Return to West Stow
Ground zero of English social history
A few days ago I visited West Stow Anglo-Saxon village in Suffolk, famous as the first attempt to use experimental archaeology to reconstruct an Anglo-Saxon settlement on its original site. It was my first return visit to West Stow in about fifteen years, although I grew up visiting the site frequently and went to school only about a mile away. I learnt recently (from Sarah Doig’s excellent new book on Basil Brown) that it was Basil Brown (of Sutton Hoo fame) who made the earliest discoveries of Anglo-Saxon houses on West Stow Heath during the Second World War, during a period when the soon-to-be-famous self-taught archaeologist was working as a stoker at Culford School.
West Stow is a village at the very edge of Breckland, where the chalkland on which Bury St Edmunds is built changes suddenly and dramatically to sand; as a child, West Stow felt like a slightly exotic place because it involved crossing this geographical boundary from the familiar to the strange – strange not only because the soil was suddenly so sandy (evoking the carefreeness of a visit to the beach) but because only odd, spindly conifers would grow in it; and it is this sudden alteration in the treescape that is perhaps the most obvious sign that one is entering Breckland. It is also a depopulated area – strangely so for a densely populated, agrarian county like Suffolk. And the forests are rendered all the more eerie for their recent vintage, most of them dating only from after the Second World War; for within the King’s Forest, Elveden Forest and Thetford Forest lies a much older landscape of barrows and tumuli.
My sister and I enjoyed visiting West Stow so much that my mother mocked us up Anglo-Saxon costumes from old school blankets, itchy white things edged with blue stripes, which we wore with my father’s old belts and any Anglo-Saxon-looking accessories we could get hold of; my pride and joy was a little replica gold brooch looking like a fox’s face with two little red garnets for eyes, which I got from the shop at West Stow itself. I remember struggling to learn runes and trying to write the names of the old Anglo-Saxon gods in them, desperately wanting to get as close as possible to early Anglo-Saxon England. What fascinated me then was the thought of what it must have been like to live in pre-Christian England, in a tiny settlement like West Stow, hacked out of a forest in which you were not quite sure what monsters lived; and I terrified myself reading Ted Hughes’s Beowulf with Charles Keeping’s illustrations.
Returning to West Stow today, it is with a rather different perspective. For the early Anglo-Saxons were not, of course, pioneers hacking a precarious existence out of virgin wilderness. Approaching West Stow, you may well cross a bridge over the River Lark and an area of river basin separating the villages of Lackford and Icklingham – which is, of course, the site of the Roman town of Camboritum, the largest Roman settlement in West Suffolk (the ‘Roman Bury St Edmunds’, if you like). Camboritum was not large – a townlet rather than a town – but it is important to bear in mind that whoever settled at West Stow in the 5th or 6th century did so in the shadow of this decaying settlement – a settlement where, as we know from a series of lead tanks covered in Christian symbolisms, baptisms had been in progress in the late Roman period. The Anglo-Saxons took up residence in the wreckage of the society, and of the religion, that preceded them. And it is striking that a good proportion of the artefacts in the museum at West Stow are Roman – including the curious ‘Icklingham Pillar’, a diminutive pillar (perhaps a pedestal for a cult image) that was found in a pit, deliberately buried with severed human skulls in what seems to have been a ‘closing ritual’ of some kind for a Romano-British cult we can only dimly guess at. Roman artefacts have been found in many Anglo-Saxon graves, although whether these were heirlooms passed down through families with some dimly remembered Romano-British ancestry or association, or talismans picked up from the wreckage of Roman Britain that the Anglo-Saxons regarded with mingled fear and curiosity, we can only guess at.
Put simply, returning to West Stow as a trained historian, I suppose what I see now that I never did as a child is the depth of field of the past; the extent to which people living in the past (those Anglo-Saxons) were also living in a past of their own – the former landscape of their Roman and Bronze Age predecessors, who in the case of the Romans had barely just left (in archaeological terms). As a child, I became hyper-fixated on the period of life most associated with West Stow as it is presented as a heritage site – the early Anglo-Saxon era – and sought to understand its distinctive character. Perhaps this is just how children think; although it does make me wonder if we could do more to emphasise the way different pasts bleed into one another in the way we teach history, rather than presenting ‘The Romans’, ‘The Saxons’, ‘The Normans’ and so forth as discreet self-contained eras to primary age children.
But there is another way in which my perception of West Stow has changed profoundly since I first visited. As a child, I suppose I saw the purpose of the reconstructed dwellings as a kind of immersive evocation – the chance to feel what early Anglo-Saxon was like. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. But approaching these structures now I am conscious that West Stow is as much a museum dedicated to experimental archaeology as a museum created by experimental archaeology. I am as fascinated by articles belonging to Basil Brown and his brilliant protégé Stanley West as I am by the ancient artefacts themselves, and the archaeologists’ original pioneering work in the 1970s now seems as exciting to me as those imagined Anglo-Saxons were to me as a child. We now know that the early reconstructions of ‘grub huts’ got it wrong – but in getting it wrong, they advanced our understanding immeasurably, because they stimulated different ways of thinking about how the Anglo-Saxons lived and the assumptions we brought to dealing with these ‘barbarians’. West Stow is a monument to the history of British archaeology, and to a golden and pioneering age of archaeology in the 1970s that feels like a very different era. But it remains a deeply special place: a place of contact with ordinary Anglo-Saxon people because they were ordinary, not for some ulterior purpose: a sort of symbolic ground zero for English social history.