The wooden ribs had rotted away in the acidic soil, but the rivets remained, along with a beautiful, intricate imprint of the ship, as if a great crocodile had slept in the sand. Within three days, he and his team began to uncover the outline of a twenty-seven-metre Anglo-Saxon rowing boat that had been hauled up from the river and buried on the land above the shore. It “felt rather like digging into a small mountain,” he later recalled. In May, 1939, Brown returned to Sutton Hoo to tackle the largest mound. He found fragments of an axe and a few intriguing rivets, similar to ones unearthed in 1862 at the nearby site of a purported ship burial, of which only the barest traces had survived.īasil Brown, the curator at the Ipswich Museum. In his first summer at Sutton Hoo, with the help of Pretty’s gardeners, Brown explored three of the smaller mounds. He was an object of some curiosity in his village.
In 1932, after four years of work with a small telescope, Brown had published a well-received, two-hundred-page book of astronomical maps and charts. Before he turned to ancient remains, in his early forties, he had been a farmer, a gardener, a handyman, and an insurance agent. Brown had left school at the age of twelve. Pretty employed him at the rate of thirty shillings a week and lodged him with her chauffeur. Redstone introduced her to the curator of the Ipswich Museum, who suggested that she hire the museum’s freelance, self-taught archeologist-a local man named Basil Brown-to take a look at the tumuli.īrown arrived at Sutton Hoo at 11 A.M. At the flower show, she approached a history teacher and antiquarian named Vincent Redstone and asked what she should do next. An elderly laborer on the estate, known as Old Pettit, swore that the mounds contained treasure.
The hillocks were marked on maps as Roman tumuli-burial mounds-and a guest who stayed with Pretty once claimed to see a ghostly warrior on horseback, riding through the grounds. Pretty had always been curious about a strange set of mounds that was visible from the house. In Old English, Hoo means a spur of land, and Pretty’s house, a large, pale villa, sat on a bluff overlooking sandy heathland that sloped down to the river Deben. Pretty, who was fifty-three, lived with her son on a five-hundred-acre estate named Sutton Hoo, a few miles outside the town.
In July, 1937, Edith Pretty, a wealthy widow and local magistrate, attended a flower show in Woodbridge, a picturesque, red-brick town on the Suffolk coast, in search of archeological advice.
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