Britain AD: Dave Start – Heritage Trust of Lincolnshire

The answer to the Arthurian mystery lies just north of the Fens, in a region known as the Witham Valley.

In 1981 archaeologists digging here came across a remarkable discovery. Just under the surface of the fen, a series of upright posts and horizontal timbers were uncovered. They were part of a raised causeway constructed over 2,000 years ago. At either side of the causeway, archaeologists found dozens of ancient weapons, including a large number of swords and spears. And this was not the first time such objects had been found here.

Dave Start, Trust Director Heritage Trust of Lincolnshire “In the late 18th century when they were dredging the Witham Sir Joseph Banks, a great scientist and collector, put out a notice to the watchmen – anybody finds anything, you come to me, I’ll see you all right. And it was a wonderful thing to do because this stuff wouldn’t have got into the museums otherwise.”

Over the years, literally hundreds of swords, daggers, and other precious items have been dredged from the Fens here. They range in date from prehistoric right through to the 14th century. Now this wasn’t a localised fenland cult, but part of a much larger belief system.

They’re still being found today.

Jo Hambley “We’ve been out here every weekend, more or less, since August, and look at how many have turned up. They’ve walked a lot of their parish already, and found some fantastic sites just through field-walking. If they hadn’t done it we’d never know about them. Although individually, you might not think you were finding very much, but put it all together, we’ve found nearly 2,000 separate objects now.”

It wasn’t until recently that archaeologists noticed a pattern in the location of these objects.

Jo Hambley “Throughout the valley, there are these higher sandbanks and ridges.”

These were the remains of ancient causeways, which once formed part of this extraordinary landscape. The Witham Valley stretches in a long, thin line up to the city of Lincoln. Until these Fens were drained in the 1780s, the Witham would have sprawled all over the low-lying land, weaving a network of islands and marshes. Local people moved around the Fens on a series of wooden causeways.

The weapons were always discovered near these causeways. At first, it was assumed they were accidentally dropped or lost in battle. In fact, there is a far more mysterious explanation.

Dave Start “People were visiting the river, using the river, and, for whatever reason, they were leaving this sort of material. The spear could have been used in the river, but it seems to have been given to the river.”

I like the idea of them being given, returned to the waters, perhaps.

Dave Start “And these mediaeval iron swords. The sort of thing that does actually go all the way through, through millennia.”

For hundreds of years, weapons have been deliberately thrown from these causeways into the water. I believe the story of King Arthur receiving his sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake is a direct reference to this ancient British tradition. But the Arthurian legends were written much later, long after these ancient religious ideas were supposedly wiped out by the Romans and Christianity. How on earth did they survive? The Witham had one more secret to reveal.

This area of fenland has one of the highest concentrations of monastic sites anywhere in Britain. There can be no practical need for so many abbeys in such a small area. So why was the early mediaeval church building here with such extraordinary fervour?

The narrow ten-mile stretch of the Witham Valley is scattered with the remains of 14 abbeys. Every one of these abbeys is built at the end of an ancient causeway.

Dave Stocker “We found it really difficult to understand why there should be 14 church sites all lined up, for 10 miles along the Witham Valley.”

Historians Dave Stocker and Paul Everson don’t think this is a coincidence.

Dave Stocker “The Abbey we are standing on is on an island. There’s only one way to get here, and it’s along a causeway. It seems odd that a causeway should determine whether you put in Abbey. You’ve got to bear in mind that to cross any body of water, particularly a fen by boat, was a dangerous matter. In order to make it a successful crossing, by night or for some sort of piety. Call it superstition, but it was a folk superstition bound up with religion. The weapons and the water into which they were being placed had significance for the people of Ancient Britain. Swords weren’t just a weapon. The sword is a great symbol of authority which is distributed outwards from lords to their tenants, as a badge of office. Once the tenant dies, that sword has to go back to the lord, and that’s attested in many Anglo-Saxon wills. Now imagine that you’re a king and haven’t got a lord, or not on Earth, and in the Arthur story, it’s the spirit of the lake – the Lady of the Lake, who is guardian of Britain.”

The story of the Lady in the Lake echoes the ancient tradition of depositing weapons in water. The mediaeval authors knew about such traditions because Christianity had not killed them off, but kept them alive.

When were the last swords going in?

Dave Stocker “The latest one is 14th century. And interestingly enough, that’s precisely the same moment at which swords and whole body armour tend to start being hung up in churches, over burials of lords.”

It sounds to me, looking at it as a prehistorian, that actually what some of these chaps in the abbeys are doing, sounds awfully pagan to me.

Dave Stocker “Pope Gregory said, I don’t want you knocking down these pagan temples, I want you to convert the pagan idols. Water is the one connecting thread. The Bronze Age barrows were by the water, the causeways crossed the water, the swords are put into the water. So the one connecting thread of all this is water.”

And do you suppose that might be a reason why that fantastic cathedral in Lincoln is placed right by the River Witham?

Dave Stocker “I have very little doubt that that’s the case. The first name for a Lincoln is ‘city by the pool’. ‘Nicor’ is what the Normans tended to call the place, and the word ‘Nicor’ means water spirit.”

The story of the Witham is one of continuity. It suggests that deep-rooted ideas from prehistory continued into the mediaeval period. This clashes with what I learned at school – where the first 1,000 years of British history were a series of massive invasions. Indeed, the first of these, the Roman invasion, may not have been a forced invasion at all.