Basil Brown was a farm boy from Rickinghall, Suffolk, who left school around the age of 13 to work on his father’s company. He seemed ready to spend his life on the land.
Born in 1888, Brown certainly succeeded – but not through agriculture. He started working the land in a completely different way.
As a young man, he had nurtured a passion: digging up hidden treasures and revealing the archaeological secrets of the local countryside. And like the Netflix movie The Dig, released on January 29, reveals that he triumphed in stunning style – discovering Sutton Hoo’s treasure in 1939.
Beneath a large pile of dirt on private land outside Woodbridge, Suffolk, Brown – played by Ralph Fiennes – discovered the buried remains of an entire 100-foot ship; a secret room filled with gold and silver; a sword with a jeweled handle; shoulder clips of gold inlaid with garnet; and pieces of iron that were later assembled to make the elaborate, iconic Sutton Hoo helmet. The seventh century treasure was the richest tomb ever excavated in Europe.
“Brown discovered the greatest archaeological treasure in this country, changing our understanding of English life in the early Middle Ages,” said Sue Brunning, curator of the British Museum’s Sutton Hoo collection.
“Before Sutton Hoo, Britain was thought to have declined culturally and economically after the departure of the Romans. But Brown revealed treasures in this quiet corner of England that could be traced from sources in Europe and Asia and showed that there was a tremendous trade in wealth going on at the time. England was not a cultural backwater. “
The original decision to dig at Sutton Hoo was made by wealthy widow Edith Pretty (played by Carey Mulligan). Her estate there was laced with burial mounds that had been looted in Tudor times. Was there any treasure left, she wondered? Experts at the Ipswich Museum recommended Brown – who by then had taken evening classes while running the small farm he’d taken over from his father, earned several degrees, and began working on local archaeological digs.
In 1938 he conducted a number of excavations that yielded promising results and the following year decided to investigate the largest hill on the site. Not long after he started, Brown discovered a piece of rusting iron that he recognized as a rivet from the bow of a ship.
Very slowly he peeled away the earth to reveal the shape of a whole barrel. The wood had disintegrated, but the rivets were exactly in place, revealing the perfect outline of a Saxon longship. It was an astonishing sight: a ghostly image of an old vessel pressed to the bottom of Suffolk.
Sutton Hoo
At that time, almost all ship graves in Norway had been found and were of Norwegian descent. But Brown soon realized that this was not a Viking ship, but an Anglo-Saxon ship from an earlier period. “It is the find of a lifetime,” he wrote in his diary on June 29, 1939.
The excavation progressed, revealing a separate burial chamber that was meticulously excavated again. His treasures turned out to be as exotic as Brown discovered on July 22 when he was summoned by the excited screams of his team and discovered that a treasure had been discovered.
“I never expected to see so much gold in an excavation in this country,” Brown wrote that evening. “There was a heavy gold buckle, the frame of a beautiful gold purse, in which were 39 gold coins … a solid gold belt with the best cloisonne work. All objects shone in the sun as on the day they were buried. “
The effort and resources required to tow a ship deep inland before filling it with treasure and then burying it would have been a remarkable undertaking reminiscent of images from the Old English poem Beowulf with its towering wooden halls and mighty kings and nobles. Brown had helped to repaint our image of early medieval England.
Initially, no traces of human remains were found at the site and it was concluded that it was intended to be more of a cenotaph than a tomb. “Subsequent excavations, however, pointed to decayed organic remains that may be human,” Brunning said. For the record, a huge, ornate sword had been laid out in a manner similar to other warrior graves. So I’m sure this was the tomb of a great individual, maybe even a king. “
However, the identity of that person is not so certain. The best candidate remains King Raedwald, who died about 625, although there is still disagreement among archaeologists as to who was buried at Sutton Hoo.
As for the immediate fate of Brown’s treasure, that was less glamorous. On September 3, Britain declared war on Germany and the country was taken prisoner. Sutton Hoo was covered and his gold and silver was taken to Aldwych Tube Station in London, where the British Museum stored its greatest treasures. After just a few weeks in the sunlight, it was placed in a tunnel 10 times deeper than its original resting place in Suffolk and returned to darkness until the end of the war.
Today the treasure has been given its own room in the British Museum. The helmet, found broken to pieces at Sutton Hoo, has been reassembled and the rest of its treasures are on public display – a monument to the sophistication of our seventh-century predecessors and Basil Brown who uncovered their glory.
“He has done a fantastic job digging out the vessel at Sutton Hoo,” said Brunning. He may have been self-taught, but he was a remarkable archaeologist. As for the movie, I think it deserves a lot of credit for the man and the find. “