Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Eorðan wæstmas: a Feast for the Living
- 2 Bare bones: animals in cemeteries
- 3 Pots, buckets and cauldrons: the inventory of feasting
- 4 Last orders?
- 5 The grateful dead: feasting and memory
- 6 Feasting between the margins
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
3 - Pots, buckets and cauldrons: the inventory of feasting
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Eorðan wæstmas: a Feast for the Living
- 2 Bare bones: animals in cemeteries
- 3 Pots, buckets and cauldrons: the inventory of feasting
- 4 Last orders?
- 5 The grateful dead: feasting and memory
- 6 Feasting between the margins
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
Containers such as buckets, pots and occasionally glass vessels have been found in many Anglo-Saxon graves. Vessels may have been added to cremation pyres as well, with a minimum of 93 cremations from Spong Hill containing refired Saxon potsherds, as well as some glass vessels. Such objects must have had, at least at some stage, a connection with food and drink, even if their meaning may have become more diffuse by the time they became part of the Anglo-Saxon burial rite. Pottery and containers made from other materials are generally counted in different categories and are examined under separate headings. Precious vessels, which were made from glass, animal horn, silver or copper alloy, and in some cases of wood with a gold or bronze trim, often occur with high-status burials. They habitually feature in certain sorts of grave: Arnold has observed that rich male graves in sixth-century Southern England always included weapons and some form of container. One of the most well known is the ship burial under mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, which contained twenty-eight different vessels, among which were a Byzantine silver dish (the so-called Anastasius dish), a silver bowl with fluted handles, ten smaller silver vessels, a ladle with a parcel-gilt bowl, a small plain bowl without a handle, a Coptic bronze bowl, silver-mounted wooden vessels, three cauldrons, a hanging bowl and iron-bound bucket, plus pottery vessels (Plate 7). The ship funeral under mound 2 also contained an emphatic range of vessels, including a tub, a bucket, a copper-alloy bowl and a silver mounted cup. Sutton Hoo is a very high-status site, and all of these vessels are indicative of feasting and hospitality. Mounds 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 contained cremations wrapped in cloth that were then placed in bronze bowls. The disturbed ship burial under mound 2 contained drinking horns, an iron-bound bucket, a bronze bowl, a blue glass jar, a cauldron and a silver-mounted cup. The cremation of a man under mound 17 contained a cauldron, a haversack with meat bones, an iron-bound bucket and a drinking bowl. In the early seventh-century princely burial at Taplow, Buckinghamshire, a man was laid out in an oak-lined chamber under a mound. This burial contained no fewer than nineteen vessels.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Feasting the DeadFood and Drink in Anglo-Saxon Burial Rituals, pp. 72 - 86Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007