Sue's favourite Anglo-Saxon sword I Curator's Corner S4 Ep4 #CuratorsCorner #SuttonSue

One of these swords is my absolute favorite sword in any Museum, anywhere in the world

I'm Sue Brunning, I'm curator of the European Early Medieval Collections and this is my corner.

So today I'm going to talk to you about my favorite artifacts in the museum,

which are early Anglo-Saxon swords so I've got three swords here to talk to you about

they all come from the 6th to early 7th century so this is the Anglo-Saxon period in Britain

in the early Anglo-Saxon period swords were really the only weapon

that was made and used exclusively for warfare

so Spears could be used for hunting for instance, same with arrows

and axes were kind of related conceptually also to tools.

Whereas swords were the only weapon that were basically made for killing other human beings.

Swords were also the most prestigious weapon most prestigious type of fighting implement

for the early Anglo-Saxons and we see this in the art and literature from the time

but we also see it in particular from the archaeology which is what I'm particularly interested in.

So for example, during this period when these swords were made,

in the 6th and 7th centuries the Anglo-Saxons were burying their dead with grave goods

and that meant that the dead person was placed inside the ground surrounded by an array of artifacts

we find with swords that they're often buried very close to the body

sometimes they're overlaying parts of the body like the arm and the shoulder

and sometimes they're actually cradled into the arm

as if they're sort of being being hugged like a really beloved possession.

So we have this this closeness between the dead person and a sword

and I think that's because swords were particularly important to that dead person's identity

they said something about the person that was in the grave.

One of the things that I was really struck by when I first started studying Anglo-Saxon swords

was actually how shabby the condition of many of them are.

Now I'm not talking about the blades of the swords when I say that,

these are made from iron so after about 1500 years or so in the grave

they do tend to come out looking like this, it's very highly corroded

What I'm talking about is actually the hilts of these swords

so the handles the parts of the sword that are held in the hands.

These fittings often show quite a lot of wear and tear with the decoration has been worn down

or some of the surface ornaments, such as gilding, those sorts of things has been worn away.

I have one example here this is probably dating to the 6th century

and it was found at a cemetery in Faversham in Kent so not very far away from where we are in London now

and the part that I want to talk to you about is the pommel which is the piece at the very end of the handle

or the hilt of the sword here now if we take a very close look at the pommel here

we can see that this decoration that runs along the front there's a line here starts to disappear towards this end

and also on the top of the pommel here as well we have quite deep sort of almond shaped slashes

that have been gilded so covered with a layer of gold