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.

One of the most curious coins in the British Museum’s Anglo-Saxon collection is a small (20mm diameter) gold coin found in Rome in the 19th century, weighing 4.3g, and which carries the inscription OFFA REX on one side. In all other respects it is clearly a copy of a dinar minted by the Abbasid caliph. 
It is also clear that the Mercian die-cutter did not recognise the patterns on the coin he was copying to be a form of writing, much less understand it, perhaps thinking it was merely decorative, as the coin bears the inscription “ There is no God but Allah alone without equal, and Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah ” albeit with a number of mistakes. It also features the date of issue of the coin being copied -ah 157 or 773-4 CE - in the very middle of Offa’s reign, suggesting the parent coin itself was surprisingly new when it was plagiarised.

​This coin is often speculatively connected to the a ‘Peter’s Pence’ levy of 365 gold coins which Offa collected and paid annually to the Pope, from 796 CE (Williams, 2008). This levy was known as the ‘Rome-scot’ - the latter part deriving from the Old English name for a different coin (the small thick early Anglo-Saxon silver ‘sceat’). It’s tempting to imagine the bewilderment of the pontiff receiving 365 such coins from a Christian king each bearing ‘the shahada’ (the Islamic Declaration of Faith), but in fact, the dinar on which they were based would have been very familiar in Rome, where all manner of high-value solid gold coins collided....

Few archaeological finds are as evocative as helmets - many items of war-gear can help paint a picture of ancient battlefields, but in framing (or in some cases directly representing) the face, helmets help to humanise warriors from centuries past. This is particularly ironic given that, at least in some cases, helmets in antiquity were designed to create an intimidating sense of “otherness”, occupying the “uncanny valley” between metalwork and man.

​ It is in our nature to recognise and emotionally respond to faces, and it is hard to stare into the eyes of the Sutton Hoo helmet and not feel as though you have, in some sense, met a person, rather than simply viewed an archaeological artefact. No surprise then, that over and above all the other treasures in that unprecedented burial panoply (including some with considerably higher bullion value) it is the helmet from Sutton Hoo that
has become emblematic of the assemblage, and the most enduring symbol both of Anglo-Saxon material culture, and even of British history itself.
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The Anglo-Saxon period in Britain spanned six centuries, and although it is unfairly reductive to characterise it purely as a time of war, it is undoubtedly true that regular clashes between well-equipped armies peppered the period and dictated the convoluted path taken from locally identifying post-Roman communities to a coherent united England. The scale of Anglo-Saxon armies continues to be debated, and it is not entirely clear how well equipped they were, but archaeological discoveries in recent decades have provided abundant examples of war-gear – especially weapons – to inform our image of Anglo-Saxon warriors. Such gear is most abundant from the early period (5-7th centuries) thanks to grave goods from the ultimately doomed furnished-burial rite, but even from these centuries, that most evocative item of war-gear, the helmet, is exquisitely rare. We just don’t have many examples. There’s a bigger problem though; we don’t even know how many examples we have. Almost all running totals are wrong.
(Originally published in May 2020)