ANGLO-SAXON CERAMICS AND THE SURVIVAL OF PAGANISM For many years, archaeologists have attempted to track the spread

of early English Christianity. The historical record, particularly the writings of Bede, contains an apparently detailed account, and has heavily influenced our approach to understanding the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon world. The archaeological evidence is, however, somewhat ambiguous. The majority of studies have concentrated primarily on cemeteries, with both grave-goods and the symbolism of their decoration given particular attention. The presence of cross motifs on, for example, cloisonn garnet brooches, has led to endless arguments as to whether or not these are evidence of the deceased having been Christian. We know that the practise of furnishing burials gradually fell from fashion after the conversion, but there is no guarantee that unfurnished graves contained Christians, nor that furnished burials were those of pagans. The picture is extremely complicated, and can be summed up as follows. It is very clear ... that the contest between Heathenism and Christianity was obstinately prolonged in England and that among the people, Paganism was not quickly eradicated, especially in their funeral rites and ceremonies. A desire to lie among their kindred may long have prevailed over the remonstrances of the Christian priests. How long the remains of Heathens and Christians continued to be intermingled in one common cemetery is a problem in Archaeology which will need further discoveries to solve satisfactorily ... John Akerman, November 24, 1859. It is also fairly obvious from the historical record that the arrival of Christianity did not bring about a instant cessation of pagan practice. This was in the main due to the initial tactics of the church, which concentrated on converting the elite, then waiting for the lower orders to follow, in a sort of ecumenical trickle-down effect. Certainly, it seems that most of the English elite embraced the new religion with some enthusiasm, but the common people appear to have been less eager. This is not a singular case. The nature of the conflict between ideologies within a society was given some consideration by Randall McGuire and Robert Paynter in The Archaeology of Inequality, and they came to the following conclusion: Non-elites often do not share the dominant ideology of the elites, and in fact have ideologies of resistance. This suggests that dominant ideologies were better suited to securing the coherence of the dominant class than the submission of subordinates. There is also the problem which was noted by the historian Catherine Cubitt Assessing the extent to which any individual or society has adopted Christianity is not a simple task: the essentials of the Christian way of life are not fixed, but fluid and culturally determined This was clearly the case, and the written record shows us that English Christianity absorbed many pagan practices in an effort to make the new religion acceptable to the people. History tells us that St. Augustines initial attempts to convert the English in the early years of the 7th century were only partially successful. His first major scalp was King Aethelbert of Kent, who accepted baptism on the understanding that no-one else should be forced into conversion. Despite this, in AD601, Pope Gregory, Augustines chief tactician, wrote to the king urging him to 'abolish the worship of idols and destroy their shrines'. This was ignored

by Aethelbert, so, after a brief rethink, Gregory wrote to Augustine instructing him to

'destroy the idols, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up, and relics enclosed in them. In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that its temples are not destroyed, may abandon idolatry, and resort to these places as before, and may come to adore the true God.' This would appear to have been a more successful ploy, and a later instruction in the same letter told Augustine to similarly Christianize feasts and festivals, explaining perhaps why we celebrate Xmas next week, despite the fact that there is no evidence that the Bethlehem census of 4AD was held in December. The early church did not just hijack festivals. Tim Taylor has suggested that modern clerical garb is not, as traditionally explained, a result of early priests dressing in Roman togas, but due to the fact that they adopted the same mode of dress as male Germanic pagan priests, who, according to Tacitus, dressed as women. Tim has also argued that the practice of preparing baptismal water by dripping hot wax from a burning candle into it has sexual overtones that can only be pagan in origin. When all else failed, however, the church was not above using distinctly non-Christian tactics. The novelist Tom Robbins once described the early popes as making Richard Nixon look like a hustler at a hick carnival, and he may have a point. According to Bede, in AD686, Cadwalla, the king of the Gewissae, the proto-kingdom of Wessex, was preparing to attack the then stillpagan Isle of Wight, and asked the church for support in return for one-quarter of the land if he was successful. The church took up his offer, and sent along a priest. After an overwhelming victory for the Gewissae, Cadwalla had the surviving population of the island baptised, then put to death. Soon after this, Cadwalla went to Rome for baptism by the pope, and then died shortly afterwards. He was buried in St. Peters and the pope had a plaque erected to commemorate the Saxon kings great piety. At the same time that Cadwalla was converting the Isle of Wight, the church was beginning to realize that the trickle down effect was failing to work, and began to use legislation to bring the doubters to heel. The later seventh century Penitentials of Theodore catalogued a long list of proscribed practices which included sacrificing to devils, augury, the eating of food which had been offered as sacrifice and the burning of grain for the well-being of the dead. These were certainly pagan practices, and burnt grain is occasionally found in early Anglo-Saxon graves. The texts also legislated for the baptism of heathens and the status of pre-existing pagan marriages. There were also penalties listed for Christian clerics who performed pagan divinations. Thus, there were still many doubters nearly a century after the arrival of Augustine. Over 50 years later, paganism was still alive and well, for in AD747, one of the canons of the Synod of Clovesho stated that each year, every bishop should go round his diocese to forbid pagan practices such as divination, soothsaying, augury, omens, amulets, and spells, and as late as AD786, the papal legates were admonishing the English for dressing in heathen fashion and slitting their horse's nostrils in the manner of pagans. Laws proscribing pagan practice were still being introduced as late as the ninth century, under Alfred. Archaeologically, most cemeteries with origins in the pagan period fell from use by about AD 700, with churchyard burial becoming the norm. This would have been a significant step along the road to Christianization, as the Anglo-Saxons appear to have placed a great deal of importance on legitimization through ancestral association, and so burial in a churchyard would 3

have been a significant switch in emphasis. Certainly, the Buttermarket cemetery in Ipswich, which fell from use around AD700, was a major industrial complex within 50 years, suggesting that veneration of the pagan dead had all but ceased by that time. So, why were the people offering such staunch resistance when the elite so keen to convert? The answer would seem to be that early English Christianity was indeed tailored to secure the coherence of the elite. The period AD600-800 saw a constant struggle for power between the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex, and the killing of kings was not uncommon. Another of the Legantine decrees of AD786 was 'Let no-one conspire to kill a king, for he is the Lords anointed, and if anyone takes part in such a crime..(they shall) be burnt in the eternal fires.' You wont find that in the bible. The church had also, by this time, began to consecrate English kings at their coronations, so to strike a blow at the king was to strike a blow at God himself. This too would seem to be an adoption of pagan practice, as the majority of Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies led in most cases, back to a pagan god. So, where were these pagans, and how can we identify them? As I stated earlier, material culture has long been used in an attempt to identify the spread of Christianity, but what evidence does it offer for pagan resistance? There appear to be two main barriers to a clear understanding: The first is the classic anthropological problem of identifying sub-groups within a society who see themselves as different, but, to the outsider, share many common attributes. The second is that resistance to any hegemony is difficult to detect. History tends to be written by the winners, and our knowledge of English paganism is severely restricted by the fact that Bede and other Christian writers refused to record pagan practices on the grounds that they were sinful. Evidence of resistance is perhaps even more difficult to find in the archaeological record, as changes in material culture, our primary source of evidence of change in the archaeological record, can come about for any number of reasons. We know that material culture was a highly important method of signalling social and cultural affiliation in early Anglo-Saxon England, and pottery was one of the foremost media for doing so. Julian Richards' work on Anglo-Saxon cremation urns of the pagan period has shown that the stamped and incised designs, in tandem with the size and shape of the pots themselves, were a symbolic representation of the deceased contained within them, and were related to age, gender and social status. He also noted that these annular brooches and the plan views of the corresponding cremation urns are remarkably similar, suggesting that the urns were broadcasting the same information about the individuals in death that the brooches did in life. Other more recent work, such as that by Gabor Thomas and Phil Sidebottom, has shown fairly conclusively that even during the late Saxon period, material culture as diverse as strap-ends and stone crosses were a means of broadcasting cultural information. The practise of stamping and incising funerary pottery such as this was relatively common during the pagan period, although less than 5% of domestic pottery was treated in such fashion. The use of such pottery in the domestic context is unclear, but all generally agree that such vessels were marked out as special. Decorated pottery began to fall from use during the seventh century, the time of the Christian conversion, so decorating pots may have been seen as pagan practice. Certainly, pottery of the 8th and early 9th century, the time when Christianity was beginning to exert its grip, is rarely decorated. For example, at Hamwic, the middle Saxon emporium of 4

Southampton, only 100 of the 40,000 or so sherds of local pottery which have been unearthed have stamped decoration, and none of the thousands of sherds of local pottery known from London or York are stamped. However, in East Anglia in the eighth century, a new pottery type appeared, which revived the use of some of the symbols which were commonplace on decorated pottery of the pagan period. Ipswich Ware first came into production in the eponymous Suffolk town around AD720 and was the only eighth century English pottery type which used stamped and incised decoration to any great degree. The techniques were exclusively limited to large jars and pitchers, and around 10% of such vessels were stamped, a proportion comparable with the domestic pottery of the pagan period. No overtly pagan stamp motifs such as swastikas or runes are found on Ipswich Ware, but many of the motifs which were used can be found on earlier, pagan cremation urns. However, there is a single sherd of Ipswich Ware which has what can be regarded as an overtly pagan symbol as a stamp motif. The sherd, as can be seen, is decorated with stamped face-masks. Richard Hodges, amongst others, has argued that the sherd is evidence of royal patronage of the Ipswich Ware pottery industry, due to the fact that similar motifs are known from the whetstone sceptre from Sutton Hoo. However, the Ipswich Ware sherd post-dates the Sutton Hoo burial by at least a century, and such motifs are not uncommon on pagan Anglo-Saxon material culture. Two sixth-century cremation urns from the Lackford cemetery in Suffolk have stamps which could be said to be stylised faces, and moulded face-masks occasionally occur on other vessels of the period. Such motifs are common on brooches, the significance of which has already been mentioned, and they also occur on other items of material culture, such as drinking cups and buckets. Julian Richards has suggested that the facemask may have been a positive symbol of Anglo-Saxon identity, and it is possible that it represents one of the pagan gods. The Sutton Hoo helmet was perhaps the pinnacle of the symbolism of the facemask in pagan Eastern England. As noted earlier, the genealogies of many of the Anglo-Saxon royal families lead ultimately back to the time of myth. Thus, when the king wore this helmet, he was taking on divine identity, a reminder to his people that he was descended from the gods, and a legitimization of his position. So, I would suggest that the presence of stamped facemasks on an Ipswich Ware pot is not evidence of royal patronage, but rather is evidence of a positive statement of pagan identity in an increasingly Christian world. There is other evidence for a revival of pagan symbols. The Ipswich potters used a limited suite of stamp arrangements, including pendant triangles, the staple decorative arrangement of sixthcentury cremation urns in East Anglia. It is possible, of course, that the stamping and pendant triangle decoration of Ipswich Ware was merely atavism, and that the potters were copying designs they had found on old potsherds, but if this was the case, why were swastikas and runes not used? The answer can only be that such symbols still retained their potency some 150 years after the arrival of Christianity. Pendant triangles do not appear solely on pots. The silver-gilt mounts of the Sutton Hoo drinking cups and the rim-bands of the Taplow and Burghead drinking horns are hung with pendant triangles, as were many buckets. Thus, the only objects apart from pots which had pendant triangle decoration were containers for liquids but not all containers of these types were marked with pendant triangles. This would suggest that, as with pagan pottery, those that were, were special, and were linked to pagan practice, and the same may therefore be true of Ipswich 5

ware. Certainly, there is good reason to suspect that drinking horns were intrinsically pagan objects. One of the few things we do know about pagan Anglo-Saxon religion is that goats appear to have been venerated. A burial at Yeavering in Northumbria, thought to be of a pagan priest, contained a metal staff which terminates in what appears to be a stylised goat, and the remains of a goats skull were at the feet of the interred individual. Yeavering, the most important royal and ceremonial centre in the north of England in the sixth century, had the Saxon name of Ad-Gefrin, the Hill of the Goats. It also perhaps no coincidence that the Christian portrayal of the anti-Christ is a goat-like figure with cloven hooves and horns. The bible merely describes the Devil as a fallen angel, and hooves and horns do not come into the equation, but early English Christians invariably described the old religion as devil-worship, which may explain where this image originated. The point of this is that the papal legates of AD786 condemned the use of horn for communion chalices and patens, suggesting that such material was linked to pagan practice. Since drinking horns, along with pots, buckets and cups, are the only type of material culture usually found with pendant triangle decoration, vessels marked with such symbols may have had pagan significance, although with a less overt symbol set which was only meaningful to those who knew. To quote Mary Beaudry: Style communicates subculture, and is instrumental in group definition and boundary maintenance. subcultures wield style as a tool to identify those who belong... However, the same symbol can have different meanings within different subdivisions of the same social group. A recent example of this is the practice of wearing bunches of keys on the belt. This was generally taken up amongst mainly working-class males as machismo, the size of the bunch of keys being a symbol of importance due to the number of locked places that they had access to. Amongst the gay community, however, bunches of keys worn on the belt were a way of broadcasting sexual preferences. In this case, it was not the size of the bunch of keys which was important, but the position on the belt. In some cases, the wearing of a coloured handkerchief was also involved, with both the colour of the handkerchief and the way in which it was worn acting as a modifier for the information broadcast by the position of the keys. Thus, the decoration of Ipswich Ware pottery in eighth century England may had a duality which was of sufficient ambiguity to allow their use. Richards showed that in the case of pagan cremation containers, pendant triangles were very strongly linked to male burials, so such decoration, in East Anglia, may have been a traditional symbol of maleness. The fact that the only Ipswich Ware vessel types which had such decoration were storage jars and pitchers suggests the decoration was a traditional symbol of male control over food and drink, with the churchs attempts to ban the consumption of food offered as sacrifice strengthening the possibility of a duality of meaning of the pendant triangle. This all suggests that Ipswich, one of the most important towns in England during the eighth century, was a hotbed of paganism, despite the efforts of the church to clamp down on such practices. A case can be made that it was happening with the churchs knowledge. The historical record tells us that Frisian merchants were very active in England in the 8th century, and Ipswich ware, which was kiln-fired and mass-produced, is both stylistically and technologically similar to their pottery, but very different to all other English pottery of the time, which was more or less 6

the same generally locally-made and bonfire-fired wares of the early Saxon period. Frisian pottery is rarely found in England, although their coins are plentiful. The reason for this may have been simple economics. Rather than carrying heavy, bulky and cheap pottery on the long journey across the North Sea, they utilized the plentiful supplies of locally available clay in Ipswich to produce the pottery needed to carry out their domestic activities in a culturally acceptable fashion. The pots could have been made either by themselves, or by English potters under their patronage. The Frisians were also pagan at the time, and Ipswich has produced neither evidence of a middle Saxon church, nor any middle Saxon artefacts with any characteristics which can be regarded as Christian. So why, at a time when the historical record suggests that the church was clamping down on pagan practise, was this allowed to happen? The answer appears to be that it was putting mammon before God. Ipswich was the main redistribution centre for imported goods on the east coast of England, and the distribution of Ipswich ware, shown here, shows that it had a hinterland far greater than any of the other English wics. The fact that the church was doing very well out of the trade of the time may have been an overriding factor. The evidence from the Ipswich Buttermarket cemetery showing that the dead were no longer venerated, and the non-use of symbols such as swastikas and runes indicates a certain covertness in pagan practise, suggesting a degree of compromise on both sides. But why only Ipswich? Probably because the two other southern wics, London and Southampton, were mainly supplied by Frankish merchants, who were Christian. Thus, a clamp-down on paganism in those places would not have affected trade. And so to finish. This is obviously a big subject to pack into a relatively short time, and I have been forced to skim over what are often quite complex arguments. The fact remains that the pagans of 7th and 8th century England have not had their place in history, primarily because the historical record of the period was written solely by Christians. However, we cannot hope to ever construct a meaningful model of the spread of Christianity, nor of pagan resistance, if the writings of Christian hagiographers such as Bede are the main point of reference. We know that artefacts can reflect social change, and this paper has demonstrated, I hope, that when placed in their context, they have the potential to identify things that the written record cannot.