Human sacrifice in Anglo-Saxon England: what rite might have been used?

In an earlier post I reviewed the limited evidence relating to human sacrifice in early England (‘Anglo-Saxon’ England), and came to the conclusion that the early English almost certainly knew of human sacrifice, but that there is little evidence that they practised it to any great extent. A small number of graves, such as the strange burials at Sutton Hoo, are consistent with human sacrifice but other explanations are possible. I personally think it most likely to have been a rare event reserved for exceptional circumstances.

If human sacrifice was practised at all in early England, what form might the rites have taken? As there’s little evidence for it at all, it won’t surprise you to hear that there’s no definite evidence for the rites that might have been employed. However, it may be possible to make some extrapolations from related cultures, with due caution and the usual caveat that other interpretations are possible.

Sutton Hoo

The body buried without grave goods and probably face down in one of the quarry pits used to construct Mound 5 at Sutton Hoo may have been a sacrifice, but was not well enough preserved to give any evidence for the cause of death (Carver 1998).

The group of anomalous burials (see earlier post for details) surrounded the site of a gallows, so it is plausible (though not certain) that at least some of them had died on it. Whether they represent sacrifices or executions, or indeed whether such a distinction can be made, is not known. One body had a dark stain around its neck that could have been the remains of a rope. Others were decapitated, but whether this happened at or after death is not known. The dates for this group of burials span the period from the sixth to the eleventh century (Carver 1998).

Iron Age Europe: the bog bodies

The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the 1st century AD, says that the tribes living in the areas that are now Germany and southern Denmark sacrificed human victims to Mercury, but doesn’t say what rite was used.

Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims.

--Tacitus, Germania

He also says that the slaves who washed the wagon of the goddess Nerthus were drowned in a sacred lake, although this is attributed to a desire to maintain secrecy rather than to sacrifice as such.

Anon the chariot is washed and purified in a secret lake, as also the curtains; nay, the Deity herself too, if you choose to believe it. In this office it is slaves who minister, and they are forthwith doomed to be swallowed up in the same lake. Hence all men are possessed with mysterious terror; as well as with a holy ignorance what that must be, which none see but such as are immediately to perish.

--Tacitus, Germania

Remarkably, a few human bodies from the Iron Age in northern Europe have survived to the present day, preserved in acid and waterlogged conditions in peat bogs. Readers in Britain will probably be most familiar with “Lindow Man”, discovered during peat cutting at Lindow Moss in Cheshire, in north-west England in 1984. The lower half of his body had presumably been destroyed by the peat-cutting machinery (unless someone found a nasty surprise in their azalea bed), leaving only the body above the waist and part of one lower leg. The investigations into the body have been described in clear and readable detail by Don Brothwell of the University of London (Brothwell 1986). Lindow Man had been struck at least twice on the top of the head by a blunt instrument, fracturing his skull. He also had a broken jaw and chipped tooth which may indicate another blow to the lower face, and a broken rib which may indicate a violent blow to his back. He had also been strangled by a twisted cord, his neck was broken, his throat had been cut, and there was a possible stab wound to his chest. The number of different types of injury seems excessive for an ordinary murder, and suggests a ritual death (Brothwell 1986). Hutton comments that it recalls the “triple death” of Irish legends (Hutton 1993).

Although many other bog bodies have been found from sites across northern Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Britain and Ireland, many were either insufficiently preserved or insufficiently investigated to identify a cause of death. However, several other bog bodies show evidence for one or more of the types of injuries inflicted on Lindow Man:

• Borre Fen Man - hanging/strangulation, skull injury


• Borre Fen Woman (II) – skull injury, other fractures


• Elling Woman – hanging/strangulation


• Grauballe Man – throat cut, skull injury, other fractures


• Lindow Man - hanging/strangulation, throat cut, skull injury, chest wound (possible) other fractures (possible)


• Lykkegard Man - hanging/strangulation


• Osterby Man – beheading, skull injury


• Rendswuhren Fen Man – skull injury, chest wound


• Stidsholt Fen Woman – beheading


• Tollund Man – hanging/strangulation


• Werdingerveen Man – chest wound

--Brothwell 1986; Coles & Coles 1989

More than half of these bodies (6/11) had multiple types of injury, though Lindow Man had the widest range. Head injuries were the most common (6), perhaps intended to stun the victim out of mercy or convenience. The other modes of death include strangling or hanging (5), chest wounds (2) and cutting of the throat (2). Placing the body in a pool in the bog (all of them, by definition) may also have represented drowning, yet another mode of death. Other bog bodies have been found pinned down in the bog by stakes or branches and may have been drowned (a woman at Jelling in Denmark, a man and a girl at Windeby in north Germany, a man at Gallagh in Ireland), although it may also be possible that the bodies were placed in the bog after death and pinned down to prevent them floating to the surface of a pool. Two of these bodies had cords around the neck that might have been used for strangulation (Gallagh, the man at Windeby) (Coles & Coles 1989).

Some Irish legends feature a “Triple Death”. For example, Adomnan’s Life of Columba says that St Columba prophesied that Aed Dub (Aed the Black) would die by falling, drowning and stabbing.

And Aid, thus irregularly ordained, shall return as a dog to his vomit, and be again a bloody murderer, until at length, pierced in the neck with a spear, he shall fall from a tree into the water and be drowned

--Adomnan, Life of Columba, Chapter XXIX

In another Irish legend, Diarmait mac Cerbaill, king of all Ireland, is killed by his foster-son Aed Dub by drowning, burning and stabbing (see Wikipedia).

The significance of the multiple modes of death is unknown. It has been suggested that certain modes of death were sacred to particular gods (Powell 1983), so perhaps a person killed using several modes was believed to influence several gods. Or it may be that the elaborate ritual was required to differentiate the sacrifice from a commonplace death – after all, people could drown by accident, or could be stabbed, beaten or strangled as a result of war, a brawl or an ordinary murder. Perhaps a multiple death was intended to mark the person out as a gift presented especially to the gods.

Norse documentary sources

Multiple modes of death are also found in documentary descriptions of Norse customs. In the tenth century, an Arab diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, wrote a detailed description of the Rus, who were Norse traders living on the River Volga in what is now Russia. In it he describes a human sacrifice at the funeral of one of the Rus leaders:

… they laid her at the side of her master; the old woman known as the Angel of Death re-entered and looped a cord around her neck and gave the crossed ends to the two men for them to pull. Then she approached her with a broad-bladed dagger, which she plunged between her ribs repeatedly, and the men strangled her with the cord until she was dead.

--Risala

According to the Icelandic poem Havamal, the Norse god Odin was hanged on the World Tree and stabbed with a spear.

I trow I hung on that windy Tree
nine whole days and nights,
stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin,
myself to mine own self given,

--Havamal

If we take hanging and strangling as equivalent, this is the same death as that meted out to the slave girl on the Volga, and Havamal is explicit that this is a sacrifice to Odin.

The Greek historian Procopius, writing in Byzantium in the 6th century AD, says of the inhabitants of Thule (modern Norway and Sweden):

This sacrifice they offer to Ares, since they believe him to be the greatest of the gods. They sacrifice the prisoner not merely by slaughtering him, but by hanging him from a beam or casting him among thorns, or putting him to death by other horrible methods.

--Procopius, Gothic War. Quoted in Ellis Davidson (1964).

Ares is the Greek war-god, whom the Romans called Mars. Procopius presumably substituted the name of the Greek god he considered to be the nearest equivalent to the Norse deity concerned. The two most obvious candidates for a Norse war god are Tyr or Odin, both of whom could be considered gods of war.

Adam of Bremen, writing in 1070, described extensive human sacrifice at the temple of Old Uppsala in Sweden:

There is a festival at Uppsala every nine years […] The sacrifice is as follows; of every kind of male creature, nine victims are offered. By the blood of these creatures it is the custom to appease the gods. Their bodies, moreover, are hanged in a grove which is adjacent to the temple. This grove is so sacred to the people that the separate trees in it are believed to be holy because of the death or putrefaction of the sacrificial victims. There even dogs and horses hang beside human beings.

--History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen

He is clear that the victims were hanged, and if his reference to “blood” is literal rather than poetic it may indicate that they were also stabbed, as described in Havamal and the account of the slave girl on the Volga.

The medieval Norse saga Gautrek’s Saga contains a vivid account of a sacrifice to Odin. In the saga, King Vikar prays to Odin for a favourable wind, and when the lots are drawn to decide who will be the sacrifice in payment, the lot falls to King Vikar himself. King Vikar tries to cheat his fate by staging a mock sacrifice. He stands on a tree stump with the soft intestines of a calf looped around his neck and fastened to a branch above, and one of his men thrusts a blunt wooden rod at him with the words, “Now I give you to Odin”. As soon as the words are uttered, the rod becomes a spear piercing King Vikar through, the intestine becomes a strong rope and the branch jerks the king into the air and hangs him (Ellis Davison 1964). Odin, the master of deceit, is not easily cheated.

This colourful story is from a late source and may be no more than vivid fiction, or it may be based on a genuine tradition of a rite used to send a victim to Odin by hanging and stabbing. It is consistent with Havamal, but if the saga writer was familiar with Havamal he could simply have copied the rite and added some dramatic details.

Conclusion

Irish and Norse legends, and accounts of Norse customs, all describe human sacrifice involving death by multiple methods. These might be dismissed as no more than bizarre stories invented by chroniclers about barbaric peoples of far away and long ago, if it were not for the evidence of the bog bodies.

These individuals demonstrate clearly that death by elaborate and multiple methods was inflicted in Iron Age northern Europe, including Britain, north Germany and Denmark, and the victims placed in the peat and water of bogs. The pattern of injuries varies from one to another, presumably indicating variations in the rite as well as variations in the survival of evidence. Wounding with sharp implements, hanging or strangulation, and violent blows to the head are all represented among the bodies, and their location in watery places may represent actual or metaphorical drowning. It is worth remembering that alternative rites, such as burning, would either leave no trace (if the ashes were dispersed) or might be difficult to distinguish from an ordinary cremation burial. Drowning and/or disposal in bogs might have been a common factor among ritual deaths, or just the common factor among the ones that happen to have left evidence for us to identify and interpret.

Exactly how widespread human sacrifice was, how long it persisted, and what rites were used when and in which societies, remains uncertain. No definite sacrificial victim from the early medieval period in England has yet been identified (Lindow Man has been dated to around the first century AD), which might be interpreted either as absence of evidence or evidence of absence. However, if human sacrifice was carried out in early England, one might reasonably conjecture that the rites involved would have been likely to resemble either those used on the earlier Iron Age bog bodies, or those recorded for later Norse culture.

References
Full-text sources available online are linked in the text
Brothwell D. The bog man and the archaeology of people. British Museum Press, 1986, ISBN 0-7141-1384-0.
Coles B, Coles J. People of the wetlands: bogs, bodies and lake-dwellers. Thames & Hudson, 1989, ISBN 0-500-02112-0
Ellis Davidson HR. Gods and myths of northern Europe. Penguin, 1964, ISBN 0-14-020670-1.
Carver M. Sutton Hoo: Burial ground of kings? British Museum Press, 1998, ISBN: 0-7141-0591-0.
Hutton R. The pagan religions of the ancient British Isles: their nature and legacy. Blackwell, 1993, ISBN:0-631-18946-7.
Powell TGE. The Celts. Thames & Hudson, 1983, ISBN 0-500-27275-1.

Human sacrifice in Anglo-Saxon England

Did the early English (‘Anglo-Saxons’) conduct human sacrifice before their conversion to Christianity?

Evidence from related cultures

The Roman writer Tacitus is quite clear that the Germanic tribes in Continental Europe used human sacrifice in the 1st century AD:

Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims.

--Germania

The same summer a great battle was fought between the Hermunduri and
the Chatti [….]The war was a success for the Hermunduri,
and the more disastrous to the Chatti because they had devoted, in the
event of victory, the enemy's army to Mars and Mercury, a vow which
consigns horses, men, everything indeed on the vanquished side to
destruction.

--Annals of Imperial Rome, Book XIII.

Mercury was the Latin name for the god known to the English and Germans as Woden and to the Norse as Odin.

There is also clear evidence of human sacrifice among the Norse (‘Vikings’) of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, who were neighbours of the early English. The names of the gods we know about were the same in both cultures, so it is possible that other aspects of their religions were also shared. In the tenth century, an Arab diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, wrote a detailed description of the Rus, who were Norse traders living on the River Volga in what is now Russia. In it he describes the funeral of one of the Rus leaders:

When the man of whom I have spoken died, his girl slaves were asked, "Who will die with him?" One answered, "I.”
[…]
Then they laid her at the side of her master; the old woman known as the Angel of Death re-entered and looped a cord around her neck and gave the crossed ends to the two men for them to pull. Then she approached her with a broad-bladed dagger, which she plunged between her ribs repeatedly, and the men strangled her with the cord until she was dead.

--Risala

Another Arab chronicler, ibn Rustah, described a different form of funeral sacrifice among the Rus:

When one of their notables dies, they make a grave like a large house and put him inside it. [….] They also put his favourite wife in with him, still alive. Then the grave door is sealed and she dies there.

--Quoted in Brondsted, 1965, p. 305.

A grave excavated in Birka, eastern Sweden, is consistent with this practice. The grave contained two women, one richly attired and the other lying in a strange twisted position, and was interpreted by the excavator as the grave of a wealthy woman and a serf who had suffocated in the burial chamber (Brondsted 1965, p 293).

Adam of Bremen, writing in 1070, described extensive human sacrifice at the temple of Old Uppsala in Sweden:

There is a festival at Uppsala every nine years […] The sacrifice is as follows; of every kind of male creature, nine victims are offered. By the blood of these creatures it is the custom to appease the gods. Their bodies, moreover, are hanged in a grove which is adjacent to the temple. This grove is so sacred to the people that the separate trees init are believed to be holy because of the death or putrefaction of the sacrificial victims. There even dogs and horses hang beside human beings.

--History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen

Evidence from Anglo-Saxon England

So, it seems reasonably clear that the 1st-century Germans and the 10th-century Scandinavians carried out human sacrifice. What about the early English?

Documentary evidence

There is no direct reference to human sacrifice in documentary sources. Bede says that when King Oswald of Northumbria was killed in battle in 642,

… the king that slew him commanded his head, hands, and arms to be cut off from the body, and set upon stakes.

--Bede, Ecclesiastical History Book 3 Ch. 12.

The remains were retrieved the following year by Oswald’s brother Oswy. This may indicate a ritual element, perhaps reminiscent of Tacitus’ description of dedicating a defeated enemy to the war gods. Or it may be a convenient way of identifying and humiliating the dead king, much as the heads of those executed for treason were displayed on London Bridge in medieval and Tudor England. Or both; these are not mutually exclusive.

Pope Gregory the Great sent priests Augustine and Mellitus to preach Christianity to the English in 597, and in 601 he wrote a letter of encouragement to Mellitus. This letter refers to animal sacrifice, but makes no mention of human sacrifice:

And because they have been used to slaughter many oxen in the sacrifices to devils, [they may….] celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer beasts to the Devil, but kill cattle to the praise of God in their eating.

--Bede, Book 1 Ch. 30.

This may just be absence of evidence; perhaps Gregory did not know what rites the English practiced, or did not think it right to mention such an unpleasant subject in a letter. However, it is notable that a later Pope, Gregory II, specifically mentioned the subject in a letter to Boniface who was preaching in Germany and Frisia and who had evidently asked for guidance on the practice of selling slaves for human sacrifice:

Among other difficulties which you face in those parts, you say that some of the faithful sell their slaves to be sacrificed by the heathen. This, above all, we urge you to forbid, for it is a crime against nature. Therefore, on those who have perpetrated such a crime you must impose a penance similar to that for culpable homicide.

--Letters of Boniface 16.

And in the Life of St Willibrord, written by Alcuin in the 8th century, the saint was threatened with death for having insulted the gods of people living between Frisia and Denmark:

The king was roused to intense fury and had a mind to avenge on the priest of the living God the insults which had been offered to his deities. For three whole days he cast lots three times every day to find out who should die; but as the true God protected his own servants, the lots of death never fell upon Willibrord nor upon any of his company, except in the case of one of the party, who thus won the martyr's crown.

--Life of Willibrord

Willibrord’s unfortunate follower might be considered an execution rather than a sacrifice as such, though the casting of lots to choose a victim is consistent with a ritual component.

The absence of such references in the letters to the Christian mission in England may indicate (but does not prove) that the use of human sacrifice was less widespread there.

Archaeology

The (probable) temple excavated at Yeavering in Northumberland contained a pit filled with animal remains, mostly ox skulls, but no human remains were noted (Hutton, 1993, p. 270). This is consistent with the references to animal but not human sacrifice in Pope Gregory’s letter to Mellitus, but does not prove that humans were never sacrificed, as such remains might have been disposed of elsewhere.

A small number of excavated graves from early England have features that are consistent with human sacrifice (Ellis Davidson 1992):

• At Sewerby, in East Yorkshire, a woman with rich grave goods had been buried in a deep grave, and a second woman had been buried a few inches above her at the same time, laid face down and with a piece of a quernstone over her pelvis.


• At Mitcham in Surrey, a grave excavated in 1905 contained a small woman laid face down between two men.


• At Finglesham in Kent a man had been buried with grave goods and with a second body laid across him.

These may be instances of funeral sacrifices, as in the Norse grave at Birka and similar to the rites described for the Rus by the Arab writers.

Further evidence comes from Sutton Hoo, believed to be the royal cemetery of the Kings of the East Angles in the seventh century (Carver 1998). Mound 5 contained a cremation burial of a young adult who had died by several blade cuts to the head. One of the quarry pits dug to produce soil to build the mound contained a body without grave goods that had been buried, probably face down, at the same time as the mound was raised or very shortly afterwards. The excavator suggests that this person may have been killed as sacrifice, vengeance, punishment or vindictive attack by a stressed foreman – there is no evidence to say which (if any).

Other burials at Sutton Hoo included one with a dark stain around the neck that could have been the remains of a rope (Burial 49), a triple burial containing a decapitated man and two women buried face down on top of him (Burial 42), several burials in which the head had been removed and replaced in an odd position (wrong way round, on the shoulder, by the knee) or was missing altogether, a burial in which the body had apparently been folded over backwards (Burial 55), several burials with the wrists and/or ankles crossed over each other as though tied, several crouched burials, and one extraordinary grave containing a body stretched out as though hurdling or running and accompanied by unidentified pieces of timber (Burial 27). This last grave has been interpreted as a wooden plough buried with a ploughman (Ellis Davidson 1992), but the excavator noted that the timbers may be from some other object such as a spade or pieces of the gallows (Carver 1998). Radiocarbon dates ranged from the sixth to the eleventh century. A gallows had stood at the centre of the site, and was radiocarbon-dated to 690–980, contemporary with the date range of most of the strange burials (Carver 1998).

Were these strange burials at Sutton Hoo sacrifices or executions? The two need not be mutually exclusive. According to Julius Caesar, the Gauls of the 1st century BC sacrificed criminals to the gods:

They consider that the oblation of such as have been taken in theft, or in robbery, or any other offence, is more acceptable to the immortal gods; but when a supply of that class is wanting, they have recourse to the oblation of even the innocent.

--The Gallic Wars, Book 6 Ch 16

The distinction between sacrifice and execution may be in part a matter of labelling. The strange burials may represent a dramatic method of despatch (reminiscent of the Roman use of criminals in the arena), or ritual killings, or both. The excavator says in his book, “..most seem to belong to the period after the conversion of East Anglia to Christianity. This group does not therefore offer strong evidence for human sacrifice.” (Carver 1998, p. 168). On the other hand, the historian Ronald Hutton cites the evidence from Sutton Hoo and Sewerby as, “fairly clear evidence [of human sacrifice] in Anglo-Saxon England” (Hutton, 1993, p. 274).

Conclusion

It seems certain that the early English knew of human sacrifice, since related and neighbouring cultures in Continental Europe and Scandinavia practised it. Whether they practised it themselves is open to question; the people who settled in late- and post-Roman Britain in the fourth and fifth centuries may have been drawn from tribes who did not practise the rite; they may not have taken the ritual with them, or they may have abandoned it in their new environment, perhaps because there were no large and long-established ritual centres such as the temple at Old Uppsala.

The display of Oswald’s head on the battlefield is reminiscent of ritual, and there is some archaeological evidence of burials consistent with human sacrifice, as at Sewerby or Sutton Hoo. The comparatively small number of such graves may represent absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence. Until the Sutton Hoo excavation in the 1990s, the existence of the strange burials there was completely unsuspected, and similar surprises may be awaiting the archaeologist’s trowel elsewhere. That said, well over 5000 Anglo-Saxon burials have been excavated in Britain (Hutton, 1993, p. 275), so if it was a widespread practice one might expect to have found more of them by now.

On the whole, I would agree with Hilda Ellis Davidson’s view (1992); that the early English certainly knew of human sacrifice but that it did not play an extensive part in their society, being reserved (if practised at all) for exceptional circumstances and/or times of crisis.

References
Full-text sources available online are linked in the text
Ellis Davidson HR. Human sacrifice in the late pagan period in north-western Europe. In: Carver M (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo. Boydell Press, 1992, ISBN: 0851153305
Carver M. Sutton Hoo: Burial ground of kings? British Museum Press, 1998, ISBN: 0-7141-0591-0.
Hutton R. The pagan religions of the ancient British Isles: their nature and legacy. Blackwell, 1993, ISBN:0-631-18946-7.
Brondsted J. The Vikings. Pelican, 1965, ISBN: 0-14-02-0459-8.