distant origins. Another example of an object not being used in its original manner is the zoomorphic penannular brooch being worn as a bracelet at Bifrons. Wrist-clasps are usually seen as one of the ways in which material culture helped to create a sense of “Anglian” identity in the sixth century north of the Thames. From its distribution south of the Thames, a “Saxon” brooch type seems to have been a small gilt “button-brooch”, usually with a recognizable human face cast on its surface, masks that also occur in the centres of some of the saucer-brooches –yet those brooches were acceptable in both areas. There are also a few saucer- and rather more  button-brooches in east Kent, despite its supposedly being peopled by Jutes- and indeed, having more objects with parallels in Denmark than in the rest of England.  But no grave in Kent has objects that are all exclusively “Jutish”; it is as though some items were accepted and other rejected, as were things from Francia and other parts of the continent, creating an identity that was specific to east Kent itself. Another example of object which on their own might suggest close links and assimilation includes the small Type G “British” penannular brooches found in “Anglo-Saxon” graves. But many were not being worn on the dead person’s costume, as some seem to have been in bags or purses, and they occur with a seemingly miscellaneous assortment of other items, not with things that suggest a strong affinity with the societies in the west and north. One in a cemetery at West Heslerton, North Yorkshire, was with necklaces of amber and glass beads, including four “gold-in-glass” examples, probably late fifth- or sixth- century Anglo-Saxon. That cemetery had as many as 16 purse-groups in female graves. The contents of these little bags have been variously interpreted: as random collections of scrap brought together for recycling; as amulets for healing and fortune-telling; and as a demonstrations of respect for things from the past. Respect for things  that carried the authority of Rome may well be shown by the use of base-metal coins pierced to be worn on necklaces, and unpierced ones in the purse-groups. The role of women in long-distance social transactions is shown by the possible interpretations of material like the wrist-clasps in Kent and the Jutish square-headed brooch at Apple Down. Objects could travel by a variety of means, and the movers need not always been male, whether smiths ,traders, raiders, or warriors. If the great Beowulf poem can be taken as reflecting anything of the values of the sixth century , it shows the importance of aristocratic women in creating alliances and the settling of feuds through marriage – and how they could restart such feuds when their precarious position in an alien society caused them to be abused in some way that their blood family needed to avenge. Women ,especially young women, were important as political negotiators or “peace-weavers” , even if they did not wield formal  power. Marriages were probably important social events, no less important than funerals, and occasions when gifts would be exchanged ,some of which might end up in graves. Furthermore, it may not have been only women of the highest status who married out of their local communities , for there is now evidence of everyday contacts over the sort of distance that could easily have taken a young person more than 50 miles from their birthplace. This evidence is provided by a seemingly mundane  type of pottery, used both for burial urns and domestically, which distinctive only for one thing: that it happens to contain within its clay a mineral which is found in this country nowhere except in Leicesteshire’s forest of Charnwood. Yet this unimpressive pottery has been recognized at sites as far apart  as the London basin and central Yorkshire. Communities receiving it cannot have been very self-contained , because surely only regular and routine exchange would have taken this everyday pottery from place to place, not the sort of aristocratic, political or ritual mechanisms that could account for the travels of prestigious goods. The same is true of whetstones and hones , which are also found both in graves and in occupation sites, some of which were made from stone that outcrops a long way from the findspot. Partly because traditional explanations seem no longer fully adequate and distributions of object types do not necessarily make patterns that neatly coincide with long-held assumptions derived from Bede and other written sources ,alternative meanings are now sought in studies of early Anglo-Saxon objects, taking advantage of their considerable quantity and the precision of their contexts when properly recorded. That the number of objects and the probable scarcity of materials used in making them suggest a society with distinct hierarchies- some people having more access to resources than others- is no longer seen as quite such an obvious deduction. The “wealthier” might have been heads of households, for instance, rather than local leaders like Sussex’s putative Paecca. An increase in the quantities  and values of things deposited can be seen as “social” or “symbolic” capital, reflecting long-term accumulation of family rather than personal prestige, and perhaps of obligations as well. The age at which people died is one factor that probably affected what was put in their graves , women being most important to a family while they were producing its next generation, and thus , like the young woman at Apple Down, given the most jewellery in death. Infants and children, were rarely included in cemeteries with adults, and even more rarely provided with gravegoods, as though they had died  before they could become people. Such objects as they were given often seem “amuletic” , to drive off evil spirits. A spear in a burial need not simply be symbolic of someone who had the right to defend their community; it could be a symbol of their right to take part in violence to avenge personal injury, the theme of the early law codes. The men given shields, or even more rarely swords , were not necessarily the richest; they tend to be people who had died in their fighting prime, when most useful to their communities. Swords may have had overtones that went beyond wealth and status.  As “the work of giants” or of magic smiths, they may have been viewed as something generally less suitable for graves. Few brooches were old when buried , there was rapid change in their designs, showing that people were not resistant to new ideas and modes. Much of the jewellery became fleshier than the quoit-brooch and other styles had been. The equal-arm brooches showed the way, with eye-catching gilding . The effect of silver could be achieved by white-metal plating, used even on simple flat disc-brooches with a few “ring-and-dot” devices countersunk in their faces. Cruciform brooches became more elaborate in their shapes. Saucer-brooches and great square-headed brooches were cast with deep relief ornament , so that they would sparkle whatever angle the light came from. The latter were often further embellished with punch-marks, and much more rarely inlaid with niello, a black sulphide powder heated to form a past, or enamelled; one or two have glass or garnet settings. The saucer-brooches were sometimes punched, but apparently never inlaid. There are also more beads, made of glass, amber and sometimes crystal. Gold, is notably scarce, except for the small amounts used in gilding. Even silver was not common. The great square-headed brooches seem to have been high-status objects. Some opportunities for display seem not to have been grasped. One new introduction enabled iron to be made more spectacular , either by inlaying it with silver or by overlaying it with silver sheets. Used in various parts of the continent, this technique may have originated in Scandinavia; nevertheless, silver on or in iron remained unusual in Britain. It may have been too obviously new and thus too directly associated with alien cultures to be acceptable, unlike objects and styles that developed traditional modes, albeit  taking them in new directions. A little less rare are gold discs, thin enough to have patterns impressed into them, some also being punched or given gold-wire surrounds. Worn as pendants, the earliest of these “bracteates” are embossed with crowned heads in imitation of imperial coins, where they were not from graves but may represent some sort of votive sacrifice deposited in running water ,as they must have been too valuable to lose casually . One of the 2 coins from Oxfordshire, is post-Roman object on which there are Latin letters, so it is probably not coincidence that another bracteates, from Undley, Suffolk, is the first to have the Germanic script runes. The bracteates origins are again in Scandinavia, where they developed into a means of promoting the cult of Woden. A die for making one with a Woden image was found in a grave at Broadstairs, Kent , but the designs on the earlier pendants in England are otherwise mostly in Style I. They can be seen as Kent’s partial acceptance and partial rejection of a Jutish identity. Outside Kent they were more likely to be made in silver, or even copper alloy. Although they were pendants, they may have had a role that went beyond the ornamental and amuletic; their derivation from coins means that they might have been what anthropologists term “ primitive valuables”. In the same way, gold coins were beginning to reach England from the continent in the sixth century, as the Carisbrooke grave shows, making people familiar with the concept of fixed values and weighed payments. The coins were not only solidi, but their one-third subdivisions, “thrymsas”(also called trientes or tremisses). They are not found in large numbers ,and most come from east Kent, where, in contrast to the continent, they are nearly all in graves, often set in mounts to be worn as pendants, so that their date of burial may be long after their minting, itself usually a very uncertain date. Whilst furnished graves provide a plethora of data about deliberately deposited objects, accidentally lost or discarded things are also found in profusion within the backfills of the below-ground hollows of the many ”sunken-featured buildings” that characterize settlements of the fifth century onwards, in which rubbish accumulated when they were abandoned. Much of this residue of everyday activities consists of things that were not usually chosen for burial, such as clay loom-weights.  Bits of pottery are common; one distinctive type is low-fired and handmade; with quantities of straw and other farmyard debris, probably from animal dung, mixed in to bind the clay. This “organic-tempered” pottery is not a late Roman type , but nor is it Germanic. It seems to have been made in the south in the fifth century, spreading northwards well beyond the Thames, but was less universal than the sunken-featured buildings. Where direct comparison has been possible between pots in a settlement with urns from an adjacent cemetery, it has appeared that some forms were considered less appropriate for burial than for everyday use.