This lavish volume presents the research undertaken between 1980 and 1988 on the Anglo-Saxon settlement at Staunch Meadow, Brandon, Suffolk. The settlement, dating from the mid seventh to later ninth century AD, was situated on a raised ‘island’ of windblown sand, beside a 1km-wide branch of the fens that follows the valley of the Little Ouse. The excavations covered an area of 11 750m2, providing one of the few large ‘windows’ through which to examine a complex nucleated settlement of this date in England.
Elements in the site's complex layout included 35 buildings of mostly earth-fast timber construction, a raised causeway and bridge to access the island, two cemeteries and two buildings identified as churches, and zones linked to specific manufacturing activities. Artefacts recovered included 20 Anglo-Saxon coins, copper alloy pins, personal dress items (including some of silver and gold), fragments of window glass and vessel glass, over 100 bone objects, 24 000 sherds of pottery, 157 000 fragments of animal, bird and fish bones, and 416kg of ironworking slag. There was also significant evidence for a literate element among the settlement's population, reflected by three objects bearing runic inscriptions (one of which was an antler tine inkwell), three styli, fragments from eight glass inkwells and a gold plaque, with the eagle-image of St John, and a surrounding inscription in Latin of SCS EVANGELISTA IOHANNIS (pp. 256–63). Bringing these excavations to full, high-quality publication is a major achievement, and the excavators and leaders of the post-excavation research and their large team of specialists deserve huge credit. English Heritage (now Historic England) also deserves much praise for its long-term commitment to funding these research projects and their publication.
Particularly praiseworthy is the exemplary stratigraphic analysis and phasing (Chapter 2), achieved by combining data from key stratigraphic relationships, dendro-chronological and artefact-based dates with 27 radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modelling. The presentation of the remains by phase and spatial analysis of the discard of artefacts and manufacturing debris is also impressive. It provides a particularly interesting contrast to the contemporary remains from Flixborough, Lincolnshire, where larger quantities of artefacts, bones and industrial debris were deposited as refuse, within a smaller zone of a larger settlement (Loveluck & Atkinson Reference Loveluck and Atkinson2007). The reports on the human, faunal and botanical remains, and on the different types of finds, are also of a very high standard, provided by leading specialists.
Within the wider context of the social dynamics of seventh- to ninth-century England, the greatest contribution of the settlement and cemetery sequences from Brandon lies in the insights that they provide on the complexity of rural centres and their social make-up. Most notable are the hypotheses suggesting that the nucleated settlement housed both secular aristocrats and a small monastic community, accounting for both trappings of lay social practices—hunting, feasting and perhaps warfare—and the presence of a Christian element that was involved in a literate culture of a more sophisticated nature than comparable sites, such as Flixborough, where inkwells were absent. The suggestion of aristocrats holding small monastic centres and estates as lay abbots, or as imposed owners, following textually attested Mercian practices in Kent, is highly plausible (p. 392).
In some important instances, however, the interpretative discussion in Chapter 12 would have benefited from more appropriate or fuller comparative references to achieve a more balanced argument. For example, in support of the nucleated settlement as a monastery, reference is made to settlement location on headlands or sand islands as particularly favoured for monasteries in East Anglia, and that enclosures were a particular feature of monasteries (p. 389). Yet in fenland ‘marsh-scapes’, raised sand islands (roddons) and headlands were favoured locations for settlements in general, as the seventh-century pre-monastic settlement at Brandon demonstrates, as do other sites, such as Fishtoft, near Boston, Lincolnshire (Cope-Faulkner Reference Cope-Faulkner2012), among others; and all of these sites used enclosures to structure settlement space.
In another case, the authors cite the emerging trend of the consumption of cod on ‘high-status’ sites, “including the monasteries at Brandon, Flixborough and Lyminge, in the Middle Saxon period” (p. 375). Here, it would have been more balanced to have added reference to the significant number of cod caught and consumed in the ninth-century phases of the estate centre at Bishopstone, Sussex (Reynolds in Thomas Reference Thomas2010). Similarly, in interpreting the significance of small whale or dolphin bones at Brandon, it would have been useful to cite examples recovered from non-monastic estate centres at seventh- to early eighth-century Carlton Colville, Suffolk, and ninth-century Bishopstone, in addition to Flixborough, which is here assumed to have been a monastery for its entire seventh- to mid-ninth-century occupational history (following Blair Reference Blair2011), despite the close similarities between Flixborough's later seventh- to eighth-century lifestyles to secular estate centres such as Carlton Colville and Portchester Castle, Hampshire (Lucy et al. Reference Lucy, Tipper and Dickens2009; Loveluck Reference Loveluck2013).
The authors also quite rightly cite Continental analogies from monastic traditions in northern France (pp. 388–89, following Blair Reference Blair2005), a region with influential links with Anglo-Saxon England and its Christian networks. Yet again, the Continental analogy is not balanced by even brief discussion of northern French sites, whether estate centres such as Serris, Seine-et-Marne or small monasteries, such as Hamage, Nord, which was published in interim form in French over the last two decades and referred to in publications in English over the last ten years (see Loveluck Reference Loveluck2013).
There are other examples of unbalanced analogy in Chapter 12, but despite these minor points, they do not take anything away from the achievement of producing this landmark publication, which will provide a key dataset and series of hypotheses for interpretation over the next decade. They will, no doubt, be further informed and amended by current research bringing the Kentish royal estate centre and monastery at Lyminge to publication (Thomas Reference Thomas2011), and by wider debates on the relationship between elites and the spectrum of farming, artisan and merchant populations (Loveluck Reference Loveluck2013; Oosthuizen Reference Oosthuizen2013).
