Leslie E. Webster

The Staffordshire (Ogley Hay) hoard: problems of interpretation

The hoard presents us with a startling number of unfamiliar images from the Anglo-Saxon past, not least in the new icon of treasure that it presents. As the descriptions of treasure and gift-giving in Beowulf so vividly remind us, the gaining of treasure, and its corollary, gift-giving, were major preoccupations for Anglo-Saxons and their northern European contemporaries, whether Clovis, showering the crowds in Tours with gold solidi when he was created consul in 508, Oswiu attempting to buy off Penda before the Battle of Winwæd with what Bede (HE III.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969: 288–91) described as an incalculable and incredible store of royal treasures or the huge Danegelds extorted by Vikings in the tenth and early eleventh century. But until July 2009, the picture presented by the archaeological evidence for Anglo-Saxon treasure could hardly have been more different: the material remains of treasure with which we are familiar come overwhelmingly from high-status burials, or as individual gold finds without context, most of them the result of relatively recent metal-detecting activity. Only one seventh-century Anglo-Saxon gold hoard exists, from Crondall in Hampshire, dated to c. 640; but that is essentially a coin hoard, the only non-numismatic items two small clasps which must have fastened the purse or satchel containing the coins.

Medieval Britain in 1976

The compilers of this summary wish to thank all those who have kindly helped them by giving information about excavations and small finds. They appeal to all who deal with excavations or antiquities of the period with which this journal is concerned to bring to their attention year by year any new finds in any part of the British Isles in order that the survey may be as complete as possible. Part I has been compiled by Leslie E. Webster and Part II by John Cherry.

Howard Williams. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain . xiv+260 pages, 73 illustrations. 2006. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 0-521-84019-8 hardback £55 &

plurality of families’ representing a manifestation of a state ‘more at ease controlling urban settlements and nuclear families than dealing with larger mobile clans’ (p. 407). The more-or-less egalitarian social organisation evident in the architecture and 600 burial tumuli in the peripheral settlement of Aghram Nadharif contrasts with the diversification by rank apparent in Garama and its cemeteries, suggesting the ‘superposition of a political elite on a kin-based society’ – the consequence of the incorporation of this oasis community into the larger Garamantian polity (p. 417).