Basil Brown was a farm boy from Rickinghall in Suffolk, who left school for about 13 years to work on his father’s farm. It seems he is ready to spend his life on the land.
Brown, born in 1888, certainly succeeded in the task – though not by farming. He cultivated the land in a very different way.
As a young man, he nurtured a passion: to discover hidden treasures and reveal the archaeological secrets of the local countryside. And if the Netflix movie The digging, released on January 29, he triumphed in a beautiful style by discovering the Sutton Hoo treasure in 1939.
Beneath a large mound of earth on private land outside Woodbridge in Suffolk, Brown – played by Ralph Fiennes – discovered the buried remains of a 27-meter-long ship; a secret room filled with gold and silver; a sword with a decorated handle; shoulder pads of gold cast with grenade; and pieces of iron later assembled to create the elaborate, iconic Sutton Hoo helmet. The treasure from the seventh century was the richest tomb ever excavated in Europe.
“Brown discovered this country’s greatest archaeological treasure and in the process transformed our understanding of English life in the early medieval period,” said Sue Brunning, curator of the Sutton Hoo collection at the British Museum.
‘Before Sutton Hoo, it was thought that Britain had deteriorated culturally and economically after the Romans left. But Brown revealed treasures in this tranquil corner of England that could be traced from sources across Europe and Asia and that at the time had a large trade in wealth going on. England was no cultural background. ”
The original decision to dig at Sutton Hoo was made by wealthy widow Edith Pretty (played by Carey Mulligan). Her estate there was peppered with burial mounds looted in Tudor times. Is there another treasure left, she wonders? Experts from the Ipswich Museum recommend Brown – who by this time was taking evening classes while managing the smallholding he took over from his father, obtained several diplomas and began work on local archeological excavations.
In 1938 he did some excavations which yielded promising results and decided the following year to explore the greatest hope on the property. Not long after he started, Brown uncovered a piece of rust iron he recognized as a rivet from the bow of a ship.
Very slowly he pulls back the ground to reveal the shape of an entire vessel. The wood crumbled, but the rivets lay exactly in place, revealing the perfect outline of a Saxon longship. It was an astonishing sight: a ghostly image of an old vessel imprinted on the Suffolk ground.
Sutton hoo
At that time, almost all ship burials were found in Norway and were of Norwegian origin. But Brown quickly realized that it was not a Viking vessel, but an Anglo-Saxon ship from an earlier period. “This is the find of a lifetime,” he wrote in his diary on June 29, 1939.
The excavations progressed to a separate burial chamber which was again carefully excavated. His treasures were as exotic as Brown discovered on July 22 when he was summoned by the excited screams of his team and found that a treasure of the treasure had been uncovered.
“I never expected to see so much gold in this country,” Brown wrote that evening. ‘There was a heavy gold buckle, the frame of a beautiful gold purse containing 39 gold coins … a belt in solid gold with the best cloisonné work. All the objects shone in the sunshine as on the day they were buried. ”
The effort and resources involved in towing a ship deep into the interior before it was filled with treasures and then buried would have been a remarkable undertaking that captured the images of the Old English poem Beowulf with its rising wooden halls and make powerful kings and nobles think. Brown helped paint our image of early medieval England again.
Initially, no sign of human remains was found on the site and it was concluded that it was a cenotaph rather than a tomb. “Later excavations, however, indicate decayed organic remains that could have been human,” Brunning said. ‘For a good measure, a large, decorated sword was laid out in a manner similar to other tombs of warriors. I am therefore confident that it was the tomb of a great individual, perhaps even a king. ‘
However, the identity of the person is not so certain. The best candidate remains King Raedwald, who died around AD625, although there is still disagreement among archaeologists as to who was buried at Sutton Hoo.
As for the immediate fate of Brown’s trove, it was less glamorous. On September 3, Britain declared war on Germany and the country embarked on a truce. Sutton Hoo was covered and his gold and silver were taken to the Aldwych tube station in London where the British Museum stored its greatest treasures. After only a few weeks in the sunlight, it was placed in a tunnel that lay ten times deeper than the original resting place of Suffolk and returned to the dark until the end of the war.
Today, the treasure has found its own room in the British Museum. The helmet, found in pieces in Sutton Hoo, has been collected and the rest of its treasures displayed in public – a monument to the refinement of our seventh-century predecessors and to Basil Brown who dug up their glory.
“He did an incredible job digging the ship at Sutton Hoo,” Brunning said. “He may have been self-taught, but he was a remarkable archaeologist. As for the film, I think it gives a great honor to the man and the find. ‘