Reynolds Andrew. Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs

Oxford University Press, 2009. — 324 p. — (Medieval History and Archaeology). — ISBN 978–0–19–954455–4.Reynolds' investigation into Anglo-Saxon deviant burials emerged from his Ph.D. thesis, which he undertook at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and completed in 1998. He decided not to publish his findings immediately afterward, because more information on this issue was coming to light as a result of further excavation. From 2002 to 2003, Reynolds undertook a year of study leave to undertake new research in this area.
The book has been acknowledged as providing archaeological data to back up the historical records regarding Medieval European beliefs in the undead.
The first chapter, "Sources, approaches, and contexts", takes an interdisciplinary approach by examining the literary evidence from the Anglo-Saxon period regarding the execution and burial of those "individuals deemed social outcasts and even feared among the living for their malevolent qualities." Reynolds examines the references to punishment for deviancy within the Anglo-Saxon law codes, before looking at the evidence from charters and place-names referring to places of execution and burial sites.
Chapter two, "Burials, bodies and beheadings", focuses on the archaeological evidence for deviant burials in Anglo-Saxon England, identifying eight specific causes for such funerary deposits: victims of battles, judicial executions, massacres, murder, plague, sacrifice and suicide. For each of these, Reynolds looks at the archaeological evidence that these would each leave behind, before attempting to identify any Anglo-Saxon grave sites that fit into these categories.
In the third chapter, "Social deviants in a pagan society", Reynolds looks at the evidence for deviant burial practices from the fifth to the eighth centuries. Dismissing ideas that crouched, multiple, and shallow burials could be considered "deviant", he examines prone inhumations, decapitated and amputated bodies, and corpses with evidence of stoning, suggesting that these are best categorised as examples of deviant burial.Sources, approaches, and contexts.
Burials, bodies, and beheadings: interpretation and discovery.
Social deviants in a pagan society: the fifth to seventh centuries.
Social deviants in a Christian world: the seventh to eleventh centuries.
The geography of deviant burial in Anglo-Saxon England.
Themes and trajectories: the wider social context.A handlist of Anglo-Saxon law-codes prescribing capital punishment, mutilation and burial in unconsecrated ground.
A handlist of early Anglo-Saxon deviant burials.
A handlist of select burials from execution cemeteries.
A handlist of execution and related sites, and burial places, in Anglo-Saxon charter bounds.