| Votive Deposits Before they migrated to Britain, the ancestors of the English often consigned objects to the peat-bogs in Jutland. Called "votive deposits", the earliest were made by farmers, not warriors, to secure fruitfulness for land and crops. But as their society became more militarized, the deity they worshipped called Nerthus, or Mother Earth, evolved into a more war-like god. Over time, massive accumulations of equipment were dedicated to this god of war. Almost every major deposit of the Roman Iron Age lies within the Anglian homelands, that is in the Jutland peninsula and on the adjacent islands. No deposits remotely resembling them are known from the North Sea, or from any other part of Germania. The chronological chart shown on the next page clearly shows that all of the major votive deposit centers suddenly stopped being used at exactly the same time (in the late 400sAD). Except for the Kragehul site, which was used once again for a very brief time, none of the sites were ever used again! What happened? It is not possible that the sudden cessation of this practice at virtually all of these centers was due to a change of social customs. Such important customs do not change overnight. The simple fact is that the people making these deposits were no longer living there. After all, this did take place during the Migration Period. In his Les Invasions: Les Vagues Germaniques, Lucien Musset tells us that the homelands of the Angles "...remained vacant for two centuries after they migrated to Britain......The Angles seemed to have disappeared from the continent altogether, leaving their territory to Danes, Swedes, Frisians and Slavs." One Danish archaeologist laments that not long after this event "......the historical and archaeological sources seem to let us down.....graves and hoards are sparse or next to non-existent respectively......". The English archaeologist, J. N. L. Myres, wrote "The sixth century, and even indeed the later part of the fifth, are something of an archaeological blank in Schleswig and Funen, a fact which has very naturally been linked with Bede's positive assertion that Angulus, the homeland of the Angles, was deserted after the migration to Britain." A map of these major votive deposits is on the next page. Please allow time for downloading. Previous Page Next Page These illustrations are from an excellent work, The Northern Barbarians 100 B.C. - A.D. 300, by Malcolm Todd, (London: Hutchinson University Library). |