Saturday, December 16, 2017

Winfarthing Woman

The chance discovery of a mysterious wealthy lady in poor farmland soil is about to rewrite the history of Anglo-Saxon England.

The find by Tom Lucking, a student, of the remains bedecked with an exquisite gold pendant and diplomatic coins has led to a reassessment of the powerbases of the Anglo-Saxon elite in the 7th century.

The “Winfarthing Woman”, named after the village in Norfolk where she was found, was described yesterday as a high-status individual who might have even been royal. The pendant found with the body features hundreds of tiny individually set garnets, some used to create an interwoven serpent-type motif, whose hand-cut garnet eyes are half a millimetre in diameter.

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