Orientation at Finglesham: Sunrise Dating of Death and Burial in an Anglo-Saxon Cemetery in east Kent
ORIENTATION AT FINGLESHAM:
SUNRISE DATING OF DEATH AND BURIAL
IN AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY
IN EAST KENT*
SONIA CHADWICK HAWKES, M.A., F.S.A.
Excavation of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Finglesham was begun in
1928-9 by the late W. P. D. Stebbing and completed by the author
between 1959 and 1967.1 Though a few graves were destroyed by the
small-scale chalk quarrying which first disclosed the cemetery and
though at least two remain inaccessible beneath The Whiteway, now a
metalled by-road but once an ancient trackway forming the western
boundary of the burial-ground, Finglesham has otherwise been
excavated in its entirety (Fig, 1). Total analysis of information from 243
burials is under way and promises to yield a richly rewarding story about
the lives and deaths of the people in this east Kentish community. The
present paper is concerned with just one aspect, grave orientation and its
implications, but a little scene-setting is required to put this in context.
The cemetery is at N.G.R. TR 326534, just over 100 ft. A.O.D. on a
prominent knoll of bare downland chalk, which has long been under
plough. The site commands an unimpeded view out to sea, from northeast
to south-east, and is itself visible for quite a distance around. The
first burials here date from the first half of the sixth century, when an
aristocratic family and their adherents began to inter their dead on the
highest piece of ground at the northern end of the eventually much larger
cemetery. Amongst the founder burials are four with exceptionally rich
jewellery and weapons, and vessels of bronze and glass, with another
three, robbed in antiquity, from which enough survives to suggest
comparable wealth. They can be dated to the second and third quarters
of the sixth century and appear to represent two or at most three
generations of a single family. For the rest, a man with sword, shield and
spear but less wealth about him, another with shield and spear, two with
spears alone, and a few men, women and children with few or no grave-
" This paper is published with the aid of a grant from the Department of the
Environment.
1 For reports on the earlier excavations, see W. P. D. Stebbing, 'Jutish Cemetery near
Finglesham, Kent', Arch. Cant., xii (1929), 115-125, and Sonia Chadwick (Hawkes),
'The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Fmglesham, Kent: a Reconsideration', Medieval
Arcltaeol., ii (1958), 1-71. There are brief notes on the later discoveries in Medieval
Archaeol., iv (1960), 135; x (1965), 171.
33
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Gra.-c- pubhbtins from a couple of graves: a pale
gold solidus of the Frankish king Sigebert III and an even paler Kentish
PADA thrymsa, which date grave 7 to c. 675; and a purse-hoard of
eight primary sceattas of the Kentish king Wihtred, which date grave
145 to c. 700 or a little after. 13 This is the latest datable grave in the
cemetery, which seems to have gone out of use at about this time early in
the eighth century. Christianity was now well established in Kent, and
burial may have been transferred to consecrated ground.
Possibly, the people buried at Finglesham had been nominal
Christians from early in the seventh century. Deposition of grave-goods
and burial in festival attire, though a legacy from pagan times, continued
as an important expression of legal right and status everywhere in this
Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, H. R. Bilis Davidson and Christopher Hawkes, 'The
Finglesham Man',Antiquity, xxxix (1965), 17-32.
9 On the status of the spear, see M. J. Swanton, The Spearheads of the Anglo-Saxon
Settlements, Royal Archaeol. Inst., 1973, 3-4.
10 The high status of shield-burial in the seventh century emerges very clearly from the
evidence discussed by Vera I. Evison, 'Sugar-loaf Shield-bosses', Antiq. Journ., xliii
(1963), 38- 96. See also, Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, 'The Dating and social Significance of
the Burials in the Polhill Cemetery', in B. Philp, Excavations in West Kent, 1960-1970
(1973), 186 IT.
11 There is nothing remotely comparable to the best necklaces and pendants known
from other sites, see Ronald Jessup, Anglo-Saxon Jewellery (1974), pls. 2-4, 17, 21, and
Audrey L. Meaney and Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, Two Anglo-Saxon Cemeleries at
Winnall, Winchester, Hampshire (Soc. Medieval Archaeol., monograph 4, 1970), pls. v
and vi.
12 The absence of all but the earliest type of Kentish jewelled disc brooch, in the long
series now conveniently published by Richard Avent, Anglo-Saxon Disc and Composite
Brooches (British Archaeological Reports, 11, 1975), is a sure indication of the changed
circumstances in the seventh century.
13 S. C. Hawkes, J. M. Merrick and D. M. Metcalf, 'X-Ray fluorescent Analysis of
some Dark Age Coins and Jewellery', Archaeometry, 9 (1966), 115-16; S. B. Rigold,
'The two primary Series of sceattas: Addenda and Corrigenda', Brit. Numismatic Journ.,
XXXV (1966), 3, 6.
37
SONIA CHADWICK HAWKES
century of transition and need not imply obstinate paganism. 14 Even
objects overtly heathen in their symbolism, such as the buckle in grave
95 and a pendant in grave 138, may only have been included as a precautionary
measure lest the new religion prove ineffective in averting the
evil eye and laying the ghost.15 Certainly, the woman in grave 138 also
wore cross pendants, and a number of other female burials were
provided with similar tokens of Christianity. But, perhaps, the clearest
evidence of religious change at Finglesham is the slight but general
alteration in the alignment of burial that took place at the beginning of
the seventh century.
ORIENTATION OF BURIAL
The cemetery was planned during excavation from an accurately laid out
25-foot grid with its baseline aligned on Magnetic North, the graves
being triangulated from the pegs and their bearings checked by compass.
On the finished plan (Fig. 1) north has been recalculated for True North,
and the grave orientations discussed here are head-foot alignments
expressed in degrees from True North. These should be accurate to
within a degree or so. Unfortunately, there can be no such certainty
about the graves excavated in 1928-9. Though W. P. D. Stebbing used a
compass calibrated for True North and left a plan which looked good
when it was published posthumously in 1958,16 re-excavation of those
which survived in 1959 exposed major planning errors affecting both the
spatial distribution and, to a lesser degree, the orientation of his graves.
My attempt to marry this old plan to mine, to complete the over-all
picture of the cemetery, has probably compounded errors in the case of
graves destroyed between 1929 and 1959. Their positions must be
regarded as very approximate and appear in broken lines on the plan:
their bearings, calculated from Stebbing's original, are given in broken
lines in Fig. I.
In Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, particularly those of the pagan period,
orientation can be very diverse. 17 At Finglesham, with the exception of a
couple of burials with feet pointing south (my 165, a seventh-century
male, and Stebbing's G.1, a late sixth-century female) and another with
feet to the north-west (215, undatable female), all burials were laid with
14 The legal basis of the custom and the Church's attitude to it are not documented for
England: for enlightenment, we must tum to the Continent There is a useful discussion in
Frauke Stein, Adelsgriiber des achten Jahrhunderts in Deutsch/and (Germanische
Denkmiiler der Volkerwanderungszeit, Serie A, Berlin 1967), 181 ff.; see also, Frauke
Stein, 'Pre-Carolingian graves in South Germany', Journ. British Archaeol. Assoc .. 3rd
ser., xxxi (I 968), 1 ff.
s 15 It was suggested in Meaney and Hawkes, op. cit. (1970), 31-3, that the Conversion
brought with it feelings of insecurity that actually led to an increased use of pagan rites
and amulets during the seventh century.
16 Chadwick, op. cit. (1958). fig. 1.
17 G. Baldwin Brown, The Arts in early England, iii (1915), 158-69.
38
ORIENTATION ATFINGLESHAM
their feet to the east. Within this easterly orientation there is wide
variation, however, with some burials pointing well to the north of east
and others to the south of it. From a cursory glance at the plan of the
cemetery, the pattern of burial might seem quite random. The graves
were clearly not dug in alignment with any fixed feature, such as a post
or structure, either within or without the burial area, nor, with few
exceptions, do they appear to have been aligned on each other. Indeed,
the difference in orientation between graves within obvious groups or
rows is in some cases quite extreme. Yet, if we measure all the grave
bearings and plot them diagrammatically (Fig. 4) we find that 240 out of
243 burials cluster in the arc between N. 23 ° and N. 126 °. There is
nothing random about this. So what conditioned grave orientation at
Finglesham?
In this country, questions of this sort have scarcely been posed at all
in modern times, but recently there appeared a very interesting
discussion of the somewhat similar variation in west-east orientation in
the seventh-ninth century cemeteries at Caister-on-Sea and Burgh
Castle in East Anglia.18 The dead in both were early Christians, laid out
so that at the Resurrection they would rise up facing east. This, the place
of sunrise and the home of life in pagan solar religions, had been adopted
by the Church as the direction of the second coming of Christ. 19 Without
a compass, however, fixing the east point will have been a problem. At
Burgh and Caister, it was argued, the grave diggers may have taken their
bearings from the point of sunrise itself, which, in these latitudes, occurs
to the north of east at midsummer and to the south of it at midwinter. If
they did, it should be possible to work out within known limits the time
of year when each grave was dug and thus determine the seasonal
pattern of mortality within each community during the period of its
cemetery's use. Unfortunately, the basic hypothesis cannot be sustained
because the extreme sunrise bearings are not reflected at either site.
Instead, the marked clustering of grave alignments within 15 ° north and
south of due east, not a large variation, might suggest the presence in
both cemeteries of an east point that was fixed, perhaps by a church as
yet unlocated. As neither cemetery plan is figured, it is difficult to judge.
The results adduced from these East Anglian sites, as Wells and Green
have freely admitted, are at best inconclusive and may be invalid, but
this experiment was worth publishing as an encouragement to others to
look more carefully at grave orientation. It prompted a closer analysis of
the situation at Finglesham, with results both positive and interesting.
From this Kentish burial ground it would have been possible, on clear
mornings, to have seen the sun rise from sea horizon at all times of the
18 Calvin Wells and Charles Green, 'Sunrise Dating of Death and Burial', Norfolk
Archaeol., 35 (1973), 435-42.
19 Baldwin Brown, op. cit. (1915), 160.
39
SONIA CHADWICK HAWKES
year. It seemed possible, therefore, that sunrise bearings were responsible
for the otherwise puzzlingly wide variation of easterly orientation
described above. Wells and Green had already found out from the Royal
Greenwich Observatory that 'the obliquity of the ecliptic, which is
numericaily equal to the maximum declination of the sun, has not, as far
as we know, varied by more than half a degree over the past two or three
thousand years'.26 Alexander Thom,21 quoting formulae by de Sitter,22
says that the slow decrease in the obliquity of the ecliptic amounts to
only about a degree in 10,000 years. From this, it will be clear that the
directions in which the sun rose during the year (azimuths) were substantiaily
the same in Anglo-Saxon times as they are today. To check the
grave bearings, therefore, it only remained to calculate the azimuths of
sunrise for the latitude of Finglesham (51 ° 13'. 75 N.). Wells and Green
explain how these may be calculated for any site by means of data given
in the Nautical Almanac, but in this case it seemed preferable to enlist
the help of a more numerate colleague. I am deeply indebted to Dr. A. D.
Petford23 for responding so generously to my appeal and providing all
the data needed. Finglesham proved to be an ideal site for the
experiment: not only is the outlook nearly perfect, but the site's elevation
above sea-level puts the horizon at 0° , so no correction is needed for
curvature and refraction.24 Dr. Petford calculated the minimum and
maximum azimuths of sunrise as N. 50 ° .559 and N. 129 ° .441, the
positions at the summer and winter solstices respectively. His graph of
'equal month' approximation to azimuth of sunrise shows how the
bearing of sunrise moves southward after midsummer and northward
after midwinter (Fig. 3). The figures on which it is based are as follows:
AZIMUTH OF SUNRISE(Latitude 51° 13'.75 N.)
Jan. 1
16
Feb. 1
15
Mar. 1
16
Apr. 1
16
May 1
16
Jun. 1
16
128° .64
124° 88
118° .09
ll0°.64
102° .30
92° .93
82° .91
73° .85
65 ° .59
58° .62
53° .23
50° .76
20 Wells and Green, op. cit. (1973), 437.
Dec. 16
1
Nov. 16
1
Oct. 16
I
Sep. 16
1
Aug. 16
1 -
Jui. 16
1
129 ° .17
126° 31
120° .74
ll3° .32
104° .11
94°.93
85 °.63
76 ° .54
67°.55
60°.26
54°.36
51° .14
21 A. Thom, Megalithic Sites In Britain, Oxford, 1967, 19-20.
22 W. de Sitter, 'On the System of astronomical Constants', Bull. Astr. 111st.
Netherlands, 8 (1938), 213.
23 Senior Research Officer, Dept. of Astrophysics, University Observatory, Oxford.
24 Thom. op. ctt. (1967), p. 25.
40
so· 60"
ORIENTATION AT FINGLESHAM
70' 80' 90'
AZIMUTH OF SUNRISE
Fig. 3.
--1----
110• 120·
These figures for sunrise could now be added to the numerical plot of
grav e bearings, on a simple dial (Fig. 4), compared and seen significantly
to coincide. Only 30 out of our 243 burials lie outside the range of
41
SONIA CHADWICK HAWKES
sunrise bearings, most of them in a compact group facing north of the
minimum azimuth of sunrise. These are the cemetery's founder graves.
Their more northerly bias was recognizable at the time of excavation and
shows up clearly on the plan. Datable sixth-century graves excavated by
myself range in direction from N. 23 ° (110), N. 31 ° (22 and 204),
N. 35 ° (203) to N. 40 ° (205 and 211). Those excavated by Stebbing
may be less accurately measured, but their bearings are strikingly
similar: N.23 ° (H3 and E2), N.34° (G6), N.41 ° (H2), N.43 ° (A2)
and N. 47° (D2 and D3). With them, in the northern corner of the
cemetery, are some unfurnished burials whose similar alignments suggest
that they, too, were of the sixth century. The only early grave within the
sunrise range of bearings is Stebbing's G2 at N. 56 ° . Even allowing this
one, the overall pattern of orientation is remarkably compact. The
governing factor, which was neither sunrise nor moonrise, has not been
determined. The mean of the reliable grave bearings approximates to that
of the founding male in grave 204: projected, it brings one to the head of
the old creek, down the hill at West Street, a very likely site indeed for
the homestead. There have been times when I wondered whether the
members of our sixth-century princely family may have been buried
facing some visible landmark such as a totem mounted on the gable end
of their hall. Though this suggestion should not be taken too seriously,
possibilities of this sort should not be ignored.
With the exception of G2, all datable graves within sunrise bearings
were dug in the seventh or very early eighth centuries, and very few
graves of this date lie outside these bearings. The notable exception, the
N-S grave 165, has been mentioned already, but there is a small number
of graves within the seventh-century area of the cemetery which were
dug on what we may now call typically sixth-century alignments. Of
these, 24, which was robbed, and 13, which is not datable, may just
possibly have been outliers from the sixth-century group of burials, but
the unfurnished 148 is too far out and 103 has grave-goods more likely
to be seventh- than sixth-century in date. The occupants of all these
deviant graves were middle-aged or elderly by the standards of the time.
Allowance for planning errors and grave-digging errors permits two
seventh-century graves bearing N. 47° and N. 48 ° to be included within
the sunrise margin. We, therefore, have 215 graves of the seventh and
very early eighth centuries clustering between the azimuths of
midsummer and midwinter sunrise, and there can be very little doubt
that they were dug on sunrise bearings deliberately. The abandonment of
the more northerly alignments current in the pagan sixth century, by all
except a few elderly members of the community, suggests a change in
religion. At Finglesham, therefore, we seem to have a genuine case of
what Wells and Green hoped for at Caister-on-Sea and Burgh Castle: an
early Christian burial ground, where the east point was not fixed and the
42
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.
,..
"!,
s
Fig.4.
43
FINGLESHAM, KENT
GRAVE AND SUNRISE BEARINGS
TOTAL POPULATION
-- GRAVES PLANNED
1959 • 1967
•••••• CRAVES PLANNED
1928·9
0
TRUE
NORTH
s
Fig. S.
44
FINGLESHAM, KENT
GRAVE AND SUNRISE BEARINGS
1928 • 9 Grave• Omitted
MALE BURIALS
ACE 40-t-
" 30·40
" 18 •.19
• UNl