In the beginning, there was a small orange bead. It seemed at first unremarkable — a trinket easily mistaken for something from Accessorize. Cat Jarman found it in a Tupperware box containing items unearthed in 1982 during an archaeological dig at Repton. Thirty-five years later, Jarman was cataloguing the stuff — more than 9,000 objects spanned 1,300 years. Here was a Roman enamel brooch, there a piece of medieval glass. A Victorian bone toothbrush lay next to an Anglo-Saxon comb. “I felt like a child let loose in a toy shop after hours,” she writes.
That bead came from a Viking mass grave containing the remains of 264 people who were almost certainly part of the Viking Great Army that rampaged around Britain starting in the year 865. In 873 they conquered Repton and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. The bead was carnelian, a semi-precious gemstone mined and cut in India. So how did a bead from Gujarat end up in a Derbyshire churchyard?
