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)

enamel, in swirling “trumpet spiral” patterns with strongly “Celtic” affinities which would later play alongside Germanic motifs in early insular manuscript art. A counter-sunk base typically housed an additional escutcheon, often even more elaborate, on the base, and created an inner platform for another escutcheon inside, or in some cases 3D sculptures (such as a fish, raised up inside the bowl as if swimming, in the case of a bowl from Sutton Hoo).  Where did these enigmatic objects come from, and what were they used for? 
(Originally published in March 2020.)

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)

In 2011, almost immediately after the founding our group, the Thegns of Mercia, we began a blog (on blogspot) to serve as a website for the group, with news posts about our activities, but also as a place to store and share articles. Initially these were mainly intended to serve as guides and primers on various subjects internally within the group, but with us not being in a position to administer restricted access, they were effectively out in the open, and begun to be shared around, necessitating a fairly rapid climb in our editorial standards.    
We later built this website as a vehicle to share our reconstruction work, and to advertise our living history services, but the old blogspot page has continued trundling along in the background, with the occasional article posted and then shared through our social media pages, particularly when what we had to say felt topical.  However, its become clear that the maintenance of the old blog left much to be desired - its format increasingly dated, and the web tools increasingly unwieldy.    Having trialled the tools here with our "Recent Reconstructions" blog this seems the obvious choice to relocate our wider discussions of history and archaeology topics.

This blog will therefore serve as the new repository for our articles, going forward, with the old blog still available at thethegns.blogspot.com but increasingly not actively maintained.  Some of our favourite content from the old blog may be re-edited and migrated over here too. We hope this new format will be both more readable and more visually engaging, as well as better integrated with our wider work.