Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs

by Andrew Reynolds

Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs is the first detailed consideration of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. Beginning with the period following Roman rule and ending in the century following the Norman Conquest, it surveys a period of fundamental social change, which included the conversion to Christianity, the emergence of the late Saxon state, and the development of the landscape of the Domesday Book.

While an impressive body of written evidence for the period survives in the form of charters and law-codes, archaeology is uniquely placed to investigate the earliest period of post-Roman society - the fifth to seventh centuries - for which documents are lacking. For later centuries, archaeological evidence can provide us with an independent assessment of the realities of capital punishment and the status of outcasts.

Andrew Reynolds argues that outcast burials show a clear pattern of development in this period. In the pre-Christian centuries, 'deviant' burial remains are found only in community cemeteries, but the growth of kingship and the consolidation of territories during the seventh century witnessed the emergence of capital punishment and places of execution in the English landscape. Locally determined rites, such as crossroads burial, now existed alongside more formal execution cemeteries. Gallows were located on major boundaries, often next to highways, always in highly visible places.

The findings of this pioneering national study thus have important consequences on our understanding of Anglo-Saxon society. Overall, Reynolds concludes, organized judicial behaviour was a feature of the earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, rather than just the two centuries prior to the Norman Conquest.

Genres: Nonfiction

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Peter Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anglo-Saxon deviant burial customs, by Andrew Reynolds, 2014, 250 pages plus appendices,


Reynolds is an author who has been on my radar since I read Anglo-Saxon Life and Landscape. This was a deceptively good book. Although the title made it sound dry it was fascinating. Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs is a work I often saw cited in other books, so I was looking forward to reading it. This was despite it sounding very archaeological with probably any number of accounts of oddly buried people.


The opening chapter on sources, approaches and contexts was brilliant. One small paragraph laid out the process of trial and how it all worked and this dozen or so lines was so concise, yet so clear it was even elegant. It was the sort of paragraph that you'd pray to discover as an undergraduate. The rest of the book was equally clearly written and even the in-text citations didn't totally kill off the readability of the prose.


Detecting a deviant burial is largely a matter of examining a combination of factors, such as the way it was buried, how complete it is, how they died and the position of the grave amongst the landscape and known boundaries. It's less a dark art than a matter of deduction and that was pleasant to read.


However, there is a major flaw with this book and that is that the accounts of various types of deviant burial quickly becomes a list of what was found where and what made it deviant. These are all individually interesting, but en-mass they quickly become very repetitive. This became extremely marked in the 55 pages on Christian era deviant burials, which records the same sort of thing for various counties, one after another.

On the one hand this is a sign of thoroughness and you can't argue that this book isn't thorough in this respect. Unfortunately it makes this a much less joyful read than I'd have liked, as my enthusiasm for reading about how a particular skeleton was found heavily suffered from diminishing returns.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid scholarship, a bit too technical for light reading.