Trumpington Meadows Burial

Very exciting news in the Daily Mail today reporting on the finding of a grave site at Trumpington Meadows near Cambridge.  The headline reads  "Buried wearing her cross 1,400 years ago, is this girl one of our first Christians?"  Well the answer to that is no and as usual the Daily Mail, which is such a stickler for historical accuracy, manages to get it all wrong by suggesting that there were no Christians in Britain before the arrival of St Augustine in 595 AD.  And that on the day before St Patrick's Day! Horrified!

Nevertheless the burial is very exciting not least because it suggests that St Augustine had nothing to do with it.  The cross depicted in the paper is studded with garnets and dated to between 650 AD and 680 AD.  It is a small treasure in itself but its significance is not in its value but in its shape.  It is the Greek cross of St John not the straight Roman crucifix.  This suggests to me that the young lady who is reckoned to be around 16 years old was a member of the Celtic Church. The Celtic Church regarded St John as their founding apostle rather than St Peter who is regarded as the founder of the Roman church. 

The value of the cross suggests the girl might have been destined for a high position within the Celtic Church which accorded equality to women and since she appears to be of noble birth it is possible that she had already been appointed an Abbess or Bishop since these positions were generally given to high-born young ladies of good family and education and their monasteries (still monasteries and not convents) sponsored by their wealthy families.  She may have been educated at Faramoutiers in what was then Austrasia, founded by the protogee of Columbanus, Fara, a girl of similar background or at Hild's famous double monastery at Whitby.  In my book Columbanus: Poet, Preacher, Statesman, Saint (Imprint Academic) you will find details of the position of women within the Celtic Church.

There is an assumption that she is Saxon but she could just as easily have been a Frank or a native Brit.  The bed burial is a very exciting link to a druid past. In my book The Wonderful History of the Sword in the Stone I have presented a translation of the 5th century book contained in Malory's Mort Darthur which tells the story of the merger between the druids and the Christians in 5th century Britain to create the Christian Druid Celtic Church.  In this story a bed is at the very heart of the story, the centrepiece of the Ship of Faith, and Percival's sister and the mother of Galahad, the model of perfection and the only character to achieve the Holy Grail, is laid to rest on a bed.  She is the druid equivalent of the Virgin Mary although a goddess in her own right. The exciting aspect of the bed burial at Trumpington Meadows is that, taken with the St John's Cross, this is a mark that the girl is not just a Christian but a Christian Druid, preserving some rituals of the druid past and blending them with Christianity. 

I am so excited because there is little archaeological evidence for this period but it does demonstrate that there is some out there. Too often archaeologists skip over the transitional period and jump from Roman to Saxon (as I hope they have not done in this case - I am hoping that the mistakes are all the Mail's!).  Here we have some tangible evidence that links a burial, mid 7th century, to what documentary evidence we have.  By 680 AD the Synod of Whitby saw the Roman Church acquiring official backing from the Saxon ruling class (although interestingly despite being nominally Roman Catholic to preserve their international alliances almost all the Saxon nobility had their children educated by the Celtic Church as, if the Trumpington girl is a Saxon, they did in her case) and the old habits of the Celtic Church, crossing oneself on the forehead, praying with the palms upwards in the old Roman fashion, the use of the St John Cross rather than the straight Roman cross (although it remained in use as the basis of the dual Christian Druid Celtic Cross and has never disappeared) and the bed burials all died out.  There are no bed burials after the 7th century. The Synod of Whitby appears to have put an end to that practice too.