The Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of Caistor-by-Norwich and Markshall, Norfolk

This is an account of excavations of the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries at Caistor-by-Norwich and Markshall, Norfolk. Included are descriptions of funerary practices and grave goods, together with an account of the methodology used to during the excavations. The Anglo-Saxon cemeteries of Caistor-by-Norwich and Markshall both lie in the present civil parish of Caistor St. Edmund, the one to the south-east and the other to the north of the Roman walled town of 'Venta Icenorum'. While both are situated in close and obvious relationship to it, and so must be treated together, their history in recent times has been quite different. The material here published from Markshall comes either from a few chance discoveries of earlier times or from the recent attempt to re-examine this destroyed site: no information is available from which a plan of the cemetery can be constructed; the urns, though including several of exceptional interest, are mostly represented only by fragments, and there are very few reliably associated grave goods. Caistor, on the other hand, though to a great extent disturbed and in part destroyed in earlier days, has been the subject of recent excavation in which several hundred urns were recovered in controlled conditions and a great deal of information was recorded both on their contents and on their relationship to one another in the ground.