Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons: Richard Foreman interviews Cat Jarman

Author and publisher Richard Foreman met medieval historian Cat Jarman to discuss The Bone Chests.
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Cat Jarman, Can you first tell us about the genesis of The Bone Chests? What prompted you to write the book?

I first learnt about these chests more than decade ago and have been intrigued by them ever since. The chests are completely unique: there’s nowhere else in England, or to my knowledge, in Europe, where so many early medieval royals are interred in a single place. The other thing that fascinated me about these chests is the more recent history, which reads like something out of a Dan Brown novel. They have survived – just – decades of decay, a succession of three different churches, the Reformation, and not least a devastating attack on the cathedral during the Civil War. In the latter, parliamentarian troops stormed the cathedral and began extensively destroying its interior; some clambering up the stone screens where the chests were perched, opening them, callously rifling through the contents, and throwing the bones to the ground. The fact that any of the bones arestill there is testimony to how much they have meant to successive generations over more than a millennium. But the real excitement for me was the new project that began in 2012, which attempted to use modern scientific methods to find out who is really interred within these chests. Although that project is still ongoing, I wanted to use the preliminary results to assess what we really know about the chests’ history and alongside it, reassess our knowledge of Winchester’s role in the creation of England.

 

The Bone Chests expertly straddles both history and archaeology. You wear the hats of both a scientist and storyteller throughout the book. Can you tell us, are you happier with a pen in hand or digging tool?

Archaeology is an incredibly varied profession and in reality, very little actual time is spent excavating. Although I’ve been fortunate enough to lead numerous excavations in several countries in my career, most of my work has been in the field of bioarchaeology, which focuses on the study of human remains. This has meant many weeks and months doing lab work and crunching data, but I’ve also spent a lot of my career studying artefacts and archival evidence. These stages are like the part of a puzzle when you separate the pieces into matching colours, or edge pieces: when it comes to the writing part, that’s when all the pieces begin to fit together, and the picture emerges. I love doing both, and could never choose just one.

 

The science behind extracting information from bones is incredibly impressive. Can you tell us a little about the techniques that are used – and what we can discover and conclude about the skeletons with some degree of accuracy?

The methods we now have available to us to study human remains are really extensive, the science and technology has moved on enormously in the last decade or so. We can start by looking at the basic elements of a skeleton, things like size and stature, and evidence for age and sex. It surprisingly rare to find out how somebody died, because most courses of death don’t actually leave a mark on the skeleton. Ancient DNA, so DNA extracted from bones or teeth, can tell us everything from indications of ancestry – which sometimes, but not always, gives us a clue to geographical origins; to sex; skin and hair colour; and sometimes evidence of disease like smallpox or leprosy. We can also trace family relationships, which I find very exciting. But the method I have used the most in my own work is isotope analysis, where you analyse teeth and bone for subtle variations in the elements that make up our bodies. We are like walking diaries of our lives because everything we eat and drink turns intothe building blocks of our tissues. Some of the elements that are present in our skeletons, like oxygen and strontium, preserve chemical fingerprints that were passed on from the food and water we consumed as children. Those fingerprints can be specific to certain climates or geographic environments, which means that we can match the signatures we find in a skeleton to geographical locations. This means we can find out about someone’s unique migration history. In a similar way, we can study people’s diets to find out if they were, for example, meat eaters or vegetarians. Diet is often linked to sociocultural circumstances, meaning we can unravel additional information about past lives.

 

Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder and Athelstan all duly feature in the book. In what way, or ways, do you think these rulers helped to create England? Also, if you could meet just one of them, who would it be and why? 

These three rulers were all significant to the creation of what we now define as England, but I think what’s important to understand that this was a long process, which began earlier and continued well beyond Athelstan’s time. The borders of the kingdom waxed and waned for centuries, and the inclusion – and exclusion – of regions is a key part of the story, as is the influence of the Scandinavians. We often have a tendency to want to define key moments or characters where something began, or ended, but the reality is often far more fluid than that. I’d love to meet Alfred, because he is perhaps one of those that we have credited with having such an enormous impact on the shaping of England. So much so, in fact, that when I recently took the ‘Life in the UK’ British citizenship test, the syllabus confidently stated that he ‘defeated the Vikings’ and was the only pre-conquest king mentioned by name. I’d love to know how much of what we think we know about him was really true; he clearly had an excellent PR team both in his own time and among the Victorians, who created the historic hero an expanding British empire needed. Interestingly, archaeology is beginning to reveal some unknown facts about Alfred’s reign. For instance, metal detecting finds of coin hoards and archaeological evidence about the Great Heathen Army, who he fought against extensively, is revealing that his relationship with the Mercian king, Ceolwulf (who is usually described as a Scandinavian puppet-king), was far more complex than we previously thought.

 

The story of the Anglo-Saxons is one which is wedded to that of the story of the Vikings. Can you tell us if the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons are viewed differently in Scandinavia, as opposed to in Britain? Also, should you be able to meet just one Viking ruler, who would it be and why?

I grew up in Norway, and found that the Vikings I had learned about at school were very different from the Vikings I learned about when I moved to England at the age of 18. This is not surprising, because the narratives told in England focus very much on the stories of the invaded, and the battles that were fought against these interlopers. But another key difference is that in Britain, so much of these narratives are based on the available written accounts, instead of the archaeology. In Scandinavia, where there are very few contemporary written sources from the Viking Age, so much more of the story comes from archaeology. I have also been surprised to see how little understanding there seems to be of just how extensive the Scandinavian settlement of Britain really was, especially in the north and east of the country.

Through writing this book, I have become a very big fan of Cnut the Great, the Danish king who ruled England as part of the North Sea empire for 18 years, alongside Norway, Denmark, and parts of Sweden. Cnut’s seems poorly understood in this country: he was actually a popular and successful king, who managed to maintain peace and fend off any rival attacks by other Vikings. He was also a Christian who invested extensively in churches across England. Part of his success must also becredited to his wife, Emma of Normandy, who was an incredible woman and a powerful agent in her own right.

 

Finally, can you tell us what you are working on now? 

At the moment, much of my time is spent in my role as editor of British Archaeology magazine, which is a great way to keep an eye on all the exciting new projects that are taking place across the country. I also have a new historical podcast, The Rabbit Hole Detectives, which I co-host with Richard Coles and Charles Spencer. In it, we investigate the historical origins of pretty much anything we can think of. There are also some book projects in progress, but they have to remain under wraps for a little while longer!

Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist and historian, and the author of The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons.

Richard Foreman is a bestselling novelist, publisher and the author of Siege.