Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs
The first edition cover of the book, depicting a triple Anglo-Saxon burial uncovered in the town of Staines.
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| Author | Andrew Reynolds |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Anglo-Saxon archaeology |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
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Publication date
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2009 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 324 |
| ISBN | |
Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs is an archaeological study of atypical burial practices in Anglo-Saxon England. It was written by the English archaeologist Andrew Reynolds of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, based on the work which he had undertaken for his PhD, completed in 1998. The book was first published by Oxford University Press in 2009 as a part of their series on "Medieval History and Archaeology", edited by John Blair and Helena Hamerow.
The book has been acknowledged as providing archaeological data to back up the historical records regarding Medieval European beliefs in the undead.
Reynolds' investigation into Anglo-Saxon deviant burials emerged from his PhD thesis, which he undertook at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and completed in 1998. He decided not to publish his findings immediately afterward, because more information on this issue was coming to light as a result of further excavation. From 2002 to 2003, Reynolds undertook a year of study leave to undertake new research in this area.
Andrew Reynolds, 2009.
The first chapter, "Sources, approaches, and contexts", takes an interdisciplinary approach by examining the literary evidence from the Anglo-Saxon period regarding the execution and burial of those "individuals deemed social outcasts and even feared among the living for their malevolent qualities." Reynolds examines the references to punishment for deviancy within the Anglo-Saxon law codes, before looking at the evidence from charters and place-names referring to places of execution and burial sites.
Chapter two, "Burials, bodies and beheadings", focuses on the archaeological evidence for deviant burials in Anglo-Saxon England, identifying eight specific causes for such funerary deposits: victims of battles, judicial executions, massacres, murder, plague, sacrifice and suicide. For each of these, Reynolds looks at the archaeological evidence that these would each leave behind, before attempting to identify any Anglo-Saxon grave sites that fit into these categories.
In the third chapter, "Social deviants in a pagan society", Reynolds looks at the evidence for deviant burial practices from the fifth to the eighth centuries. Dismissing ideas that crouched, multiple, and shallow burials could be considered "deviant", he examines prone inhumations, decapitated and amputated bodies, and corpses with evidence of stoning, suggesting that these are best categorised as examples of deviant burial.
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