Archaeologists excavating ahead of a housing development at Harpole, near Northampton, have discovered an astonishing 7th-century burial. Acidic soil conditions meant the bones had virtually vanished, but what was left behind was evidence of one of the richest burials of a woman of the period ever uncovered.
There could be no ambiguity about this woman’s faith, for buried with her was a magnificent necklace featuring a pendant cloisonné cross, while large garnets mounted in gold jostled with late-Roman gold coins attached to the necklace. The woman’s body was laid on a bed, long since decayed; a cross was placed underneath her body, while the burial was also furnished with pottery jars and a bronze dish.
The splendour of the “Treasure”, as it is being called, has led to suggestions that this woman was of royal status, and perhaps even one of the great royal abbesses who did so much to bring Christianity to early England.
In the middle years of the 7th century, the Kingdom of Mercia, of which Northamptonshire was once part, stood at a crossroads in its history. Mercia’s aggressively pagan king, Penda, had defeated both St Oswald of Northumbria and St Sigebert of East Anglia in separate battles, martyring both Christian kings and threatening the very future of the still young mission to the English people, based in Canterbury.
The political reality of Anglo-Saxon England was one of overlordship, where greater rulers dominated lesser; if Penda achieved overlordship of all the kingdoms, Christianity was in danger of losing its attraction and prestige. Yet this military world was only one side of 7th-century England, where royal women wielded great power, held their own land and sometimes pursued agenda very different from those of their husbands and fathers.
Most famously, the East Anglian princess St Etheldreda was married in succession to two kings, yet insisted on living as a nun throughout and used her power, land and privileges to found and lead monasteries.
Where men sometimes faltered in their commitment to the faith they had received from St Gregory, Anglo-Saxon women stepped into the breach. Thus Penda’s daughters Kyneburgha, Kyneswitha and Tibba all defied their pagan father by becoming nuns and foundresses of monasteries. Penda finally died in 655, to be succeeded by his Christian sons Peada and Wulfhere.
Wulfhere eventually gave his daughter Werburgh a royal estate at Weedon in Northamptonshire in order to found a monastery. Significantly, Weedon (which lies on the old Roman Watling Street) is only around two and a half miles west of Harpole, and next to another early minster site, Church Stowe. While establishing the identity of the woman buried at Harpole is impossible, one possibility is that she was an early abbess of Weedon, perhaps belonging to the Mercian royal family (albeit not St Werburgh herself, whose body was eventually translated to Chester). Even if she was not an abbess, the lady of Harpole surely belonged to the first generation of Christian Mercian royals, presumably living on King Wulfhere’s royal estate.
Just as ship burials were reserved for the greatest men in Anglo-Saxon England, so “bed burials” were a rare honour for women, with only a handful known. In several cases, such as at Trumpington in Cambridgeshire and Ixworth in Suffolk, the body laid on the bed was adorned with a cloisonné pectoral cross – but nothing quite as rich as the Harpole necklace, which outshines even a necklace discovered at nearby Desborough (which similarly featured garnets and gold bullae).
The Harpole necklace, almost uniquely, incorporates Roman coins – chosen, no doubt, for their Christian imagery. While it might seem strange to us for a Christian to receive a “furnished burial” with grave goods, the persistence of elements of pre-Christian burial practices was common in the 7th century, when the Church had yet to take an active interest in burial rites. Indeed, some commentary on the Harpole burial has already made the mistake of interpreting the interment as partially pagan.
This misses the point that it took a long time for Christian burial practices to become standardised. The Harpole lady was placed on top of a silver cross featuring unusual silver heads, perhaps representing evangelists or apostles. Throughout the Middle Ages, distinguished clerics and religious were buried in their vestments and regalia, which is one reason to wonder if the Harpole necklace might have been a mark of office as well as a treasured possession.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the Harpole Treasure, however, is its incorporation of older Roman artefacts – something not altogether unusual in Anglo-Saxon jewellery, although rarely at this scale. For the earliest English Christians, the Roman past had immense significance, not only because they owed the origins of English Christianity to Rome but also because missionaries looked to the Roman Empire as a prototype for an ordered Christian society that was unlike the sometimes chaotic and violent world of 7th-century England.
The missionaries built churches inside the walls of ruined Roman forts, towns and cities, hitherto largely shunned by the un-urbanised Anglo-Saxons, while still-standing Romano-British temples, mausolea, bathhouses and villas were sometimes converted into churches and chapels. The reality of this religious palimpsest was dramatically uncovered in 2021 when archaeologists investigated St Mary’s, Stoke Mandeville, in Buckinghamshire, prior to its demolition to make way for HS2. The medieval church was found to have been preceded by an Anglo-Saxon tower-like chapel, which had in turn been built on top of a pagan Roman mausoleum.
The Anglo-Saxon obsession with Rome and all things Roman is well attested, and an influential interpretation of the Sutton Hoo helmet sees it as a 7th-century imagining of a Roman cavalry helmet by an East Anglian king eager to project his Romanitas. Yet above all, the Rome of Anglo-Saxon imagination was Christian Rome; the Church always had on its side the cultural prestige borne by the religion of Rome, which virtually every petty king and tribal leader of the early Middle Ages wanted to emulate.
Yet as King Raedwald of East Anglia would prove, political conversion was not enough; Raedwald kept up an altar of Woden beside that of Christ, and was succeeded by a pagan. The idea that political convenience alone established Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England is simply implausible, and St Bede’s celebrated account of the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria and the pagan priest Coifi speaks to a deeper dissatisfaction with ancestral sacrifices.
“I have long since been sensible that there was nothing in that which we worshipped,” declared Coifi, after hearing St Paulinus preach, “but now I freely confess, that such truth evidently appears in this preaching as can confer on us the gifts of life, of salvation, and of eternal happiness.”
If Bede is to be believed, it was often the women of Anglo-Saxon England – beginning with Queen Bertha herself – who were the first to recognise the living hope the new religion brought with it. The Harpole Treasure, combining royal splendour with marks of devotion, is evocative of the heroic era of the faith Bede describes, when royal women often consecrated their power and privilege to Christ and used it in his name.
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