Excavations at one of Britain’s most majestic castles help tell the story of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom

By ERIC A. POWELL

July/August 2016

On the windswept northeastern coast of England, Bamburgh Castle rises high above a massive outcrop of black dolerite. Its brooding sandstone fortifications command sweeping views of the surrounding county of Northumberland, which was once the heart of the medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Visit the castle today, and what you see is an ornate Norman fortress that was extensively rebuilt by its owners in the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, though traces of medieval masonry are still visible in many of the buildings. But view the site through the eyes of archaeologist Graeme Young, and a different vision of the castle emerges. On his morning tea break, Young takes a few moments from supervising his crew to explain that he has spent 20 years excavating inside and around Bamburgh in an effort to understand the site’s 2,000-year history. Beneath the stately grounds of the modern castle, he and his team have unearthed the remains of a royal citadel from the early medieval period, when Northumbria’s Anglo-Saxon kings made this nearly impregnable volcanic plateau their seat of power. In the popular imagination, this era is the violent and barbaric Dark Ages, but Young suggests that discoveries here paint a more nuanced picture. “We’ve long known Bamburgh was an important site during the Anglo-Saxon period,” he says, “but we’ve discovered it was much more cosmopolitan that we imagined.” Sitting in a small office tucked into the wall of Bamburgh’s west courtyard, Young tells the unlikely story of archaeology in the castle. It begins in the 1960s, when famously eccentric archaeologist Brian Hope-Taylor started to excavate inside the castle walls. He had previously dug at a nearby early royal Anglo-Saxon settlement called Yeavering that he believed was a co-capital with Bamburgh of the kingdom of Bernicia, which predated Northumbria. “He was one of the first archaeologists to seriously study Anglo-Saxon sites,” says Young. “He really was a pioneer.” Scholars consider Hope-Taylor’s meticulous publication of the Yeavering excavation a landmark in Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Unfortunately, though he made several spectacular discoveries at Bamburgh, including the best-preserved Anglo-Saxon sword in Britain and a solid gold plaque depicting a stylized animal known as the “Bamburgh Beast,” he was not able to publish his results before his death in 2001. Young has a personal investment in Hope-Taylor’s work. He grew up visiting Bamburgh and credits the formative experience of exploring the castle as a boy with inspiring him to become an archaeologist. In 1996, he and his colleagues contacted the castle owners to request permission to follow up on Hope-Taylor’s excavations. “We didn’t know where he had dug,” says Young, “so we were hoping to use geophysics and small-scale excavation to determine that.” The owners gave their permission, and the small team began their work. Twenty years later, Young shakes his head and smiles at the memory. “We were thinking of it as a short project that we’d do on weekends among friends,” he says. But that short project quickly bloomed into a much bigger effort when it became apparent to the team that the richness of the site meant it would take years to understand it properly. They also became the unexpected heirs of Hope-Taylor’s considerable legacy.

While searching for office space, Young and the castle’s groundskeeper broke the locks on the small rooms built into the castle walls that had sat unopened for decades. What they found inside was a kind of time capsule of Hope-Taylor’s fieldwork. Still astonished by the discovery, Young shares pictures of the rooms that show they were filled with dust-covered boxes of bones, artifacts, and soil samples, all excavated by Hope-Taylor. A 1974 copy of the Daily Telegraph still resting on a chair helped establish the date of the last field season. “We’ve accidently inherited an enormous body of work at an extraordinary site,” says Young. Hope-Taylor’s students later found years’ worth of Bamburgh excavation notes, and even artifacts, such as a sword, in his apartment. Now, the Bamburgh team’s task is not only to understand their own excavations, but to synchronize their findings with the copious record Hope-Taylor left behind. University of Durham archaeologist and Anglo-Saxon expert Rosemary Cramp knew Hope-Taylor well and was glad to see archaeologists return to Bamburgh. “It really is a key site,” says Cramp, who visits the excavations but is not officially involved with the project. “High points like this are strongholds from prehistoric times onwards, but very few have the depth of Anglo-Saxon deposits that you have at Bamburgh. We still know so little about the early medieval period. There’s everything to find out, really.” Though a fortress has probably stood above the crag at Bamburgh since prehistoric times, little is known about the site before the Romans arrived. Ancient historians record that the Britons built a coastal fort at the site and that it was the stronghold of the Votadini, a tribe that lived beyond the northern frontier of the empire, but whose leaders probably depended on Roman power for their authority. “Hope-Taylor discovered Roman-era pottery at Bamburgh,” says Young. “That helps confirm that Britons living here were aligned with Rome. The Romans might have even been paying off warlords to help protect the frontier.” While the team has found stray Roman-era artifacts, such as pieces of glass, they have yet to dig as deep as Hope-Taylor did. For now, they are focused on the Anglo-Saxons. When the Romans abandoned Britain in the early fifth century, the Germanic Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes, collectively called Anglo-Saxons, took advantage of the power vacuum and sailed across the North Sea to settle in England. Much of what we know about the turbulent early Anglo-Saxon period comes from The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written by the Venerable Bede, the eighth-century monk known as the father of English history. A native of Northumbria, Bede left an especially rich (and some would say biased) account of the kingdom. “Bede often mentions Bamburgh as the kingdom’s ‘royal city,’” says Young. “That tells us that it was a high-status center.” The site first rose to prominence in 547, when an Angle warlord known as Ida the Flamebearer seized the Briton coastal fortress and founded a kingdom called Bernicia. His grandson Æthelfrith brought the neighboring Anglian realm of Deira under his dominion around 604, creating the unified kingdom of Northumbria. Æthelfrith renamed the citadel Bebbanburgh, or Bebba’s fortress, after one of his wives. For the next three centuries it played a central role in English history, with its throne often changing hands between warrior kings. Remarkably, an early archaeological find at Bamburgh allows scholars to visualize exactly what one of those thrones would have looked like.

In the late nineteenth century groundskeepers clearing foliage discovered intricately carved stone fragments. For more than a hundred years they were thought to be the remains of a standing cross. But when Rosemary Cramp reexamined the pieces, she identified them as the arm of a stone chair dating to around 800. Similar carved stone chairs have been found at Northumbrian monasteries, and are thought to be bishops’ thrones. Since Bamburgh was a secular site, such a throne would have been used by the Northumbrian kings themselves and likely played an important ceremonial role. “It’s an amazing artifact,” says Young. “These thrones were called gift-stools, and were central to a fundamental ritual during which a warrior would receive gifts from his lord in full view of the court, binding him to the king until death.” A replica of the throne now sits in the central courtyard at Bamburgh. Perhaps the most famous of the kings to have sat on the Northumbiran throne was Æthelfrith’s son St. Oswald, a warrior king of great renown who was known as “Whiteblade.” As Bede tells it, when Æthelfrith was killed in battle in 617 by a rival king, Oswald fled north to seek sanctuary with the Irish. After 17 years, he returned to the kingdom and retook the throne by force. He also brought with him Irish monks who converted pagan Anglo-Saxons and founded a monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, which became an important center of medieval Christianity. Oswald ruled from Bamburgh as the most powerful king in England for eight years, only to be killed in battle and have his corpse dismembered. Bede records that Oswald’s followers found his arm, which would not decompose. They brought this incorruptible arm to Bamburgh, where it was kept in a silver shrine. Oswald was later canonized and became the object of a cult that was venerated throughout Europe. When Young and his team conducted remote sensing at the castle’s twelfth-century chapel, they found that it was likely built on the remains of Bamburgh’s seventh-century church. “That was probably where Oswald’s arm was kept,” says Young. Another glimpse inside Bamburgh’s royal court came soon after Young’s project began, when a winter storm exposed early medieval burials outside the castle. The team excavated the site, known as the Bowl Hole cemetery, between 2001 and 2007, eventually recovering 91 skeletons. Durham University bioarchaeologist Charlotte Roberts led the team that studied the remains. They recently published their results: Most of the people buried in the cemetery were likely aristocratic members of the court. “They were mainly well-nourished and of high stature,” says Roberts, “though many had severe tooth decay that could have been brought on in part by high consumption of mead.” Roberts’ team also analyzed strontium isotope levels in the teeth, which can pinpoint where an individual spent his or her childhood. The results showed the people buried at the Bowl Hole cemetery were a surprisingly diverse group. “We found that relatively few locals were buried in the cemetery,” says Roberts. “Most of these people came from other regions of the British Isles.” Anglo-Saxon kings would often exchange children or close relatives as royal hostages to ensure that the terms of treaties were observed. Some of the individuals could have been staying at Bamburgh as just this kind of hostage. The team also found one man who came from the Outer Hebrides, near to where St. Oswald fled during his exile. Artifacts found with the burial and radiocarbon dating show that the man lived in the seventh century, around the same time as Oswald. Perhaps he accompanied the famous king back to Northumbria as part of his retinue. “That’s as close as archaeology can get us to the Oswald story,” says Young. A few of the people interred in the cemetery came from even farther afield. “Some of the strontium signatures show childhoods spent in Scandinavian countries, and this is centuries before the Viking era,” says Roberts. Others were from the southern Mediterranean or North Africa. “And it wasn’t just men,” she says, “but women from Scandinavia and southern Europe as well.” Whether the people lived permanently at Bamburgh or died there while visiting, possibly while on a pilgrimage or working there temporarily, is impossible to know. But clearly, at its height, Bamburgh was a cosmopolitan place, with people from across Britain and Europe gathering in the great hall where the Northumbrian kings held court. Young has even pinpointed just where those courtiers would have gathered. During a geophysical survey of the castle’s inner ward, the team discovered traces of a large royal mead hall. The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf describes a similar royal structure as a “timbered hall, splendid and ornamented with gold. The building in which a powerful man held court that was the foremost of halls under heaven.” Some scholars have suggested that the poem may have been composed in Northumbria. “It’s possible,” says Young, “that around 1,200 years ago, a poet recited Beowulf for the king in that great hall.”