Back with Rædwald and the Wuffings again! This time: the tickly question of religion…  Woden or Christ – which way was East Anglia going to fall?  It isn’t as cut and dried as you might think…

Rædwald’s other great claim to fame, aside for his alleged occupation of Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, is his double altar at his temple at Rendlesham.  Rædwald is hedging his bets.  He has a Christian altar – that new, exciting religion that was about to whip through Anglo Saxon Britain like wildfire, but was so far just a minority sect, and something that those pesky native Britains do.  He also has another altar – probably to his own ancestor, Woden, and maybe other gods as well – on which sacrifices were made.  Perhaps Rædwald thought he had covered all the angles (boom, boom), ensuring that he was still fine with the old gods, but nonetheless not ruling out the possibility that this new religion might be the right one.

Bede, who records this in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, doesn’t think that Rædwald is doing himself any favours.  Bede considers Rædwald to be apostate – that is that he has wilfully turned away from the True Faith and from Christ.  He is thus worse than those who have not yet been exposed to the new faith.  Bede is not impressed, ‘This King Redwald was a man of noble descent but ignoble in his actions.’[1]

The cause of Rædwald’s apostacy was his wife.  Unlike Rædwald’s friend Edwin, who he assists in becoming King of Northumbria, who is persuaded to Christianity in part by his wife, Rædwald’s wife is an old school heathen who lures him back to the old worship.  Who was Rædwald’s wife?  It has been argued that she might have been an East Saxon, the next door kingdom, because of the close links between the royal families for the next century.

How devout was Rædwald?  Having not one but two altars might make him sound devout – but Bede is of course focusing on religious life.  Rædwald may have been devout – but he was also a politician.  He is baptised probably around the same time as his brother king, Sæberht of the East Saxons.  Bede mentions that both go to Kent to be baptised by the new mission there, which was allowed by the current Bretwalda, at least of southern Britain, the king of Kent, Æthelberht who had also recently converted.  This would have been in the early years of the 7^th century.  So for a short time it looked as if Christianity was taking over southern Britain.  Kent, Essex and East Anglia were all notionally Christian.

But in 616 Sæberht dies, and the country reverts to paganism.  Æthelberht dies the same year, and because of various shenanigans concerning the new king Eadbald and his marriage to his father’s wife (his stepmother) to ensure, in the old pagan fashion, the fertility of the land, the church reacts in a bad way and the bishops Mellitus and Justus skip across to France to sit out the political and religious storm.  We know that Rædwald is persuaded to revert to his old faith – while still keeping the flame of Christianity alive.  In 616 he has the only royal Christian altar in all the Saxon kingdoms!

This was a wobble – soon Christianity was re-established in Kent, and starts to gather pace.  But what was going on elsewhere in East Anglia while Rædwald kept his two altars?  There may have been British believers still left in East Anglia in the early 7^th century – the named Beccles may suggest a place of a Roman church, an Ecclesia, just as the place name Eccles also does – in the case of Beccles, possibly Beata Ecclesia.  But the British are silent in this land from this point on.  A vague whisper of a monster at Iken when St Botolph arrives suggests British desperate to keep the incoming monks away from their fastness to Norman Scarfe[2], and St Guthlac at Crowland in the Fens also hears the sounds of devils – were these also disenfranchised British as Colgrave suggests[3]?

But the man who was buried in Mound 1 was treated in death a pagan through and through.  He goes to the afterlife in a ship with all the riches and finery of his life around him.  No expense is spared to ensure he has a grand entry to the world of feasting and fighting that would make up an afterlife not dissimilar to the life he had on earth.  The metalwork found on his body hints at the story and ritual world he must have been immersed in – the boars on the shoulder clasps, the serpents on the buckle, the birds and quadrupeds that hint at more than we can ever know.  There are hints that the man buried there was aware of the Christian world – he has an Irish hanging bowl with a fish at the bottom.  A Christian reference?  The fish may be a Christian symbol here – but it might not, it might simply be swimming in the liquid these bowls were meant to contain, just a surprise at the bottom! Then there are the spoons – amazing how a theory can hang on so little a thing!  These two silver spoons look like they are marked Paulos and Saulos – Paul and Saul.  Are they a baptismal gift relating to St Paul’s conversion from nasty Christian persecutor (and tent maker – always good to have something on the side, eh?) to Christian zealot (and tent maker, just in case, eh?) given by – who knows? Æthelberht of Kent as his godfather?  Or are they, as is more likely, simply a gift from a Frankish noble or king to another king?  And is the Saulos simply a mistake of the engraver – should they both say Paulos?

Was this the burial the semi-Christian Rædwald would have wanted? More than likely – it honours the traditions of the ancestors, which we know were important to him, and it asserts his power beyond the grave by the high burial mound there on the river, visible to all who passed by and showing the might and wealth of the Wuffing line. Time would have to wait a little way for kings to realise what Christianity could for them…

[1] Bede Ecclesiastical History of the English People (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 133

[2] Scarfe, Norman “St Botolph, The Iken Cross, and the Coming of East Anglian Christianity”, Suffolk in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1986), pp. 39-51 

[3] Stevenson, Jane “Cristianity in Sixth- and Seventh-Century Southumbria”, in Martin Carver (ed.) The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1992), p. 177

When you think of Minsmere, your mind probably turns towards the flagship RSPB reverse that nestles within the woodland and reedbeds south of Dunwich and Westleton. That’s Minsmere today: a bustling place full of birdwatchers and families and walkers – and the wildlife they have all come to see. The Minsmere New Cut stops you from going too far into the marshes to the south, however, unless you are walking the coast path. Beyond that there is a bit of marshland where few people venture, even though it’s still part of the reserve. And that’s where you’ll find the chapel. The chapel of the bells.

From inland there’s a direct path to the beach. Going from Eastbridge, you can walk out very easily to the rather sad looking ruin. My Mum and I did this one warm day in 2012, after being frustrated in getting a coffee at the RSPB reverse café by time and then picking our way along a rather small road that isn’t very advertised but does run from the reserve to Eastbridge! Unfortified by coffee, we hared out along the path to the coast and back again so that we could be in time for a much more important thing – lunch at the Eel’s Foot pub back in Eastbridge with our menfolk who had not joined us on the walk. The path doesn’t actually go to the chapel (and I wouldn’t ever suggest that you trespassed, of course!) but it’s easy enough to see from it. The building, at first glance, doesn’t even look very ancient – there’s an undeniably concrete structure right in the middle of it. Closer inspection shows this to be a WWI pillbox, one of many, many that are found along this stretch of coast, but offering a little more shelter than most.

As your eye gets in, though, you realise that this is an ancient building, and moreover that it is an ecclesiastical one. Most of the larger stones have gone, leaving only the rubble construction behind, but you can see a little buttress here, and the round shape of a Romanesque arch there. A chapel! Then you look around and you wonder why. There’s nothing to see. It’s pretty wild out there, and there is a good mile and a half or so to get back to Eastbridge. Well, never mind, Rendlesham church isn’t very close to the modern settlement, placed as it may be to serve an Anglo Saxon settlement long gone. But this is slightly different.

Minsmere chapel was never a parish church. It was built here to be a desert place for a small group of religious men. The little religious settlement was founded by Ranulf de Glanville in 1182, one of two that this important Suffolk nobleman founded late in life. Ranulf was the Chief Justiciar of England in the last years of the reign of Henry II, and the king’s right hand man, effectively the regent when Henry wasn’t here (most of the time!) The new community was a Premonstratensian community – the White Canons. This was a French order similar to the Cistercians, but canons, ordained priests, who preach and serve in the community, not only in their religious house. I’m carefully not saying monastery – because not being monks, canons don’t live in a monastery! The other one was Butley Priory, which was an Augustinian house, the Black Canons. Not much survives of that, either! Though for different reasons.

The real equivalent to Butley Priory is Leiston Abbey, because just under two centuries later in 1363 the abbey moved to Leiston. It really did move as well – parts of Leiston Abbey are made up of building stone that comes from the Minsmere site – in this area, good building stone was too good to abandon! Only the chapel was left, the canons perhaps unwilling to disturb the house of God. Why did they go? Flooding is the most likely answer, but it’s possible that there was sickness as well – malaria is a possibility, as a recent study of Anglo Saxon populations shows that anaemia without malnutrition was more common in the same coastal and wetland regions as it was in the post-medieval period when we know malaria was definitely here.

It is possible that the church was maintain and a cleric from the abbey was based there throughout the Middle Ages. There may, of course, have been a tunnel to the chapel – Leiston Abbey is well known for its tunnels, which run to the Greyfriars in Dunwich and to Framlingham Castle, they say. So why not to lonely Minsmere as well?

The wild marshland and pasture around the little abandoned chapel doesn’t suggest that anything else was going on except that little religious house. However, areas that look wild now are often discovered to be hotbeds of activity in centuries past. It’s in the Domesday Book, belonging to Roger Bigod, with four free men, and a plough, and a sheriff by the name of Northmann. By 1237 it was described as a port, but when you stand on the empty beach this is hard to imagine. Hard to imagine that is until you remember the little village up the road. Dunwich today is a single street, a church and a few other houses. Everyone knows that in the Middle Ages it was one of the largest ports in England – but then, over the centuries, it was washed away by the sea. The village of Minsmere is gone forever, the people who lived moving perhaps to Eastbridge, or to Theberton where the parish church was.

More recently the coastline had to be guarded. In Tudor times there was some kind of possible artillery fort there against foreign invaders, just like the pillboxes of the Second World War, but in the intervening period a different type of invader had to be patrolled against – smugglers, of course! There was a windpump there from the 19th century: when the marshes were drained for agricultural use – you can even see it at the Museum of East Anglian Working Life in Stowmarket, as it was rescued when it collapsed in 1977. There was even a café and a couple of cottages on the beach by the sluice up to the Second World War, but these were evacuated, used as target practice and then pulled down. The Leiston-cum-Sizewell Newsletter of Autumn 2013 gives details with pictures on pages 15-16.

Now the holiday makers are back, and Sizewell’s gleaming white domes the only threatening things to be seen on the horizon. I recommend the walk down to the beach, and the lunch at the Eel’s Foot, too! Just remember, if you should happen to discover a little bell on the site of the old chapel, just leave it well alone!

This blogpost relates to The Bells of Minsmere, story eight in Suffolk Folk Tales.

All images © Kirsty Hartsiotis, 2012

This is the greatest poem of the Anglo Saxon corpus of poetry, and was written down in its current form around the year 1000, a long time after Bede wrote his history, and even longer after the supposed 6^th century date of the actual events. The content of the poem is probably based on orally transmitted stories – yep, storytelling! – and was written down at some point in the early Christain period.  Whether the poem was composed orally and then written down, or whether it was composed as a written poem from older sources is a source for debate.  It doesn’t matter – whichever way, it is an extremely powerful work, and gives a glimpse into the mindsets of this distant world. 

If you haven’t read it, I would strongly recommend that you do so: not only is it an important poem, but also a gripping story.  The eponymous hero saves the day through his strength and cunning when an unholy monster and his mother threaten the security of Hrothgar’s hall, Heorot.  Ironically, the hall itself is eventually destroyed by fire during the struggles for kingship that follow Beowulf’s intervention.  The story then jumps to Beowulf, now a king, in his old age, and his battle with a dragon.  The language is powerful and raw, and themes cover far more emotional ground than the bare bones of the story suggest.

I was lucky enough to learn Anglo Saxon whilst doing my Medieval Studies MA, and this allowed me (just about!) to read Beowulf in the original language – a swift learning curve, I can tell you, and a galling one, too.  Anglo Saxon is closer to modern German or Dutch than it is to modern English, so the German and Dutch speaking students on the course swiftly pulled ahead of us native English speakers – ah well, at least it illustrated for us the shared culture that dates back to these very times!  I wouldn’t expect that you would want to tackle the original, but there are many translations and retellings out there.  A quick flip onto Amazon shows me the latest retelling by Seamus Heaney from 2009, and the recently released translation by Tolkien.  I confess I have read neither!  But whichever translation you chose, you will be delving deep into the English subconscious. 

The story, however, does seem to have its roots in the reality of 6^th century Denmark, and the characters appear in a number of Scandinavian sagas as well as in the English poem Widsith – including mention of Hrothgar and Hrothulf, and their war with Ingeld.  These sagas tend to be more focused on the ordinary wars between the various peoples of Denmark, rather than the fascination with monsters that makes Beowulf such a compelling read.