TC Lethbridge | The Sons of TC-Lethbridge

T.C. Lethbridge and the Sutton Hoo Ship-Burials

11th Oct 2007

It is said: “When St. Wilfred came to preach to the South Saxons, they had lost the art of fishing with nets altogether except for eels, and he had to teach them afresh.” Bede: ‘Ecclesiastical History’

Before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, T.C. Lethbridge and his friend C.F. Tebbutt were commissioned by the Admiralty to visit Iceland - an account of which appears in Lethbridge’s privately published book News From Tili.(1) However, during their Arctic escapade, a remarkable archaeological excavation was taking place back home in Blighty.

Mrs Edith May Petty – owner of the Sutton Hoo estate - had always been inquisitive about the cluster of ancient burial mounds that existed beneath gorse and bracken near to her home. As a consequence of this curiosity, she commissioned local archaeologist Basil Brown to undertake an exploratory excavation of the site in May 1939. His subsequent discovery of a pagan, Anglo-Saxon ship burial was to result in one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

Realising the magnitude of Brown’s discovery, Charles Phillips of Cambridge University was contacted to oversee the dig. Phillips immediately recognised the magnitude of the discovery and realising that experts on Anglo Saxon antiquities need to be involved, he advised Mrs Petty to contact the British Museum. The subsequent discoveries: seventeen burial mounds, buried treasure, great works of art, sacrificed horses and evidence of human execution amounted to one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in Europe, nee the world.

Martin Carver, Professor of Archaeology at the University of York and Director of Research at Sutton Hoo since 1983 suggests: “The exploration of the site is challenging and the interpretation of its meaning always controversial.”(2) Because of this ambiguity, amateurs and professionals alike have, over the years, voiced their own interpretations of the site. Not one to let a major mystery on his own doorstep pass him by, T.C. Lethbridge had his own unique views on the Sutton Hoo burials.

On his return from Iceland, Lethbridge was fortunate enough to witness the first Sutton Hoo ship burial in her mound, or as he most eloquently put it: “the ghost of the vessel ”.(3) During Brown’s initial investigations in Mound 1, he came across clusters of iron ship rivets in the sandy soil. Astutely, he carefully left the rivets in situ and following a pattern, he revealed the outline of a rising stem of a huge buried ship. All of the wood had long since rotted away and all that was left was an eerie, fossil like shape of the mighty ship. On revealing the great ship, Phillips commented: “To me, one of my most satisfying experiences in 1939 was to be able to show the complete hull of the boat with all her clench nails in position, the details of her gunwale strakes strengthened to resist the strain of forty rowers, the faintly visible ghosts of the tholes against which the oars laboured and the specially strengthened point in the stern where the steersman managed his great steering oar.”(4)

The sandy soil into which the ship-burials had been intered had been responsible for dissolving not only the ships, but also any remains of those buried within. The absence of any trace of bone had left many to speculate that the ‘grave’ was not an actual burial, but a cenotaph to the deceased, whose body may well have been lost at sea. Lethbridge was aware of such ritual in Scandinavia, but not in Anglo-Saxon graves in Britain. Having excavated a number of contemporary cemeteries in Cambridgeshire, most notably; Shudy Camps, Burwell and Hollywell Row, he was well aware of the destructive nature of the soil in the vicinity. He was also aware that the idea of a cenotaph was very different from that of providing the actual body with goods to use at its resurrection, as was the case at Sutton Hoo.

Lethbridge was curious to know if the boat burials at Sutton Hoo were a distortion of an ancient Roman burial custom. The idea of creating a home for the dead was common in Britain, with roots as far back as the Neolithic. He therefore concluded that the boat burial was an extension of this conjecture. Having already pursued the correlation between the skin-covered tent and the upturned boat, he was certain that the Sutton Hoo burials were related to this line of thinking.(5) Although the ship burial culture was prevalent in Scandinavia during Anglo-Saxon times, he was astutely aware that there had been no close exchange of ideas of personal ornament between Norway and England in the Dark Ages until the Viking raids began two hundred years later.(6)

Lethbridge observed that the Sutton Hoo ship he had visited looked like a large canoe. Having had the privy of examining Icelandic open cod-boats – direct descendents of the Viking boats – he realised that the ship uncovered by Brown and Phillips was not of this lineage. He noted that the direct ancestors of the Viking ships were like those discovered at Kvalsund in Norway. He therefore concluded that the Sutton Hoo boats were more likely representatives of a Baltic line of origin.

If, as our opening quote from the Venerable Bede suggests: St. Wilfred had to reacquaint the South Saxons with the art of fishing, then it is likely that he taught them something he learnt from Roman provincials. Lethbridge was familiar with the Sussex luggers and suggested that the designs past on by St. Wilfred were direct descendents of this line of evolution and bore no resemblance to the war ships buried at Sutton Hoo. Nearly all of the Viking Age and Danish boats found on the Continent are double-ended, but he understood that only two out of the three Anglo-Saxon boats found in East Anglia had square sterns(7) and Lethbridge adjudged these to be boats of the coble type.(8) He suggested that this feature, hitherto unknown in Teutonic shipbuilding, indicates some outside influence at work in England. He believed that local types - in use on estuaries to which the Saxons came - had influenced the Saxon boat-builders in the seventh century C.E. He suggested that if we could associate this long, sheerless type of boat all up the east coast of England, then the case for Viking ancestry would be stronger, but this did not appear to be the case.

It is likely that Lethbridge was invited to view the Sutton Hoo site by his good friend Sir Thomas Kendrick – Keeper of British and Medieval Antiquities at British Museum. In turn, it was Charles Phillips who had requested Kendrick – the eminence grise of Anglo-Saxon art – onto the dig when Edith Pretty kindly bequeathed the Sutton Hoo finds to the British Museum. On realising the significance of the undertaking, Kendrick charged Rupert Bruce-Mitford – an assistant keeper in the British Museum’s Department of British and Medieval Antiquities to bring the ship-burial to publication: it was a task that was to become Bruce-Mitford’s life work. Although Lethbridge and Phillips were known to each other at Cambridge, Phillips did not hide the fact that he questioned his colleague’s approach and methodology,(9) so it is likely that the Lethbridge’s invitation down to Sutton Hoo came directly from Kendrick.

Phillips might not have welcomed Lethbridge’s contribution, but without doubt, his intervention added to the rich tapestry of ideas that contributed to making Sutton Hoo one of the most remarkable and intriguing archaeological finds ever. Lethbridge was astutely aware of the dogma that was accumulating around his profession and he astutely realised that even the layman’s opinion had a role to play in his vocation. He realised the importance of local knowledge and took every opportunity to encourage and nurture the thoughts and opinions of even those with peripheral expertise. His report ‘Boredom in Archaeology’ (‘The Archaeological News Letter’ Vol.3/No.6 – December, 1950) later provided a persuasive anthropological argument for this train of thought.

welbourn TEKH - Grantham - October 2007

NB. Click on the image for enlarged view.

Notes and References:
1. Note: Iceland, or Tili, as it was known in the days of the Venerable Bede, was considered to be six-days sail from Britain.

2. Carver, M. (1998) “Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?” British Museum Press. pxii.

3. Lethbridge, T.C. (1948) “Merlin’s Island” Metuen & Co. p.106

4. Phillips, C.W. (1987) “My Life in Archaeology” Alan Sutton. P78.

5. Note: These ideas were later to surface in ‘Merlin’s Island’

6. Schetelig, H. (1907) “Cruciform Brooches of Norway” John Brieg: Bergen.

7. Note: The 42’ boat discovered at Snape Common had a square stern. Phillips informed Lethbridge that the boat found beneath the smaller mound at Sutton Hoo also had a square stern.

8. Note: As well as the two Sutton Hoo ship-burials discovered in 1939 above the river Deben, another was found in 1862 at Snape Common near Aldeburgh overlooking the River Alde.

9. Phillips, C.W. (1987) “My Life in Archaeology” Alan Sutton. “In general such archaeological activities as there were at Cambridge were in the hands of a little clique of substantial means headed by T.C. Lethbridge of Trinity, who was an able enough man but unpredictable and often uncooperative.” p.7 “Men like T.C. Lethbridge and Charles Leaf seemed to be able to do rather second-rate work and get away with it. Leaf was a victim of the late war but Lethbridge, though very able and producing interesting ideas, had no real conscience in his work in the last analysis.” P.33