Gaulskopf

I’m really excited at the moment. I’m so excited I might punch myself in the face.

One of the things I’ve tried to do in my research is to capture something of the human experience of Boniface’s mission in Hessia - the uncertainty, the fear, the drama of travelling through dark forests in an attempt (as the missionaries saw it) to bring the light of Christ to a people caught in the snare of Satan. From reconstructing the course of the 30-year mission from fragmentary historical and archaeological sources, I’ve found one of the most terribly and tragic events to have been in 752, when Boniface wrote a letter to the Pope reporting that a massive Saxon attack had destroyed more than thirty of his churches and chapels.

This...

Boniface was an old man by this time, well into seventies - he would die just two years later - but, like an old trooper, he set about personally directing the rebuilding efforts. During my research I’ve tried to work out roughly where all this happened from a variety of circumstantial sources, and I reckoned I had a decent idea. What would have been really nice, though, was some solid archaeological evidence to back it up. Something like the remains of a burned-down church, say, perhaps with a couple of executed Christians next to it, right in the middle of the Hessian-Saxon borderlands. But this seemed pretty unlikely; I’ve tried in vain to tie the historical and archaeological sources closely together for years. And no-one has ever found any archaeological evidence for one of Boniface’s churches, even when we know exactly where to look.

and this...

Then today I came across an article about an excavation that had taken place during the 90s on Gaulskopf, a Saxon hillfort right in the middle of the Hessian-Saxon borderlands. During the excavation, the postholes of a wooden building had been discovered: it was about 11 metres long and 5 metres wide, arranged precisely east-west, with the west end divided from the main part of the hall by a wooden screen. In the opinion of the excavator, it was quite clearly an eighth-century church. You have to understand that this is unheard of. I’ve been dreaming of something like this for the past five years. Sad I know, but true. I was excited.

plus this...

But it gets better... at least for us. The excavation revealed the presence of burned wood, demonstrating that the building had been destroyed by fire. So an early church that had been burned to the ground, exactly as Boniface described in his letter to the Pope. And it gets better yet. Immediately north of the building were three graves, two men and one woman, arranged east-west in Christian fashion. They were all missing their heads. One of the men had sword cuts to his right arm that showed he had attempted to shield himself from sword blows.

... equals this.

In my thesis I wrote about the attack of 752, and about how the monks and priests had probably managed to escape to the south when the pagans came - we know this, because in 751 Boniface wrote to the pope asking for permission to recall his missionaries if they were under threat. ‘Boniface’s missionaries had probably escaped,’ I wrote last year, ‘but one wonders how the invaders treated the ordinary Christians left behind.’

I wasn’t actually expecting us ever to get an answer to that question, but now we may have. I wanted to find the ‘human experience’ of the mission, and this has become an image of Boniface’s missionaries returning to Gaulskopf after the pagan attack of 752, picking through the charred remains of their chapel, and coming across the headless bodies of their former parishioners.