The Benty Grange helmet is an Anglo-Saxon boar-crested helmet from the 7th century AD. It was excavated by Thomas Bateman in 1848 from a tumulus at the Benty Grange farm in Monyash in western Derbyshire. The grave had probably been looted by the time of Bateman's excavation, but still contained other high-status objects suggestive of a richly furnished burial, such as the fragmentary remains of a hanging bowl. The helmet is displayed at Sheffield's Weston Park Museum, which purchased it from Bateman's estate in 1893.
The helmet was constructed by covering the outside of an iron framework with plates of horn and the inside with cloth or leather; the organic material has since decayed. The helmet would have provided some protection against weapons, but was also ornate and may have been intended for ceremonial use. It was the first Anglo-Saxon helmet to be discovered, with five others found since: Sutton Hoo (1939), Coppergate (1982), Wollaston (1997), Shorwell (2004) and Staffordshire (2009). The helmet features a unique combination of structural and technical attributes, but contemporaneous parallels exist for its individual characteristics. It is classified as one of the "crested helmets" used in Northern Europe from the 6th to 11th centuries AD.
The most striking feature of the helmet is the boar at its apex; this pagan symbol faces towards a Christian cross on the nasal in a display of syncretism. This is representative of 7th-century England when Christian missionaries were slowly converting Anglo-Saxons away from traditional Germanic paganism. The helmet seems to exhibit a stronger preference toward paganism, with a large boar and a small cross. The cross may have been added for talismanic effect, the help of any god being welcome on the battlefield. The boar atop the crest was likewise associated with protection and suggests a time when boar-crested helmets may have been common, as do the helmet from Wollaston and the Guilden Morden boar. The contemporary epic Beowulf mentions such helmets five times and speaks of the strength of men "when the hefted sword, its hammered edge and gleaming blade slathered in blood, razes the sturdy boar-ridge off a helmet".
Description
The Benty Grange helmet was made by covering an iron frame with horn. It probably weighed about , the weight of the Weston Park Museum's 1986 replica. The framework, which now exists in sixteen corroded fragments, originally consisted of seven iron strips, each between 1 and 2 millimetres thick. A brow band, long and wide, encircled the head. Two strips of the same width ran from front to back, and from side to side. The long nose-to-nape band extended in the front and in the back; the extension over the nose was straight, whereas the extension at the back was curved inwards, so as to fit the nape of the wearer. The lateral band ran from ear to ear; both ends are broken off slightly below the brow band, but it would have extended further as part of a cheek or ear protection. It was affixed to the outside of the dexter (wearer's right) side of the brow band, the inside of the sinister (wearer's left) side, and the outside of the nose-to-nape band. The four quadrants created by this configuration were each subdivided by a narrower subsidiary strip of iron, only one of which now survives. Each subsidiary strip was attached to the outside of the brow band from the centre of the lateral band. Here they were wide, and, while tapering towards a width of , rose at a 70° angle towards the lateral band, which they overlapped at a 50° angle just beneath the crest. The inside of the helmet was most likely originally lined with leather or cloth, since decayed.
Eight plates of horn, probably softened and bent and suggested to be from cattle, were cut to fit the eight spaces created by the iron frame. No horn now survives, but mineralized traces on the iron strips preserve the grain pattern. The plates were fitted over the iron, thereby hiding it, and abutted at the centre of each strip. The joins were hidden by further pieces of horn that were cut to the width of the iron strips and placed on top. The three layers—iron at the bottom, followed by two layers of horn—were held together by a succession of rivets: iron rivets placed from inside the helmet, and rivets made of, or coated in, silver, with ornamental heads in the shape of a double-headed axe, placed from the outside, apart. Traces of horn on the rear extension of the nose-to-nape band, and on the rear brow band, suggest that the material was also used for a neck guard. These suggest that pieces of horn, extending from the centre of the brow band to the bottom of the rear nose-to-nape band, would have met each extension of the lateral band at a 5° angle, reaching them from the centre of the brow band.
In addition to the aesthetic elements incorporated into the basic construction of the helmet, two features provide added decoration: a cross on the nasal and a boar on the crest. The silver cross is long by wide, and consists of two parts. A silver strip was added underneath, elongating what was originally an equal-armed cross. It was placed atop a layer of horn and attached to the helmet with two rivets, one at the intersection of the two arms and one at the bottom. Around the cross in a zigzag pattern are twenty-nine silver studs, out of a suggested original forty, that were probably tapped into small holes drilled into the horn.
The most distinctive feature of the Benty Grange helmet is its boar, affixed to the apex of the helmet. The core of its body is made of two pieces of hollow D-sectioned bronze tubes, their flat sides approximately apart. The space between the two halves was filled in with a substance, likely horn or metal, which has now disintegrated; it perhaps projected upwards, forming the mane or spine of the boar, or, as has been interpreted on the replica, created a recess into which a mane of actual boar bristles could fit. On either side of the bronze core was affixed a plate of iron, forming the visible exterior of the boar. Four pear-shaped plates of gilded silver—cut down and filed from Roman silver, as evidenced by a classical leaf design on the reverse of the front left plate, and file marks on the obverse—acted as hips, through which passed two silver rivets, one atop the other, per end. These rivets held together the five layers of the boar, and were welded to the plates. Into the body of the boar were placed holes, probably punched, that held circular silver studs approximately in diameter. The studs, likely flush with the surface of the body, were filed down and gilded, and may have been intended to represent golden bristles. Eyes were formed with long pointed oval garnets set into gold sockets with filigree wire edging. The sockets were long by wide, and had long shanks, filled with beeswax, sunk into the head. Individual pieces of gilded bronze seem to have formed the tail, tusks, muzzle, jawline, and ears of the boar, but few traces of them now remain. Two sets of iron legs—probably solid originally, but rendered hollow by corrosion—attached the body to an elliptical bronze plate; both sets depict front legs, bent forwards without account for the anatomical differences between a boar's fore and hind limbs. The elliptical plate is long with a maximum width of , and matches the curvature of the helmet. Four holes indicate attachment points for the legs and another three connected the plate to the frame of the helmet, in addition to a large rivet hole slightly behind the centre. The plate was probably affixed directly to the frame, the legs passing through holes in the horn.
Function The Benty Grange helmet would have both offered some protection if worn in battle, and indicated its wearer's status. As the Weston Park replica shows, it would have originally been an impressive object, and may have been intended for ceremonial use. Experiments using a mockup of the replica also showed that the helmet would have resisted blows with an axe, which damaged the horn without entirely breaking it. Arrows and spears pierced the horn, but they also pierced modern fibreglass and safety helmets.
Helmets were rare in Anglo-Saxon England, and the Benty Grange helmet, both by its richness and its scarcity, signified the high status of its owner. Such protection certainly seems to have been among the armour of the affluent. In the contemporary epic Beowulf, a poem about kings and nobles, they are relatively common, while the helmeted Vendel and Valsgärde graves from the same period in Sweden, thought to be the burials of wealthy non-royals, suggest that helmets were not solely for the use of the élite. Yet thousands of furnished Anglo-Saxon graves have been excavated since the start of the 19th century and helmets remain rare; this may partly reflect poor rates of artefact survival or even recognition, but their extreme scarcity indicates that they were never deposited in great numbers.
Discovery Location
The helmet was discovered in a barrow on the Benty Grange farm in Derbyshire, in what is now the Peak District National Park. Thomas Bateman, an archaeologist and antiquarian who led the excavation, described Benty Grange as "a high and bleak situation"; its barrow, which still survives, is prominently located by a major Roman road, now roughly parallel to the A515 in the area, possibly to display the burial to passing travellers. The barrow is one of several tumuli in the vicinity, and may have also been designed to share the skyline with two other nearby monuments, Arbor Low stone circle and Gib Hill barrow.
The 7th-century Peak District was a small buffer province between Mercia and Northumbria, occupied, according to the Tribal Hidage, by the Anglo-Saxon Pecsæte. The area came under the control of the Mercian kingdom around the 8th century; the Benty Grange and other rich barrows suggest that the Pecsæte may have had their own dynasty beforehand, but there is no written evidence for this.
Excavation Bateman excavated the barrow on 3 May 1848. Although he did not mention it in his account, he was probably not the first person to dig up the grave. The fact that the objects were found in two clusters apart, and that other objects that normally accompany a helmet, such as a sword and shield, were absent, suggests that the grave had previously been looted. Given the size of the mound, an alternative (or additional) explanation is that it originally contained two burials, only one of which Bateman discovered.
The barrow comprises a circular central mound approximately in diameter and high, an encircling fosse about wide and deep, and outer penannular earthworks around wide and high. The entire structure measures approximately . Bateman suggested a body once lay at its centre, flat against the original surface of the soil; what he described as the one remnant, strands of hair, is now thought to be from a cloak of fur, cowhide or something similar. The recovered objects were found in two clusters. One cluster was found in the area of the supposed hair, the other about to the west. In the former area Bateman described "a curious assemblage of ornaments", which were difficult to remove successfully from the hardened earth. This included a cup identified as leather but probably of wood, approximately in diameter at the mouth. Its rim was edged with silver, while its surface was "decorated by four wheel-shaped ornaments and two crosses of thin silver, affixed by pins of the same metal, clenched inside". Also found were the remnants of three hanging bowl escutcheons, as well as "a knot of very fine wire", and some "thin bone variously ornamented with lozenges &c." attached to silk, but that soon decayed when exposed to air.