Contrary to long-held beliefs that the period was devoid of the arts or cultural richness, the Sutton Hoo artifacts reflected a vibrant, worldly society.īasil Brown (front) led excavations at Sutton Hoo. Not only did the site shed light on life during the early medieval Anglo-Saxon period (roughly 410 to 1066) but it also prompted historians to revise their thinking about the Dark Ages, the era that followed the Roman Empire’s departure from the British Isles in the early fifth century. The importance of the Sutton Hoo burial cannot be overstated. The British Museum, which houses the trove today, deemed the find a “spectacular funerary monument on epic scale.” Dating back to the sixth or seventh century A.D., the 1,400-year-old grave-believed to belong to an Anglo-Saxon king-contained fragments of an 88-foot-long ship (the original wood structure had deteriorated) and a burial chamber filled with hundreds of opulent treasures. Over the next year or so, Brown, who was later joined by archaeologists from the British Museum, struck gold, unearthing the richest medieval burial ever found in Europe. (The name is derived from Old English: “Sut” combined with “tun” means “settlement,” and “hoh” translates to “shaped like a heel spur.”) After Pretty hired self-taught amateur archaeologist Basil Brown, the dig began the following spring. Why the 23 year age gap on people who were contemporaries in real life?" while a third added: "There are lots of great actresses of the right age group.In the summer of 1937, as the specter of World War II loomed over Europe, Edith Pretty, a wealthy widow living near Woodbridge, a small town in Suffolk, England, met with the curator of a local museum to discuss excavating three mounds of land on the far side of her estate, Sutton Hoo. Someone else wrote: "In 1939 Basil Brown was 51 and Edith Pretty was older at 56. MORE: The real reason Lily James didn't appear in the Downton Abbey film revealed MORE: Everything to know about Carey Mulligan's new film Promising Young Woman MORE: Carey Mulligan's farmhouse with Marcus Mumford is mammoth – see inside "Gosh what a missed opportunity to cast an age-appropriate actor to play the 55-year-old Edith Pretty, instead of the lovely but definitely-in-her-early-30's Carey Mulligan," one viewer tweeted. Many viewers took to Twitter to point out that at the time of the excavation in 1939, Edith was actually in her mid-fifties, and older than Basil Brown, the archaeologist played by Ralph Fiennes in the film. WATCH: Carey Mulligan also stars in the Golden Globe-nominated Promising Young Woman
0 kommentar(er)
