Quick Search

 
or
Browse by Subject

Trade Sales

Sale Bargains &
Special Offers

Distributed Titles

Conference Timetable

Request Catalogues

Vacancies at Oxbow

Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs

by Andrew Reynolds

Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs is the first detailed consideration of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. Andrew Reynolds argues that outcast burials show a clear pattern of development in this period. In the pre-Christian centuries, 'deviant' burial remains are found only in community cemeteries, but the growth of kingship and the consolidation of territories during the seventh century witnessed the emergence of capital punishment and places of execution in the English landscape. Locally determined rites, such as crossroads burial, now existed alongside more formal execution cemeteries. Overall, Reynolds concludes, organized judicial behaviour was a feature of the earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, rather than just the two centuries prior to the Norman Conquest. 323p b/w illus (Oxford UP 2009)

Browse other Anglo-Saxon Archaeology books