A rich and sophisticated Anglo-Saxon town emerging from an ancient island in the Lincolnshire marshes has been hailed as one of the most important archaeological finds on British soil in decades.
The previously unknown settlement, which is thought to have been a strategic trading post or an unusually wealthy monastic community, was discovered 1ft below the surface of a field by an experienced metal detectorist.
The first trenches sunk into the clay have revealed ornate writing tools, elegant glass weights and “Cudburg”, a woman’s name, inscribed into a lead plaque, as well as hundreds of coins known as sceattas. All of these treasures suggest that the town was a cut above the average Saxon farmstead and amounts to a “site of international importance”, a sort of Dark-Age Durham, according to Hugh Willmott, senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Sheffield.
“It’s a Middle Saxon site that’s been previously completely unknown, and seems to have been pretty high status,” he said. “The difference with this settlement is the nature of it: it’s not just an ordinary rural settlement, it’s encircled with a bank and ditch. The range of finds coming from it tell us this is something really special.”
Lying about five miles from the coast, near the village of Little Carlton, the settlement seems to have been scattered over an outcrop in the Lincolnshire marshes measuring about 250m by 200m.
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Writing in Current Archaeology, Dr Willmott and his colleagues suggest it might have been a “burh”, a fortified site ringed by a boundary ditch and commanding the fork between two rivers. Its earliest coins date back to the late 7th century, when the area would have been loosely held by the Kingdom of Lindsey, a small and swampy state swallowed up by the larger kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia. The town appears to have flourished through the 8th century and then vanished in the 9th, when the Vikings began their career of pillage and plunder down the northeast coast of England. Dr Willmott said there was as yet no smoking gun to pin the settlement’s demise on Norse raiders, although the timing was certainly suspicious. “There’s no evidence of violent slaughter — we’ve only done very small exploratory trenches so far,” he said. “But there is quite an abrupt cessation of the site in terms of the material culture we’ve recovered. I wouldn’t want to say it’s evidence of the site being burnt down, but it’s classic evidence of a site suddenly ceasing to exist.”
The first hints of the Little Carlton site were found in 2011 by Graham Vickers, a metal detectorist. He came across a silver stylus, a writing implement with an animal design. This was a promising start: literacy was a rare gift in the 8th century, and anybody who owned such a piece of kit would probably have been well off. Over the following years Mr Vickers and Adam Daubney, a finds liaison officer, mapped out the locations of thousands of pot shards, loom weights and glass fragments, all pointing to a prosperous settlement.