Once dismissed as frivolous and merely decorative, Anglo-Saxon artwork is increasingly recognised to be loaded with hidden meaning, but we have barely begun to decode this visual language. Doing so offers the potential to transform our understanding of this historical cultural network of the so-called “Dark Ages” as a significant world civilization.

New research by Thegns of Mercia member James D. Wenn, focused on a seemingly unrelated subject area, and a series of chance discoveries, have led to transformative new learning perspectives with wide-ranging implications. A book (to be published soon) will lay out many of these discoveries, with key concepts discussed in an upcoming public lecture in April 2023, but neither can fully document the application of these new perspectives on the corpus of Anglo-Saxon art. In the coming weeks we will, therefore, be publishing a special series of articles, here, which will explore the decoding of Anglo-Saxon art made possible by these perspectives.

Compared to the famous shield from Sutton Hoo Mound 1, the shields from the other treasure-filled princely Anglo-Saxon burials lack ostentatious decorative fittings. In the first chapter (link) we discussed the striking similarity of these shields, which appeared to be high-performance gear for warrior princes, optimised for agility rather than ostentation. In the second chapter (link) we reported on our project to produce an authentic replica of such a shield, and explore just how light weight they could have been. 

 ​In the frequently damp environment of early medieval Britain and western Europe sheaths were essential for valuable ferrous blades, including swords, war-seaxes and smaller utility knives. The sophisticated and labour-intensive construction of sword scabbards, formed of animal-hair lined carved wooden plates enclosed in leather or hide (“skin product”) is evidence of the priority given to protecting blades. Well preserved examples of seax sheaths, mainly from productive leatherworking sites of the mid-to-late Anglo-Saxon period, at York and Gloucester (Cameron, 2000) as well as more trace evidence from earlier grave finds, demonstrates the high level of craftsmanship which went into these, usually of a single piece of folded and moulded skin-product, sometimes intricately decorated, as might be expected given that the sheath, and not the blade, was the most visible component of any seax assemblage day to day and therefore an important surface for wealth display. Vastly more common but nevertheless valuable personal possessions and often of sophisticated smithcraft, smaller utility and eating-knives also required tight-fitting sheaths of valuable skin-product, but despite the abundance of such knives in the archaeological record, for a wide range of reasons clues about the sheaths of smaller knives are scarcer than for larger seaxes.  

It might be reasonable, and has been the practice among more detail-oriented living historians and reenactors, to assume that sheaths of smaller knives in, for example, the early Anglo-Saxon period, might be miniature analogues of those of larger seaxes, yet fragmentary sheath remains from a handful of well-studied early Anglo-Saxon sites appear surprisingly crude, with amateurish stitching having unattractively contorted the seams in a way that might disgust a modern leatherworker. There is no reason not to think these examples are not well representative, and indeed, many of the later (Viking-Age) knife-sheath remains from York, though often skilfully decorated, bear the tell-tale marks and contortions of this same rudimentary stitch work.
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It is always tempting to base the sheaths of our knives on the very fanciest, and neatest archaeological examples to hand, and perhaps neaten them up with some more modern handiwork, but this can lead to a creeping departure from what is truly known of the historic craft culture purportedly represented. In contrast, replicating (to our modern eyes) “unbecoming” examples might provide useful, practical insights into why they were made this way.  Such is the case with these apparently crudely stitched knife sheaths – our experiments in replicating them have revealed what might be a cunning Dark Age leatherworker’s “life-hack” which made the tricky shaping of sheaths vastly quicker and more reliable.

antiquity or early medieval period would have had, and are keen to point out how wrong we are, for our variously either “too modern” or “too clichéd” haircuts. Such criticism raises two questions;  What do we really know about the hairstyles of nominally “Anglo-Saxon” and “Viking” period peoples?    What is our group’s authenticity policy with respect to this issue?
In this article we hope to address both questions with respect to male hairstyle and grooming, with a further article on womens’ hair and head-wear to follow. 
(Originally published in October 2019)

Although textile remains from the early Anglo-Saxon period are quite rare, painstaking analysis by textile archaeologists including Elizabeth Grace Crowfoot, Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, and Penelope Walton Rogers reveal tantalising glimpses of the surprisingly colourful world of Anglo-Saxon and Viking Age textiles. ​

​Having explored and experimented with plant-dyes for a number of years, we present here two projects to produce garments of the very brightest colours we could achieve with home grown plant dyes. ​