Rendlesham Revealed

Archaeologists Faye Minter, Jude Plouviez and Christopher Scull have worked, together with four tireless detectorists, to locate, uncover and excavate the site of an important 7th-century Anglo-Saxon royal settlement in south-east Suffolk.

Rendlesham is a rural parish in the valley of the River Deben in south-east Suffolk. The modern village is on the site of a Second World War airfield, some distance from the parish church of St Gregory the Great, but this is a place with a long history. The tower of the medieval church (1), overlooking the river, is a prominent local landmark, and its dedication to the Pope who despatched St Augustine to convert the Anglo- Saxons to Christianity hints at the possibility of an even earlier connection. The Venerable Bede, a Northumbrian monk writing in the early 8th century AD, records in his History of the English Church and People that Rendlaesham was the East Anglian royal settlement where Aethelwold, king of the East Angles, stood sponsor at the baptism of Swithelm, king of the East Saxons, at some time between AD 655 and 664.

Because of Bede’s reference there has always been interest in Rendlesham and this intensified after the discovery in 1939 of the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, just four miles away down the Deben valley (2). It seemed likely that this spectacular grave was somehow linked to the royal settlement recorded by Bede, and that the heartland of royal power in what is now south-east Suffolk may have centred on a royal territory at the head of the Deben estuary.

Subsequent excavations by Professor Martin Carver at Sutton Hoo (see pages 26 to 31) have shown that the ship burial was one of several equally high-status graves in a cemetery that appears to have been reserved for the highest social ranks – probably the ruling family of the early East Anglian kingdom.