The question of who was responsible for the funeral in early Anglo-Saxon England, or for the management of burial sites, has often been raised in passing by archaeologists, but has generally not been examined in detail. This is, perhaps, due to the difficulty of finding archaeological evidence for ceremony and its underlying motives which is independent of the analogies available to the observer (Carver 1993, v-vi). This paper represents an attempt to search for such evidence. The identification of who or what might have been responsible for patterns and variations in burial could have far-reaching consequences. If there was some form of social control, this could change the theoretical basis from which we extract meaning from these patterns, as of course the meanings of these patterns will vary depending on who deliberately created them and whose ideologies they reflected. At the very least, it might help us understand phenomena such as the speed and uniformity of change in Anglo-Saxon burial practice across England, or the underlying principles by which the landscape position and layout of pre-Christian cemeteries was planned. Understanding the social control of burial may also shed light on one of the thorny problems of burial practice in the Age of Conversion: the seemingly immense effect of the coming of the Church on burial practices, which took place apparently without any detectable institutional intention. These are wide inferences; let us see how far we can push the evidence to justify them.

After well over a century of analysis, we now know that the process of the disposal of the dead in early Anglo-Saxon England required a great many decisions to be made (Filmer-Sankey and Pestell 2001, 262). The appropriate cemetery had to be selected, and the choice between inhumation and cremation made. If cremation was chosen, the pyre had to be constructed, with another set of decisions to be made. If the rite was to be inhumation, the grave had to be dug in the correct place, with the right orientation. If there was to be a mound, the height and diameter had to be selected.