fourteen centuries ago a great ceremony took place unlike anything the kingdom of east anglia had ever seen on the river demon a vast crowd gathered under the gray skies they worked as one to haul a vast ship up a slope onto the bluff overlooking the river there they buried it along with a soul body a grand pagan ritual that was doubtless attended by those from all across this ancient land but despite the exhausting work gone into the burial despite the clear renown of the deceased it would leave almost no trace on history as the centuries slipped by the eerie complex society within which it took place would be semi-forgotten leaving only a blank in the historical record and public imagination a blank that would become known as the dark ages and it would only be with the discovery of sutton who that we rediscovered how sophisticated the anglo-saxons really were the arrival of the angles and the saxons in britain was made possible only by the collapse of an old empire in NUMBER_TOKEN a.d the romans had finally been all like you know what screw this rainy island and abandoned their northernmost province into the void left behind by their exit came diverse groups of germanic peoples peoples who'd eventually form a common culture known as the anglo-saxons yet while they established seven kingdoms on the island known collectively as the heptake they weren't an insular british culture those in the kingdom of east anglia for example kept far closer connections to scandinavia than they did to other parts of britain but then groups living in modern sweden or denmark would have felt like neighbors while those living in what is today cornwall would have seemed like distant pasty obsessed aliens so pretty much this entire video takes place within england it doesn't really make sense to think of it as solely a piece of english history instead sutton who is perhaps better understood as a fragment of a piece of much larger history one encompassing much of northern europe and it would be events in europe that led to this era becoming so forgotten in the years and centuries following the great ship burial at sutton hoop two important things happened that transformed the region the first was the arrival of christianity in NUMBER_TOKEN pope gregory sent missionaries to britain to convert the anglo-saxon kingdoms a move that would eventually turn the sutton who burial site into a place shunned as irredeemably pagan the second more important event was the arrival of the vikings from the late NUMBER_TOKENth century on viking raids smashed centers of power up and down the british coast devastating monasteries since the monasteries tended to be where all the records were held that meant a crazy amount of anglo-saxon history just went up in flames while some texts would survive such as beads writings the scale of loss would leave a black hole in the historical record one so vast that before long nearly everything about the people who'd buried their ship at sutton who would be forgotten without forgetting came physical destruction the next millennia saw the sutton hussite treated with about as much respect as the internet treats florida man in the middle ages people used the mounds as quarries in the tudor
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