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The find
In September 2009 a metal-detecting club held its annual rally on farmland near West Hanney. One of the members, digging about 13 inches down, uncovered a round brooch set with red garnets lying beside a human skull. The club protected the grave while a licence was obtained, and it was then excavated properly with the county’s finds liaison officer and a specialist in human bones. The farm has not been named, to protect the site.
The grave held the skeleton of a young woman, thought to have been about 25 when she died. Buried with her were two handmade pottery vessels, which may once have held food, two iron knives and a spindle whorl, the weight used in spinning yarn. The excavators nicknamed her ‘Eileen’.
The brooch
The brooch is a composite disc brooch, built up from gold sheet with cells filled with garnets and shell. Only about twenty brooches of this kind are known in England, most of them from Kent and East Anglia, and the Hanney brooch is the furthest west yet found. Its materials had travelled a long way: one report at the time said the shell came from the Red Sea and the gold from the Continent. The finds liaison officer said at the time that only a woman of high status would have owned such an object.
The first reports dated the burial to the 6th century. Fuller study pushed it later, and the published report by Helena Hamerow and her colleagues in The Antiquaries Journal in 2015 places it in the middle decades of the 7th century.
Why it matters
The woman was buried alone in a prominent spot overlooking the Ock valley, not in a cemetery. Two similar brooches have been found at Milton, about ten kilometres to the east, near the remains of the great Anglo-Saxon hall complex at Sutton Courtenay and Drayton. The authors argue that the three women who wore these brooches belonged to the Gewisse, the ruling group of the early kingdom of Wessex, whose heartland lay in the upper Thames valley in the 7th century. The find is one of the clearest signs that the Vale around Wantage was close to the centre of power in the century before King Alfred’s family rose to rule Wessex.
Where to see it
With the help of a small grant from the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society, the brooch was conserved and put on display at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock. It has also become the emblem of the Hanneys: it is the logo of the village magazine, Hanney News. Displays change, so check with the museum before making a special trip.