In this special episode, recorded live in front of an audience at the Chalke Valley History Festival, Robbie Stamp introduces three stories from Britain's Anglo Saxon past.
Against a backdrop of Anglo Saxon poetry, writer Olivia Bell imagines 10th-Century widow Wynflaed writing her will.
Learn more about this story’s themes with these links:
The British Library has an image of Wynflaed’s will. The Poetry Foundation has the poem that Olivia Bell sang.
Based on the excavation of a Bronze Age Barrow in 1966 and the remarkable finds of jewelry and objects belonging to the “Swallowcliffe Princess" who died c 700 AD, this story imagines how the bed burial might have happened.
Want to know more? Try starting here:
There is a wonderful video presented by Adrian Green describing the Swallowcliffe Burial artefacts discovered in 1966. If you really want to delve much deeper, the Archaeology Data Service has a monograph on the artefacts.
In the 10th-Century a legal document was drawn up outlining new ownership boundaries in the Chalke Valley area. With a special introduction from reknowned archaeologist Alex Langlands, we hear the reading of words not heard in the Chalke Valley for over a thousand years.
If you want to delve deeper into this subject, you could try here:
The Language of Landscape Reading the Anglo-Saxon Countryside website has the text and a translation of the text that Olivia Bell reads.
