Barbaric Palace

The sophisticated Romans built of enduring stone, brick, concrete and mosaic, and Britain is strewn with the ruins of their villas and fortifications. But the barbarian Anglo-Saxon bands that invaded Britain after the Roman legions withdrew in the 5th century lived in crude timber buildings that rotted away with the centuries, leaving only the faintest of traces. Last week Archaeologist Brian Hope-Taylor reported the discovery and exploration of the biggest early Anglo-Saxon structure yet found in Britain--one of the rectangular great halls described in Beowulf, where a leader's thegns gathered to tell tall stories or quaff themselves torpid on mead or beer.

Hope-Taylor was guided to it by the Venerable Bede, whose history of early Britain (written in the 8th century) related that Edwin, a 7th century king of Northumbria, had a royal palace of sorts at Gefrin, which is now the small (six houses) village of Yeavering in the Cheviot Hills. No visible traces remained, but in 1951 Cambridge University made an air survey of the region. Pictures of a field of sprouting barley showed a vague rectangular shadow and a smaller, wedge-shaped one.

Outdoor Theater. Financed by Britain's Ministry of Works, Hope-Taylor excavated the site with prodigious care. He skinned off the topsoil and found faint color changes that showed where timber had rotted. He also found a few foundation stones and many traces of holes where posts had been set in the earth. Working from these clues, Hope-Taylor concluded that the wedge-shaped area had been the site of a crude, roofless, theaterlike structure filled with wooden benches. Facing the benches was a dais protected from the weather by a screen of wickerwork daubed with clay. From this primitive rostrum King Edwin may have harangued his thegns. The benches where the thegns sat were probably arranged like a grandstand, the highest ones in the rear. At least, says Hope-Taylor, the rear benches were supported by thicker posts.

When King Edwin was not holding court in the theater, he was probably in the slightly more comfortable great hall next door. The hall measured 90 ft. by 45 ft. Charcoal fragments mixed with the earth showed that it must have been burned down at least once, and careful digging indicated that at least three halls had been built successively on the same site. Arson was standard practice in King Edwin's time.

Open to the Birds. Modern experts have long suspected that the description of the gold-decked walls and benches of the great hall in Beowulf owed more to the unknown author's imagination than to historical fact. At Yeavering, Hope-Taylor found no trace of such gold-leaf splendors: only a few potsherds, knives, belt fittings, nails, loom weights and a single gold coin. But the finds date from the 7th century A.D.--and he feels reasonably sure that King Edwin really ruled from this barbaric palace. It may have been the actual hall where he was converted to Christianity. According to a legend repeated by the Venerable Bede, a pious thegn called his attention to a sparrow that flew into the hall in the dead of winter, lingered awhile in the warmth, and then vanished again into the winter dark. The sparrow's stay, the thegn intoned, was like human life, brief and soon ended. King Edwin, says the Venerable Bede, was impressed and converted. Other historical evidence suggests more crassly that Edwin was converted by his Christian wife, and by the belief that the new faith would be politically advantageous. In any case, the story of the sparrow suggests that Anglo-Saxon palaces must have admitted a good deal of weather along with the birds.

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