 Mi'n oedd Stephen Johnson. I'm the treasurer of the society. I'm essentially a volunteer. I'm one of the trustees, as actually is Chris Scull, who's going to be talking to us today. But I have the present duty of introducing two speakers to you today, which is slightly unusual for these lunchtime lectures. So Michael Bumbry, who's going to be speaking first, is the current owner of Norton Hall. Mae gennym rhaid yn ym 1930 ac nid oes ei fawr ac yn ymwneud hynny. Mae gennym, mae'r fawr yn ymwneud hynny. Mae gennym... Mae gennym i'n mynd i gyd yn ymwneud hynny. Mae gennym i'n gweithio yma. Mae gennym i'n Sothaeg. Mae gennym i'n gweithio. Mae gennym i'n gyflawni ddefnyddol yma. Mae gennym i'n gyflawni ddefnyddol yma. Mae gennym i'n gweithio i'r Llyfrgell Cynllodd. ac yn ddwy i'r ffordd o'r ddweud o'r ffordd o'r llwyddiadau yng nghymru. Mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud i Caroline, a'u gwneud y cerddau cyffordd y meddwl gyffredigol o'r St Gregory o'r Llyfrgell, o'r ddweud o'r genesafol. Mae'n ddweud i'r ffordd i London City Firm in 1968, ac mae'n dweud i'n dweud i'r ffordd o'r gweld cyfnod, mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud i'r St Paul's Cathedrol a chaelwyr yng Nghymru'r Gweithنod ddechu y Llancaf. Yn ymweld i'w gweithio yma i ddweud hynny, neu dwi'n gwneud hynny i ddweud hynny, ac ydych chi'n gweithio ymddangos, a dwi'n gweithio ymddangos i'r amser gweithio yng nghymru a chaelwyr yn ymddangos i ymddangos i Anglos. Yn ymddangos i'r amser gweithio ymddangos i ddweud hynny, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r rhendrolyg. Dywedodd yn cael ei ddweud y dyfodol yn ymwneud yng nghymru, ac Euriech Celser Merthyn i'r mwyaf o'r ysgolau yng Nghymru, sy'n cymdeiniedd ar Euriech Celser Merthyn. Euriech Celser Merthyn i'n gweithio'r gwylliant o'r ysgolau yng Nghymru a brofynol ac yn llwylo meddwl mewn argyflwyno. Euriech Celser Merthyn, wrth fynd, yn ymwneud o'r llwylo, I hope you think I've aged well, but I've lived at home since 1965. It is on my family's land in Rendlesham that this magnificent 14th century church tar's that the story unfolds. You'll know the BBC TV series, I'm sure, the Detectorists, and one review I read a while back seemed terribly close to home for comfort. It reported that Andy and Lance are in search of the lost Sutton who treasure of Saxford, the seventh century king of these Saxons. Unfortunately, the man on whose land it may lies as mad as a box of frogs. Well, I'm afraid I don't know about boxes of frogs, but I am indeed the land owner mad or otherwise. So my part of the story starts in 2006. We had someone who worked for us out at night and he encountered four illegal Detectorists. They were detained by the police, but they were sent away and told not to come back because the police thought they had no evidence. Over the next two years, we suffered repeated illegal activity. There were holes dug in fields. It looked as though an army had walked across some of our fields in the morning. And not only did we realise this was a problem for the heritage, but we felt very, very uncomfortable about Thieves intent on criminal activity wandering around on the fields outside our house. I was complete novice and got a clue what to do. Completely exasperated. I'll horrify you by telling you that someone suggested we should spread a whole load of metal over all the fields just to spoil the so-called night hawks. But fortunately, I'd been put in touch with Jude Pluvier, the archaeologist at the Suffolk Council. She did two things for me. Firstly, she said, next time the police stops someone, press them to press charges about getting equipped to steal. That indeed is what the police did in 2009 when they arrested, I think it was the third or fourth lot of people that we'd turf'd off. And they were prosecuted, actually admitted, pleaded guilty and were fined. But they'd come from quite a way away and that unit all led to a pattern of people being really interested. So we obviously had a considerable problem on our hands. Jude Pluvier said that if she could raise the funds, she asked if she could put in a team of authorised metal detectorists. And thanks to the support from a local society, the Sutton Hoo Society, they started a survey. And in the first few weeks found items of sufficient interest that they came to me and asked if they could continue. We came to an agreement and they're still with us seven years later. They've come friends and regulars on our fields around the farm at Rentrum. They're here this afternoon. So I'd like to start by introducing you to some photographs of them of the young or not so young men who have spent countless hours since 2009 with their metal detectors at home. They have brought some things with them too to show you after the lecture and they'll be around afterwards. So you can see four very professional metal detectorists a million miles away from anyone called a Nighthawk. On the left is Alan Smith, next to him Rob Atfield, Roy Demant and then Terry Marsh. Now let me introduce you to some of their finds. They estimate they've unearthed about 120,000 items since they've been working for us with us on our land, of which about four and a half thousand are recorded as archaeologically significant. So they've been looking for the equivalent of needles in hay stacks and so we start with some of the hay. This is Terry and he's found a metal item that superficially looks like a coin. But on closer examination you'll see that it's far from a coin. It's a very 20th century shotgun top. In the days that cartridges had paper cases which have rotted away. They now have plastic cases but in any case people are encouraged now to pick them up and take them away. Everything that our team has found is also picked up and taken off the fields. Then next up is Roy Demant. Roy has got a lump of metal that's reasonably spherical and here it is in close-up. It is a musket ball. I was very surprised to find that the boys had found literally hundreds of musket balls. I wondered if there'd been a battle at home. But apparently it is the detritus of game shooting of an earlier era. Then we next move to Alan Smith. Alan, I think you'll agree, looks the part. Alan has found a needle rather than the blade of hay. It's a Roman coin. It's a bronze Cestertius, if I pronounced it correctly. Not that I'd know but Alan tells me it is and Alan's brilliant on his coins, I'm sure it is. It's had a hole drilled through probably in Saxon times and was probably reused as an ornament. But as you can see, bronze doesn't like sitting in the soil for over a thousand years. This is thought to come from the reign of Antonius Pius, 138 AD. Last up of our four is Rob Adfield. We now get to a real needle in the hay stack. On the afternoon of 20 February 2014 I was walking our dogs after their dinner. The dogs know the boys well and they are friends. We saw Rob on his knees and he was grinning like a Cheshire cat. Into my hand he pressed a lump of earth. He recorded the location on his GPS. You'll see that's it. Actually another field but when they and any of them find anything they record the location and Chris will show you why that's been so valuable. In any case I was given this lump to clean and there it is beginning to be cleaned. Five seconds later in my hand was a perfect gold coin to lay in the ground for about 1400 years. There's the one side of it and here's the other. In my pocket it is here in the flesh in its case. It may be small as you can see from the scale there but I gather it's really in perfect condition. Rob knew what it was and later Alan confirmed it was a 17th century Anglo-Saxon coin. It's an English coin known as the Two Emperor's Thrimser which might even have been minted at Grenlsham because as Chris will tell you it was a site of our activity in precious metals. Most of the coins found have been continental ones. Merovingian or others from as far away as Constantinople. But this one is English found by me in just about five minutes with a little help from Rob who probably hadn't found anything for a month beforehand and it is the only item of what has been found that will stay with me in our house. The rest is going to the local museum. I think our house is reasonably safe now because I think Chris thinks he's found the site of the Royal Hall which for many a month we thought was probably underneath the house and someone would come along and suggest that we should be allowed to dig underneath the hall floor but hopefully it's been spared. So what happens to finds such as these? Well, cartridge cases are just disposed of. Masked balls are given away or recycled. The coins are fully identified and catalogued and then the process, the treasure act comes into play in the case of the gold coin. No sorry, not in the case of the gold coin, in the case of gold and silver. Over there there are leaflets on the treasure act. I absolutely knew absolutely nothing about it in 2006. So I had a learning curve. But as I've said the Ipswich Museum is acquiring all of these finds and they will be on display in due course. Now as the importance of the site became more and more apparent in 2010 as Jude Pluvier asked Chris Skull to join and to jointly lead the project. We've all worked together since then and so I'll very shortly hand over to Chris who will take you back and describe the importance of the site and how it fits in and indeed has changed and shaped the understanding of Anglo-Saxon life over an extended period. It is paradoxical really that without the illegal activity that first sparked our notice in 2006 I wouldn't be standing here today. The criminal activities of these who do destroy our heritage in pursuit of personal gain have on this occasion prompted a response at Reynoldsham that has resulted in a major advancement of knowledge. The site is far too big to secure. It covers hundreds of acres, not a few acres. But since the archaeological work has been going on illegal activity has fallen away and I would say touch wood is now minimal. The four boys get on to fields as soon as they can. They are known to be around. There's neighborhood watch by the local community and the police are very helpful too. So it's over the site as I said at the beginning that this wonderful church stands. Literally it looks over the most important of the fields. Those of you who know anything about treasure act and things like that will know that landowners benefit from things that are found along with the finders. Early on my wife Caroline and I decided that we'd give anything we got to charity and that includes the Reynoldsham Church Council in order to prime the very substantial repairs that this church needs from time to time. As Chris has said, we will sphere raising the money elsewhere. We've made a lot of progress, we've got a long way to go but it's a very important building overlooking this important site. So Chris, over to you to talk about take us back hundreds of years into the past. Well thank you Michael and Michael has outlined for us how the project came about. And in the rest of the lecture today I just want to share with you what we found and why it's important. But before I do that I just want to say a little bit about metal detecting and archaeology because there has been and in some quarters there still is some tension between professional archaeologists on the one hand and metal detector hobbyists on the other. Things are very much better than they used to be but to some archaeologists the metal detector is still the tool of the selfish treasure hunter so for some detectorists the archaeologist represents a killjoy officialdom that resents the metal detector because it puts discovery within everyone's reach. It is not though the technology that's the issue here it's the way in which the technology is used. So irresponsible metal detecting theft damages the archaeological heritage and deprives all of us of knowledge about the past and as this side shows and Michael has said it can also do very substantial damage to fields and crops but if used responsibly with permission and the accurate recording and reporting of finds metal detecting is adding massively to our understanding of the past and over the past two decades or so metal detector finds overwhelmingly made by amateurs and hobbyists have transformed our understanding of early and middle Anglo-Saxon England that is the period of the fifth to the ninth centuries AD and this is due to the reporting framework established back in the 1990s through the treasure act and the portable antiquities scheme and as Michael has said there's information available at the front desk afterwards on these schemes. Now although there are die hard still on both sides I think both archaeology professionals and metal detecting hobbyists by and large agree now that they're on the same side they're both motivated by a common interest in the past and let's face it also by the thrill of discovery and metal detectors are used routinely now on most archaeological excavations to ensure that metal finds are not overlooked and we use them in this way at Rendelsham as you can see here we're trawling, we're sitting the excavator material and we're also using metal detecting to ensure that we didn't miss any metal finds and metal detecting if it is undertaken systematically is painstaking work that requires real expertise real skill and real patience and these are our metal detectorists and you can see from the tracks of their tears on that photograph just how much time they have to spend and just how much concentration has to go in ensuring that you cover this area, this massive area properly. Now I will show images of artefacts today that are wonderful and interesting in their own right but most of the finds from Rendelsham even those of archaeological significance are bent and broken fragments of metal are un-pre-possessing and appear to have frankly little inherent value but they all embody information and it's the big picture constructed from the aggregate of this information the information that they carry that tells us about the place and their importance therefore lies not so much in the intrinsic value of any one object but in what we can learn from the place of that object in the landscape and against objects of different types and dates and against different types of archaeological evidence and it's this differential patterning that allows us to deduce what the people who lived here in the past did and where they did it and from this to make informed judgments about how they lived. So Rendelsham, marked here in red sits on the east side of the River Deben in south-east Suffolk about six kilometres north and east of the famous Barrow Cemetery at Sutton Hoo. It sits on the edge of the area of Suffolk known as the Sandlings which is a region of subdued topography and light sandy soils with estuarine rivers flowing to the North Sea and it's been argued that this part of south-east Suffolk formed the territorial focus of the Kingdom of the East Angles in the 7th Century and this slide shows some other important places in south-east Suffolk at this time including Sutton Hoo with its ship burial, Ipswich to which developed as a port and an urban centre from the end of the 7th Century and the Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Snape which also includes burials in boats and at least one very high status 7th Century burial and I've tried to indicate with the red lines here that the topography of the River Valleys might have framed the geography of farming and of community and of Lordship in the 7th Century. Rendelsham Parish itself incorporates terrains that in the past provided a range of agricultural and farming resources marsh or water meadow in the valley bottom agricultural soils on the gentle valley slopes and the inter-fluves between the valleys which are now intensively cultivated but which in the past were heathland and sheep walk. Rendelsham is known to historians particularly because it is mentioned by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People as the East Anglian Vecus Regius or Royal Settlement where King Swithhelm of the East Saxons was baptized sometime between 655 and 663 and it's consequently long been a focus of antiquarian and historical attention and that interest and attention intensified after the discovery of the Mount Vone ship burial at Sutton Hoo in 1939 which hugely raised the profile of the previously obscure 7th Century East Anglian Kingdom and which has come to exemplify Anglo-Saxon Royal Splenda. Now in this slide from 1939 we can see the shape of the boat with its rows of iron rivets as it was revealed and what we see here is the original excavator Basil Brown who was a skilled excavator but not academically qualified who has been relegated to the difficult task of picking out the shape of the boat from its timbers and soil stains while the gaggle of highly trained professional archaeologists hogged the central grave chamber where all the goodies were found and this central grave chamber of course produced numerous extremely fine objects including this purse for the group of continental gold coins and all together the evidence suggested that this was a royal burial of the early 7th Century quite possibly that of the historically-recorded King Redwald who died in the 620s. Now the proximity of Rendlesham and Sutton Hoo gave rise to the idea that they might be linked of royal palates and a royal cemetery. There was though frustratingly little evidence for an important Anglo-Saxon site at Rendlesham. Cremation burials had been found in the early 19th Century but otherwise there was no hard evidence for an Anglo-Saxon site until the early 1980s when field walking, that is walking over plowed fields visually looking for pottery and flint on the surface when field walking and some very limited excavation indicated that there was an Anglo-Saxon settlement of some sort north-west of the parish church of St Gregory. But although the potential importance of this was clear there was nothing about the material that was found that would in any way suggest that this was a site of unusual importance or unusual status. And so, when Sir Michael reported his problems with nighttime looting, Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service immediately recognised the potential significance of what he was saying. And as he said, the responses to undertake in 2008 controlled metal detector survey of the area being damaged along with some limited geophysical survey and assessment of historic maps and documentary evidence and the plotting of relevant aerial photographs. And the intention was to get an initial idea of what was there. And as you've heard, fortunately the project was able to call upon some of the best of the many metal detector users who abide by the rules and record their finds with the Portal Antiquities Scheme. Now the initial metal detecting turned up finds of which our selection is shown on this slide that only have come from a very high status Anglo-Saxon settlement. It also indicated that the evidence of past activity spread over a much wider area than had been thought. So, on this slide, these are the areas that have been fieldwalked. But as you can see, one of the areas being regularly looted was really some way away. And that suggests a much larger area of archaeological significance. And so, at the initial suggestion of the detectorists the survey was expanded to cover the full Norton Hall estate. This was done as part of a larger project coordinated through Suffolk County Council. And this provided finds recording to the standards of the Portal Antiquities Scheme, expert academic and professional guidance. And through the project we were also able to commission complementary fieldwork including further geophysics and in time some limited excavation. The main survey began in 2009 and fieldwork was completed in the summer of 2014. All the work had to be planned and agreed with the estate so that it did the fields no damage and did not interfere with the agricultural work programme. And premature announcement of the project ran the risk of further damage to crops and archaeology from illegal detecting. And so, we kept the survey under wraps. It was kept confidential and announced in 2014 only as fieldwork was ending. Well, the survey area covers 150 hectares and that is the fields outlined and stippled in red on the map. It forms an area, a transect, about three kilometres north south along the east side of the Deben Valley and about a kilometre and a quarter east west across the grain of the landscape from the bottom of the river valley up onto the interflues. And this is a large enough area for us to be sure that any patterns of presence and absence and clustering of finds are real and also to allow us to examine how patterns of evidence change with terrain. The main survey method is systematic surface collection with metal detectors which aims for 100% coverage and has achieved 100% coverage of this area. The location of all the finds that date to before about 1650, including pottery, tile and flint as well as metalwork, is recorded using handheld geographic positioning kit, as Michael has shown. And I'd like to emphasise that everything that is recovered comes from the top 10 to 15 centimetres of the plough soil at the top, 4 to 6 inches. And so, it's long since been removed from any stratigraphic archaeological context by past ploughing. The finds are catalogued on a Microsoft Access database, which is linked to our project geographic information system. And this allows us to integrate and interrogate all elements of our data very rapidly and to generate maps, plots, distribution plots, and indeed further questions. And the database holds records of 3,946 items ranging in date from Neolithic to early modern. And this is the distribution of all those archaeologically significant finds within the survey area, so just under 4,000 dots there. Of the finds that can be securely dated, 27% are Anglo-Saxon, that is the 5th to 11th centuries AD. And this compares to only 5% of finds from Suffolk as a whole that are Anglo-Saxon. And this disparity alone indicates that there is something very unusual and significant at Rendelsham in the Anglo-Saxon period. And this is a selection of the Anglo-Saxon material that has been recovered. And it represents a number of things. Some of it represents disturbed settlement deposits, rubbish that's been just strewn around and plowed up by modern agriculture. Some of it comes from furnished burials, burials of grave goods that have been disturbed by the plough in the past. Some of it comes from midning and manuring whereby items have been bound up, taken up with household rubbish, curated as compost on middens and then spread out to manure the fields of a farm. And some of it is material that would have been dropped on the ground surface in the course of normal life in the past. And teasing out in more detail which finds represent which processes of deposition and which past activities is one of the challenges that faces us in analysing the assemblage in the future. And this is the distribution on the right of the Anglo-Saxon finds which suggests a concentration activity over an area of about 50 hectares within that oval in the 6th to the 8th centuries. And if you could just keep your eye on the dotted rectangle, within that area we've undertaken geophysics, magnetometry over an area of 46 hectares to investigate what looks to be the core area of Anglo-Saxon activity as it is indicated by metal detecting. And the results show an extensive palimpsest, i.e. superimposition of enclosures, boundaries and settlement features which we know to represent activity from late prehistory to the 20th century. And I'll show you some of this in more detail in a moment. And then if we look at the topography and the distribution of finds in a little more detail it becomes clear how this Anglo-Saxon settlement in its activity forms a coherent place in the landscape clustered around the shallow valley of a small stream flowing into the River Deben. To the south we have a flat promontary at about 10 metres ordnodd statum, 10 metres of sea level with a marked slope leading down to the flood plain. To the north and east, across this shallow valley is land rising to the interflueve and intervisible with the promontary. So this is a unit, intervisible unit clustered around this topographic set of topographic features. Now, selected features identified by the geophysics were targeted for excavation in 2013 and 2014 and our intention was to test how the archaeology survived below ground and we chose these two fields and the position of our trenches are marked in red because there was particularly good evidence from geophysics and particularly interesting finds from the metal detecting survey. The results of our limited excavation confirmed the accuracy of geophysics and provided information on the preservation and the character of the data and the potential of the varied archaeology that allows us to be more confident about interpreting our survey data in our geophysics on a wider scale across the whole range of the massive site. So we have rubbish pits, sunken featured building or gruben house. This is a cremation burial. This is the urn in which the human ashes, human bone, burnt human bone was placed and that in some time has been hit by, the top of that urn has been hit by the plough and that's why it's a bit broken. And here, something I'll talk about later, a large Anglo-Saxon ditch absolutely covered and filled with rubbish deposits and hidden deposits which has some very interesting things in them indeed. And just to explain to you what I mean by sunken featured building a gruben house, what we excavated here are the below-ground traces of a building that was built over and around a pit, like a simple cellar that was dug into the ground. These weren't, we think, dwelling houses, but they're storage buildings or working sheds. But where they're found, so you will nearly always find larger ground-level buildings, rectangular buildings, whose foundations show up only as post-holes for the archaeologists or foundation trenches. Neither of which are easy to find with geophysics, nor with excavation, unless you excavate much larger areas than we were able to. So the presence of these gruben hoys or these sunken featured buildings almost certainly indicates that there are further larger buildings, timber halls, in that area. So north and east of the stream, our excavation results suggest that the macular features, that is technical term for these blobs on the geophysics, that most of these represent just those Anglo-Saxon sunken featured buildings and rubbish pits. In other words, this is an area of settlement extending over at least eight hectares. As I've said, there are almost certainly larger timber buildings there as well. And we know from surface finds and excavation that there were also burials. So we have evidence for burials from this area, so there's probably an associated cemetery. South of the stream, there may be some gruben hoys are identified, but not in the numbers or the density that we see to the north. Here, the geophysics shows a range where the excavation has demonstrated that these include features from the later iron age, the early 1st century AD, right through to the medieval period. And an important feature of this are these two linear features that show up on the geophysics. We dropped a trench over this to see what it was. It turned out to be an Anglo-Saxon ditch which was open in the early to middle Anglo-Saxon period, probably during the 6th to the 8th centuries. We didn't excavate this parallel ditch at the bottom. This is at the edge of the plateau. That's the slope going down to the river, and so this is at the bottom of the slope. Together, these probably represent they demarcate the western edge, the boundary of the western edge of the settlement, and it looks as though they also delineate some sort of routeway going north south along the valley. Our excavation, as you can see from the photograph, showed that the areas of dark soil that we'd seen on the ground surface here actually derive from the plowing up of buried layers of Anglo-Saxon midden rubbish, which also filled and overlaid the ditch, and where such midden layers are known from other Anglo-Saxon sites in East Anglia and Eastern England. In all cases, they're close to the major buildings of the settlement. It may seem counterintuitive that where you've got those buildings on an important settlement, you've actually got the festering midden heaps quite close by, but that just happens to be the way it is. That just happens to be the way it is. The midden deposits indicate almost certainly major buildings nearby, and when we take that observation, or when we took that observation with a concentration of fifth to eighth century metal finds in that area, which included golden guide items of very, very high quality indeed, as shown on this slide, and into that the prominent position of this place, this suggested to us that this is where any high status residence was located. To our really intense satisfaction, after we come to this conclusion and after we've done our excavation, a crop mark appeared in exactly this area, which seems to represent the foundations of a rectangular timber building that's about 23 metres long by 10 metres wide. The interpretation isn't absolutely certain, but this is a very good candidate for major Anglo-Saxon Hall. It didn't appear on the geophysics, and it's not easy to define on the aerial photograph, and we were very, very fortunate that there were expert aerial interpreters from Historic England working with us on this. There must be other buildings here, but as I've already said, a need that did not have very large foundation features are unlikely to be detected by our current remote sensing techniques. So I think you can make out there in the light green the rectangle of the foundations of this building. Now, the distribution of the finds suggests activity across the 50 hectare area throughout the fifth to the eighth centuries. Although within this, it's likely there were changes in focus and density at the time. This site was at the peak of its importance in the early to middle sixth century, about 8550, until the second quarter of the eighth century, about 8720, and during this time it covered a greater area and was richer than any other known rural settlement of the same period in England. And just to make this point, this slide shows excavated hall groups at other settlements that are interpreted as royal residences at the time, including the contemporary northumbrian royal residence at Yevoryn here. That is where our hall is to scale, and you can see how the Yevoryn hall complex, this hall complex and this hall complex would all fit within this single field of the much, much larger settlement complex at Rendlesham. So it's huge by comparison with other known sites. Now from the second quarter of the eighth century, this settlement at Rendlesham declined in size and status, and from the middle of the eighth century onwards it looks like a normal farming settlement. There isn't, though, any evidence for a break in occupation or activity. There were changes in character and layout, but the settlement continued in the immediate vicinity to the 11th century and thereafter to the present day. What we have here is a favoured location in the landscape, and this major complex of the sixth and eighth centuries was an episode in a much longer term sequence of settlement activity, as these plots of the Roman finds, the Anglo-Saxon finds and the medieval finds show. They're all clustering in the same sort of area, but they show that there are concentrations of different activity at different places. There's changes over time within that topographic zone. I want now just to turn briefly to some aspects of the site's economy, and this is where we look at the royal rubbish. Animal bone from the midden deposits can tell us a lot about provisioning and consumption and the wider role of animals at this place. The bone represents butchery, food waste and the disposal of other carcasses, and we have the remains of birds of prey, horses and large, well-fed dogs, which may indicate hawking, riding and hunting. It is important to note there that horse remains are uncommon on Anglo-Saxon sites of this type and period, and the horses we have died in the prime of life, and it's possible that they represent animal sacrifice, and so some evidence of pre-Christian cult activity here. The food remains, they were eating cattle, pig and sheep, with a very high proportion of very young animals selected for consumption. We've got evidence that they're also mature cattle used for traction, so pulling plows and carts, and for tooth disease that indicates pressure on grazing from intensive livestock rearing. The findings suggest a farming establishment that also received livestock from other places as tribute or food renders, and meat consumption on a large scale and animals associated with high status activities, such as hawking and hunting, point to an elite element amongst the population. We have evidence for fine metal working here in the sixth and seventh centuries. This includes scrap material being recycled for reuse, lead models for making the moulds in which objects were cast, globules and other molten metal spilled during casting, and unfinished items discarded after casting. Precious metals scrap, gold and silver. This lead model for a sword ring, which would have made the mould from which an ornament for a sword upon all was cast, and that would probably be in silver. This unfinished mount for a belt or harness in aristocratic style too, these all point to manufacture for higher status patrons. But we also have plain copper alloy dresspins, buckles and bare catches, both finished and unfinished examples, and these point to more everyday production on the site. And the relatively large numbers of simple inexpensive items may suggest we have production here for a wider population than just the permanent inhabitants of the settlement. And we have a cluster of metal working finds just south of the area of the hall, which does very strongly suggest that there is a workshop or a production area, a metalsmith working here in the 6th and 7th centuries. At the bottom of this slide, we show broach types that are rare in England and the best parallel to Frankish gall, France, which suggests a community with long distance social and cultural contacts from the early to middle 6th century. Non-local material of a slightly later date, the later 6th and 7th centuries, the time of Sutton Hoo includes Frankish gold coinage, fragments of hanging bowls from western northern Britain and fragments of Byzantine copper alloy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean, all things that are also present in the Sutton Hoo ship burial. And these would conventionally be seen as acquired directly through elite level gift exchange. I passed on from regional potentate or aristocrat to regional potentate and aristocrat. But our finds and rendelship include these Byzantine copper coins of the late 6th and 7th centuries. And as far as we know, this is the largest collection of such material from any site in the UK. And in the past, these coins have been explained as discarded 19th century tourist souvenirs. But at Rendelsherm, they have to be taken as evidence that they were actually being brought to England in the 6th and 7th centuries. And it's difficult to think of any way that such low value coins came to England, except with individuals from the Mediterranean. And so they do suggest that the Byzantine imports, like those found at Sutton Hoo, were arriving in southeast England through mercantile channels, as well as through socially embedded gift exchange. And Rendelsherm has also yielded an exceptionally large number of 6th to 8th century coins. Our database includes 25 gold coins of the period 580 to 670 and 168 of the later silver pennies, so-called shatters of 670 to 750. And both these types of coins, the early gold and the later silver, have very similar patterns of distribution across the settlement area. They can't be explained as coin hordes that have been disturbed and dispersed by plowing. They must therefore represent continuous loss through transactions, people dropping coins as they make payments or exchange money. Rendelsherm was thus a place to which coin flowed disproportionately from the later 6th through to the early 8th centuries. And it would appear to us that the gold as well as the later silver coinage were making us money, and not just as a raw material for the jeweller. And there is support for this, which is quite an important observation in the context of early medieval economy, in the form of coin weights marked with contemporary Byzantine gold denominations. And we've also got cut coins, a weight adapted coin, blanks, gold ingots, and even a gilded silver forgery of a Frankish coin, all suggesting a system in which these gold coins are recognised as units of account that might need to be checked for weight and fineness, but where payments might be made in equivalent weights of uncoined bullion. And these contacts and the ability to acquire precious metal can only be explained if this settlement served an elite social group. And confirmation of this elite presence from the early or middle 6th century, if not before, comes from high quality dress fittings, dress jewellery weapon fittings and harness fittings like those shown on this slide. Though what I should emphasise again is that most items from Rendelsherm are unostentatious and sometimes unrecognisable copper alloy, and that the material speaks of the social range. We've got evidence that speaks of farmers and skilled craftsmen as well as magnates and warriors at this place. So what does this tell us about the character of the settlement here at Rendelsherm, the range of activities that took place here and the wider social and economic and political context within which this is all embedded? Well, this slide shows that current academic thinking would expect of a high status settlement, and Rendelsherm meets the material requirements for all these criteria. And the wider scatter coinage and metalwork, I should say, probably represents periodic activity as well as permanent settlement here. So it's a place that embodied a range of functions and activities that took place at different and social economic levels. And their relative emphasis will have varied both at the seasonal and everyday pulse of life and over the longer term. And this is our interpretation of what we have here on the ground. We think it was a farm and a residence and a tribute centre where the land's wealth was collected, consumed and redirected and where major administrative payments made and important social and political events transacted. So by the 6th century this was at the apex, a place at the apex of a pyramid of surplus extraction, taxation and jurisdiction and at the centre of networks of consumption, redistribution and patronage that fueled elite political and social relationships. And even without Beed's reference it would be a strong candidate for a 7th century royal centre. Now, early medieval kings and magnates were peripatetic, moving between different residences, partly so that the burden of feeding the household and the retinue was spread, but also so that they could be seen and ruled and be seen to rule by as many people as possible. Vrendals from then would have been a permanent centre for agrarian administration, but when the king and his household and retainers were in residence there had been gatherings of the local warrior aristocracy and assemblies to transacting laws and justice. And the broader scatter of metalwork finds includes items such as harness fittings and weapon fittings, belonging to a high state of social milieu, which might well be explained as the aggregate loss from years of periodic gatherings in the paddocks or fields around an important residence. So we should perhaps imagine these as the detritus of a tent village, a periodic tent village around the permanent settlement which was set up perhaps two or three times a year for decades or even a century or more. Now we think that the coinage was used as currency at Vrendalsham from some time in the 6th century, and conventionally transactions in gold at this time would be seen as social and jurisdictional payments, things like tribute, vines, gifts and rewards. But we also think the more commercial transactions, although restricted to the representatives of aristocracy or royalty, are also indicated. Conversely, the lower value silver coinage that replaced gold coinage towards the end of the 7th century is usually seen as indicating an increasingly immunitised market economy, but we should also envisage its use in jurisdictional administrative payments. So the evidence from Vrendalsham is that things are a bit more complicated than people have sometimes thought. In the 7th century, and this shows Vrendalsham and Ipswich to scale, the area of activity at Vrendalsham actually appears to have been greater than that of the contemporary trading settlement at Ipswich. The artifact assemblages are very different. Vrendalsham has little or none of the imported pottery that you find at Ipswich. Ipswich lacks the early coinage, material wealth and elite metalwork that is found at Vrendalsham. Sites rich in coins and metalwork in the hinterlands of coastal ports are usually interpreted as inland markets for the commercial redistribution of imported goods, but this really doesn't fit what we see at Vrendalsham. It's interesting that Cotonam, a site north of Ipswich in the Gipping Valley, is in the 7th century very similar to Vrendalsham. It's an important settlement with strong evidence for consumption and display, and these look like not like markets, but like magnate residences or estate centres that were gradually being integrated into an economy that was becoming monetised. So this may require us to rethink our ideas of how trade functioned and developed at this time. Ipswich in the 7th century may not have been a port, but may have been a staging post for trade as enclave, with the real business taking place at important rural centres like Vrendalsham and Cotonam, and the real business would be limited trade in high value goods and luxuries directed at the agents of the social elites at these places. But, from about AD 700, Ipswich massively expanded as an international trading centre and manufacturing town, and both Vrendalsham and Cotonam declined, and one explanation for this coincidence might be that as the volume of international trade increased in the 8th century it was largely concerned with bulk carriage of commodities, rather than luxuries. It was handled increasingly at coastal ports and sites such as Cotonam and Vrendalsham focused more on the agricultural economy. What was the relationship between Vrendalsham and Cotonam? It's a simple question, but the answers aren't very straightforward. Vrendalsham was an important place when the Cotonam cemetery was in use. So it's very likely that the people who buried their dead at Cotonam sometimes stayed at Vrendalsham and derived some of their wealth from its dues and renders. It's not impossible that some of the objects found at Cotonam were made at Vrendalsham, but what we can't do is assume a one-to-one relationship between the two sites. Vrendalsham was in use for rather longer than the Cotonam cemetery, and so the kings or magnates at Vrendalsham must also have had other burial places. They would also have had other estates and residences, and where the dead were buried may have depended upon where they died and when they died. We should also remember the permanent population of Vrendalsham who almost certainly were buried there at Vrendalsham. The great value of Vrendalsham, to our view of Sutton Hoo, is the broader understanding it gives of the social context of the society that created them both. Vrendalsham is everyday life, whereas Sutton Hoo is death. It's likely to be able to study life in London by looking at the whole city instead of just Highgate Cemetery or the Cryptos and Paul's Cathedral. Now I think what we see at Vrendalsham makes good sense as the context of the wealth, contacts and ideologies of power expressed in burial at Sutton Hoo and allows us to see Sutton Hoo more as a part of and a product of a living society than an isolated, non-typical funeral treasure. Archaeologic Vrendalsham has almost certainly identified the royal settlement mentioned by Bede and its predecessors and its successors. What else can we say? Well, this may be where some of the key moments related in Bede's ecclesiastical history took place. If this were a television documentary we'd see costumed extras amidst swirling smoke and the voiceover would announce that here, perhaps on his very spot, King Redwild made a decision that would change the history of England forever. But the motivation to link Bede's people to the place is powerful and it's wholly understandable. But in what he says about people in events in East Anglia he mentions Vrendalsham only once when he records the baptism of Swethel. There's a danger if we overpress this evidence of creating modern myths and perhaps missing the point about what's important about the archaeology. For that, we have to take a step back and think in a more critical way about what we know and what it might mean about how people lived 1400 years ago. What we have here is a long-lived central place that is an order of magnitude, at least 10 times larger than most other known contemporary settlements. It shows a really unexpected early and sophisticated degree of monetary circulation with long-distance exchange systems and social networks. This in turn implies that it represents enduring and robust economic and administrative systems underpinning a robust social hierarchy and the conspicuous consumption that it engendered. The site may also show signs of early centralising craft production. The identification of a long-lived central place on this scale is something absolutely new in the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England. As such, Rendellsham finds its closest comparisons with rich sites in places like Denmark and South Sweden which are known to be the centres of regional kingdoms. There are also some similarities of the economic and political geography of the Channel and the North Sea coasts. In particular, the emergence of so-called polyfocal central places in the northern Frankish kingdoms in northern France and Belgium. Rendellsham therefore begins to align southeast England with much broader economic, social and political developments both within and outside the former provinces of the Roman Empire. In the past, we perhaps underestimated the economic and administrative sophistication, if not the artistic ability of the society that created the burials at Sutton Hoo, that is the earliest English kingdoms and specifically the East Anglian Kingdom. Now we are seeing at Rendellsham evidence for the ways in which a kingdom, a complex political entity, should be ruled without the urban infrastructure, towns, that are the hallmark of government and commerce in the classical, medieval and modern worlds. Like all new information, the findings from Rendellsham are forcing us to reconsider what we think we know. How does this new twist of the kaleidoscope of evidence change the bigger picture of our understanding? This means looking at the archaeology in history not just of southeast Suffolk and East Anglia, but also of England and its European contexts. Rendellsham poses a series of challenges to receive wisdom about society and economy in early England, and examining the implications and forging new narratives is a truly exciting prospect. Now, this project has been a collaborative effort and we have to acknowledge with thanks everyone has been involved, particularly Roy Allen and Robin Terry for the metal detecting, my colleague's fame intern in Ju Pluvier from Suffolk County Council, the landowner and the farmer for their active support and encouragement, all the funding bodies and organisations that have given support, including our host this afternoon, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and my colleagues have given their time to the project at no cost to us volunteers because of the importance of the archaeology. This could have been one of those cases where thieves made off with important material and we were left in the dark or speculating about what might have been there. But because the landowner contacted local authority archaeologists, and because the archaeologists, detectorists and landowner have worked together with the farmer, local societies, local museums, academic specialists, the local archaeological field group, the national agencies and learned societies, all of this within the framework provided by the Treasure Act and the Portable Antiquities Scheme, we've together brought to light a site of national and international significance and the finds where it will be housed and displayed locally at Ipswich Museum. Now, the very final two points, so far we've only undertaken very limited excavation to test the conclusions we've drawn from our survey. The importance of this is the use of complementary non-intrusive survey techniques, and it's this that has allowed us to identify the extent, character and significance of the archaeology and to bring you the story that we're telling this afternoon. Metal finds are in fact very, very difficult to detect during field walking, and field walking in the early 1980s retrieved 350 shards of pottery of the Roman period of the late Saxon period, but no metal finds of archaeological significance. Controlled metal detecting in the same fields has subsequently retrieved a further 67 hot shards, but 739 metal finds of the same date range. Conventional archaeological survey simply failed to detect an enormously significant component of the archaeological material in the plow soil, and so for the future we have to conclude systematic field walking and metal detecting must be considered and used as complementary techniques together. As Michael said at the beginning of our talk, there's an irony in that it was illegal metal detecting that brought to the site to attention, but we wouldn't have the astonishing assemblage that establishes the significance of Rendelsham without skilled and responsible metal detecting. Well, this is work in progress. We have preliminary reports published and in press, and a day conference scheduled in Berries and Edmonds for September at which the results of the project will be presented and discussed in much greater detail, and details of this and of the project are available on the website at the web address here. There's still a lot for us to do, and our interpretations will develop as work proceeds. What we are confident about is the outline of the Saxon period that I presented, we presented for you this afternoon, and about the importance of the archaeology at Rendelsham, and thank you very much for your attention. APPLAUSE Stephen, just as we break up, I would please ask you to acknowledge the four metal detectorists who will be out coming up, and Alan's got some things to show you, but they haven't spent man days, man weeks, man months, but man years practically out in all weathers, and without this, without them we wouldn't be here today either. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE