Food and feasting played an important part in the funerary rites of the Anglo-Saxons, yet not every bone denotes a feast and not every structure in a graveyard indicates a cella memoriae. The spacing, sequence and dating of such features are important, and the complexities of feasting in the context of mortuary rites should not be underestimated. I hope to have made a case for a more detailed analysis of animal bone and other food deposits in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. At the end of the book some questions remain open, such as who exactly was feasted and to what purpose. It is also unclear whether feasting could also have taken place elsewhere, since many of the deposits are quite small and are also often the inedible parts of animals.

The post-Conversion transformation of funerary feasting may have obscured the origin of customs such as donations super altare or the need for creating networks of commemoration, to the point that there was a perceived need for a second, secular feast. While Christian concepts of death and afterlife are not necessarily egalitarian, they do promise the same salvation to all. The funerary display that had served the familiy of the deceased as a badge of identity in pre-Christian times could still be turned into a statement of power through lavish hospitality. It also allowed the kin of the dead to arrange their private forms of mourning.

The most interesting aspect of food and drink in Anglo-Saxon funerary rites is that it goes through ‘fashions’. Cremation burial frequently contains animal remains, and in many cases these seem to have been substantial. Inhumation allows the display of goods around the body, but the inclusion of large animals is wholly impractical if they obscure the body or rot around it. The inclusion of symbolic markers opens new avenues of replacement. Burial with the insignia of feasting, such as drinking cups and cauldrons, seems very much associated with the ‘final phase’ of Anglo-Saxon England, after which they disappear. However, saints, a term which, according to Patrick Geary, includes in the early Middle Ages virtually all high ecclesistics, such as bishops and abbots, continue to be buried with the insignia of feasting, such as patens and cups, representative of their role as mediators between heaven and earth. Their graves become focal points for other burials, so that communities of the dead arise.