Basil Brown was a farmer boy from Rickinghall, Suffolk, who left school at the age of 13 to work on his father’s property. He seemed ready to spend his life working the land.
Brown, who was born in 1888, certainly succeeded in this task – though not through agriculture. He continued to work the land in a very different way.
In his youth, he cared for a passion: to dig up hidden treasures and reveal the archaeological secrets of the local countryside. And as a Netflix movie pier, released on January 29, reveals that it triumphed in astonishing style – discovering the Sutton Hoo treasure in 1939.
Under a mound of earth on private land outside Woodbridge in Suffolk, Brown – played by Ralph Fiennes – discovered the buried remains of a 27-meter-long entire ship; a secret room full of gold and silver; a sword with a jewelry handle; gold shoulder clips inlaid with garnet; and pieces of iron that were later assembled to create the elaborate, iconic Sutton Hoo helmet. The 7th century treasure was the richest tomb ever excavated in Europe.
“Brown discovered the greatest archaeological treasure in this country and, in the process, transformed our understanding of English life in the early medieval period,” says Sue Brunning, curator of the Sutton Hoo collection at the British Museum.
“Before Sutton Hoo, it was believed that Britain fell severely in cultural and economic terms after the departure of the Romans. But Brown revealed treasures in this quiet corner of England, which could be traced from sources in Europe and Asia, and showed that a vast trade in wealth was taking place at that time. England was not a cultural backwater. “
The initial decision to dig at Sutton Hoo was made by the wealthy widow Edith Pretty (played by Carey Mulligan). Her estate there was strewn with burial mounds that had been looted in Tudor times. Is there any treasure left, she wondered? Experts at the Ipswich Museum recommended Brown – who until then had been taking evening classes while running the household he had taken over from his father, graduated and began working at local archeological excavations.
In 1938, he made several excavations that yielded promising results and decided next year to investigate the largest mound on the property. Shortly after he started, Brown discovered a piece of rusty iron that he recognized as a rivet in a ship’s bow.
Very slowly, he peeled off the ground to reveal the shape of an entire vessel. The wood disintegrated, but the rivets settled exactly in place, revealing the perfect outline of a Saxon shuttle. It was an amazing sight: a ghostly image of an ancient vessel printed on Suffolk soil.
Sutton Hoo
At that time, virtually all ship burials had been found in Norway and were of Nordic origin. But Brown quickly realized that it was not a Viking ship, but an Anglo-Saxon ship from an earlier period. “It is the discovery of a life,” he wrote in his diary on June 29, 1939.
The excavation progressed to reveal a separate burial chamber, which was again carefully excavated. His treasures turned out to be just as exotic, as Brown discovered on July 22, when he was summoned by the enthusiastic cries of his team and discovered that a treasure treasure had been discovered.
“I never expected to see so much gold in any excavation in this country,” Brown wrote that night. “It was a heavy gold buckle, the frame of a beautiful gold purse, which contained 39 gold coins … a solid gold strap with the finest cloisonne the work. All the objects shone in the sunlight as on the day they were buried. “
The effort and resources involved in pulling a ship deep inland before filling it with treasure and then burying it would have been a remarkable undertaking that brings to mind images of the old English poem Beowulf with its growing wooden halls and kings and the powerful nobles. Brown helped repaint our image of early medieval England.
At first, no sign of human remains was found at the scene and it was concluded that it was meant to be more of a cenotaph than a tomb. “However, subsequent excavations indicated degraded organic remains that could have been human,” Brunning said. “To a large extent, a huge, ornate sword had been placed in a way that was consistent with other warriors’ graves. So, I am confident that this was the tomb of an extraordinary individual, maybe even of a king ”.
However, that person’s identity is not so certain. The best candidate remains King Raedwald, who died around 625 AD, although there is still disagreement among archaeologists as to who was buried at Sutton Hoo.
As for Brown’s immediate fate, it was less glamorous. On September 3, Britain declared war on Germany and the country entered a martial blockade. The Sutton Hoo was covered and the gold and silver were taken to London’s Aldwych tube station, where the British Museum kept its greatest treasures. After only a few weeks in the sunlight, it was placed in a tunnel that stretched 10 times deeper than the original Suffolk resting place and returned to darkness until the end of the war.
Today, the treasure was offered its own room at the British Museum. The helmet, which was found shattered at Sutton Hoo, was put together with the rest of its treasures on display to the public – a monument to the sophistication of our 7th-century predecessors and Basil Brown who unearthed his glories.
“He did an incredible job digging the ship at Sutton Hoo,” says Brunning. “He may have been self-taught, but he was a remarkable archaeologist. As for the film, I think it’s well worth the man and the discovery. ”