My Mercian Diary Part 1 -The Staffordshire Hoard

Yesterday I was at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery looking at and yet again marvelling over the Staffordshire Hoard....a discovery that has changed our view of the so-called Dark Ages in the British Isles between the Roman's finally leaving these shores completely in 450 AD and the arrival of the Norman invaders in 1066 - or to some historians considerably later than that.

For many years now I have argued against the idea that there was ever really a Dark Age in Britain and although by the end of Roman rule the country was certainly in turmoil with multiple violent incursions by the Picts, the Angles, the Jutes, the Saxons and the Irish (i.e. the proto-Scots)...it was open season in the struggle to take over these southern fertile lands that later became known as Engla Land....and later still England.

The first point to note here I think is that later official histories and national mythmakers suggest the period between the two Conquests must have been dark and a cessation of civilisation in these islands because they could not see (or were blind to) any evidence of the complex culture of Saxon England during the period that resulted in the country being eventually founded by King Athelstan as a unified nation state in 927.

This is a theory that doesn't any longer stand up, if indeed it ever did?

The so-called Dark Ages were not only about events taking place in Britain but also in Europe as a whole in what I have come to view as the imperial history of Britain and the world. According to Wikipedia for example... the Dark Ages was "originally the term (which) characterized the bulk of the Middle Ages, or roughly the 6th to 13th centuries, as a period of intellectual darkness between extinguishing the "light of Rome" after the end of Late Antiquity, and the rise of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century." This wider definition is from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the arrival of modernity and the origins of capitalism after the collapse of feudalism in late Medieval Britain.

However... when the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today says Wikipedia, "it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" to us because of the paucity of historical records compared with both earlier and later times."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_%28historiography%29

Imperial historiography has a history going back at least as far as Cornelius Tacitus [c. AD 56 – after 117] who was a politican (senator) and a foremost historian of the early Roman Empire and one of the very few sources of contemporaneous information about ancient Britain and its inhabitants, although it must be remembered for Tacitus and for Romans in general, Britain was the ideologicical counterpoint to Rome, the land of Barbarians on the edge of the world. The origin of the noble savage that fascinated and repelled Romans in equal measure, was a sort of imagined ancient Manson Family living in a world devoid of luxury, taste and sophistication and illogically in Roman terms, determined to defend their backwardness even to the death. Britons were the Roman untermenschen with a role in their empire not much different to that of the negro in the much more recent British empire whose founders ironically were thought of as less than fully human by the Roman occupying power at the time. Britain served as a perfect foil to Rome in Tacitus's day that demonstrated just how comfortable and superior the Roman urban elite saw themselves to be in contrast with the barabrians of the far northern isles. Here we find the origins of the 'Light of Rome' theory which contrasted with the assumed darkness that must have happened when that light was finally extinguished in these wild and distant hinterlands of the Roman Empire, according to the official (school/popular culture) history that was hegemonic throughout Britain's own imperial period and in its immediate aftermath.

Modern history and archaeology has progressively disconfirmed the alleged darkness of the period beyond any hope of it retaining any usefulness as a concept today, but nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in the Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in 2009 in a field in Hammerwich in the English Midlands, the old Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia, or the modern county of  south Staffordshire.

FACTIOD

As it happens, I used to live in Burntwood, about a mile from where this treasure was discovered and during the mid-1970s I used to pass it every day (obviously unbeknownst to me) on my way to work on the railway in Walsall, a nine mile bicycle ride away. I am still slightly shocked that this treasure was almost on my doorstep where it had lain for about 1300 years when I lived in south Staffordshire during the early to mid 1970s, all the time lying just below the surface of a local field I passed almost every day. Such treasure was so close (to me) and yet for every generation since it was buried and right up almost to now... so very far away. 

Makes me wonder what treasure still lies undiscovered beneath our feet?

Here is what I failed to discover but am pleased that now it has come to light we know much more about Mercia and Anglo-Saxon England during the transition from paganism to christianity, a cultural revolution in progress captured in a time capsule that is the Staffordhire Hoard.....Enjoy!