Англосаксонское кладбище в Снейпе: раскопки и находки VI века.

Anglo Saxon burial site

The Snape Anglo Saxon Cemetery is a place of burial dated to the 6th century AD located on Snape Common, near to the town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, Eastern England. Dating to the early part of the Anglo Saxon Era of English history, it contains a variety of different forms of burial, with inhumation and cremation burials being found in roughly equal proportions. The site is also known for the inclusion of a high status ship burial. A number of these burials were included within burial mounds. The first recorded excavation of the site was conducted by antiquarians in 1827, with a later, more thorough investigation taking place in 1862 under the control of landowner Septimus Davidson. Artefacts from the earliest excavations soon disappeared, although important finds uncovered from the 1862 excavation included a glass claw beaker and the Snape Ring, now housed in The British Museum, London. During the 20th century, the heathland that the cemetery was on was given over to farmland, with a road and house being constructed atop the site. Today, the burial mounds themselves are not accessible to the public, although the artefacts uncovered by the excavation are on display at the Aldeburgh Museum in the nearby coastal town of Aldeburgh.

The Snape Anglo Saxon cemetery is located in the north east corner of the modern parish of Snape, approximately 550 metres from the parish boundary with Friston. Although several modern houses stand on or near to the cemetery site, the main settlement at Snape village is located 1.5 kilometres away, with the village of Friston slightly nearer, at 1.25 kilometres away. According to the monk Bede, writing in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in the 8th century, the Anglo Saxon age began when three tribal groups from Northern Germany and Southern Denmark – the Saxons, Angles and Jutes – began to migrate into Britain, where they were initially employed as mercenaries by the indigenous Romano British population following the collapse of Roman Imperial rule. Archaeological evidence corroborates this, but also indicates the likely presence of a fourth continental tribal group settling in Britain during the 5th and 6th centuries, the Frisians. It is likely that the new settlers did not adhere strictly to their old tribal and ethnic ties, with new syncretic blends developing and new identities forged as they mixed with one another and with the indigenous British population. There is evidence that these colonists maintained ties with the Germanic language cultures of Scandinavia, Germany and Northern France; they certainly traded with these societies for luxury goods, and told epic stories such as Beowulf which were set in their ancestral lands. The Snape cemetery lies within land that comprised a part of the Anglo Saxon Kingdom of East Anglia, which according to Bede had been settled by the Angle tribe.

The Snape Anglo Saxon cemetery has an east–west dimension of approximately 200 metres and a north–south dimension of approximately 70 metres. The ratio of the cremation to inhumation burials was approximately 1:1. At least nine – and possibly ten – tumuli, or burial mounds, were erected at the site. The ship was at least 14 metres long and contained a beam 3 metres in width. Clinker built with riveted construction, the rivets were spaced at intervals of approximately 140 millimetres and according to the watercolour painting, there were nine strakes a side. Also uncovered were some fragments initially identified as jasper and a single fragment of blue glass.

The best known artefact from the Anglo Saxon burial is the Snape ring, which consists of a Roman onyx gemstone engraved with the figure of Bonus Eventus which has been set in a large hoop. After the original excavation the ring disappeared, and was returned to Bruce Mitford (and then the British Museum) by the granddaughter of the original excavator. Filmer Sankey disputed Rupert Bruce Mitford's analysis, arguing instead that the Snape Ring had been created in continental Europe, probably by Frankish craftsmen in the early mid 6th century. Supporting this idea, he noted that it had close parallels in both form and decoration to Frankish jewelry of this date and that Germanic settings of Roman intaglios are common on the continent but otherwise unknown from Anglo Saxon England. It is believed that the mounds were excavated for a second time in the mid 19th century by antiquarians working for the Ordnance Survey; no records of this investigation have been found. Enthused by the success of the dig, he decided to return to excavate at the cemetery the following year, putting in a trench twelve yards long which unearthed over forty vases and a few other finds.

In the 1920s, the cemetery site saw the construction of a house known as St. Margaret's, immediately north of the three mounds that Davidson had excavated. The tumuli themselves became a part of the house's garden, which was ringed with some newly planted pines. It has been claimed that various urns were discovered both in the construction of the house and when digging holes for the plantation of the trees, although such claims have never been corroborated and the finds never located. During the Second World War, the heathland began to be ploughed for agricultural usage, although no finds were ever reported. In 1951, the mounds on the southern side of the road, which Davidson had not excavated, were also ploughed over, although again no finds were recorded. In an academic paper published in the pages of the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology in 1952, the archaeologist Rupert Bruce Mitford (1914–1994) began Snape's rehabilitation by providing a full summary of Dickinson's excavation, later being described by archaeologist William Filmer Sankey as "a brilliant synthesis of what was then known". In 1972, a sewer trench was being dug along the northern side of the road, and after a local resident alerted Ipswich Museum it was agreed that archaeologists would observe the construction. They subsequently recovered nine cremations, seven being urned, one being in a thin bronze bowl and the other being loose. Filmer Sankey's final excavation report eventually appeared in 2001 as the 95th volume in the East Anglian Archaeology Report series published by Suffolk County Council.