Basil Brown was a Rickinghall peasant boy in Suffolk who left school at the age of 13 to work on his father’s farms. He seemed willing to spend his life working the land.
Brown, who was born in 1888, was successful in his work, though not through agriculture. He continued to work the land in a very different way.
As a young man, he had nurtured a passion: digging up hidden treasures and revealing the archaeological secrets of the local countryside. And like the Netflix movie The Dig, published on January 29, reveals that he triumphed in impressive style, discovering the treasure of Sutton Hoo in 1939.
Beneath a large mound of land on private land on the outskirts of Woodbridge in Suffolk, Brown – played by Ralph Fiennes – discovered the buried remains of an entire ship 27 meters long; a secret chamber full of gold and silver; a sword with a jewel handle; gold shoulder closures inlaid with garnet; and pieces of iron that were later assembled to create the elaborate and iconic Sutton Hoo hull. The 7th century treasure was the richest tomb ever excavated in Europe.
“Brown discovered this country’s greatest archaeological treasure and, in the process, transformed our understanding of English life in the High Middle Ages,” says Sue Brunning, curator of the British Museum’s Sutton Hoo collection. .
“Before Sutton Hoo, it was thought that Britain had declined badly in cultural and economic terms after the Romans left. But Brown revealed treasures in this quiet corner of England that could be traced from sources in Europe and Asia and showed that at that time a great trade in wealth was taking place. England was no cultural remedy. “
The original decision to dig at Sutton Hoo was made by the rich widow Edith Pretty (played by Carey Mulligan). His estate there was full of mounds that had been looted in Tudor times. Was there any treasure left, you wondered? Experts at the Ipswich Museum recommended Brown, who at the time had taken evening classes while running the smallholding that took over from his father, obtained several diplomas and began working on local archaeological excavations.
In 1938 he made a couple of excavations which yielded promising results and the following year he decided to investigate the largest mound on the property. Shortly after starting, Brown discovered a piece of rusty iron that he recognized as a rivet on the bow of a ship.
Very slowly he removed the ground to reveal the shape of an entire vessel. The wood had disintegrated, but the rivets were put precisely in place, revealing the perfect profile of a Saxon ship. It was an amazing sight: a spooky image of an old ship printed on the ground of Suffolk.
Sutton Hoo
At that time, virtually all ship burials had been found in Norway and were of Nordic origin. But Brown quickly realized that it was not a Viking ship, but an Anglo-Saxon ship from an earlier period. “It is the discovery of a lifetime,” he wrote in his diary on June 29, 1939.
The excavation went on to reveal an independent burial chamber which, again, was meticulously excavated. His treasures turned out to be just as exotic as Brown discovered on July 22 when he was summoned by the excited screams of his team and found that a treasure had been discovered.
“I never expected to see so much gold in any excavation in this country,” Brown wrote that night. “There was a heavy gold buckle, the frame of a beautiful gold bag, where there were 39 gold coins … a solid gold belt with the best partitioned to work. All the objects shone in the sun like the day they were buried.
The effort and resources involved in dragging a ship inland before filling it with treasure and then burying it would have been a remarkable undertaking reminiscent of images from the Old English poem Beowulf with its high wooden rooms. and their powerful kings and nobles. Brown had helped repaint our image of early medieval England.
At first, no human remains were found at the site and it was concluded that it wanted to be more of a cenotaph than a tomb. “However, subsequent excavation indicated rotting organic debris that could have been human,” Brunning said. “For a good measure, a huge, ornate sword had been arranged in a manner consistent with other warrior tombs. Therefore, I am sure that this was the tomb of a great individual, perhaps even of a king ”.
However, the identity of this person is not so secure. The best candidate remains King Raedwald, who died around 625 AD, although there is still disagreement among archaeologists over who was buried at Sutton Hoo.
As for Brown’s immediate destination, this one was less glamorous. On September 3, Britain declared war on Germany and the country entered a martial closure. Sutton Hoo was covered and gold and silver were taken to Aldwych Underground Station in London, where the British Museum kept its greatest treasures. After only a few weeks in the sunlight, it was placed in a tunnel that was 10 times deeper than its original Suffolk resting place and returned to darkness until the end of the war.
Today, the weaver has received his own room at the British Museum. The hull, which was found shattered at Sutton Hoo, has been put together and the rest of its treasures publicly on display: a monument to the sophistication of our 7th-century predecessors and to Basil Brown who unearthed his glories.
“He did an amazing job digging the boat at Sutton Hoo,” Brunning says. “She may have been self-taught, but she was a remarkable archaeologist. As for the film, I think it does a great deal of merit to the man and the find. ”