In The English Historical Review, Helen Gittos writes:
The Sutton Hoo ship burial is the most famous example of a group of lavishly furnished Anglo-Saxon graves. The discovery in 2003 of another, at Prittlewell, Southend (Essex), and its publication in 2019, has brought our knowledge of them into sharper focus. Some questions, however, remain. How did the men buried in these graves acquire so much wealth? And why were they buried with so many objects from the eastern Mediterranean? The conventional view is that they probably acquired the gold from their Merovingian neighbours, and that the imported goods came as gifts or through trade. Here I argue for a different explanation which opens up a startlingly new view of early Anglo-Saxon history.
The graves currently known as princely burials share a number of characteristics. The men were buried fully dressed and provided with large numbers of grave goods, including weaponry. Their burials were carefully orchestrated and included exotic objects imported across great distances. The graves themselves were monumental, in that they were designed to be an enduring feature in the landscape; they were experimental, in that each one took a different form; and they were often placed apart from more normal cemeteries, in prominent locations on the boundaries of kingdoms. These burials were a short-lived phenomenon of the period from c.580 to 635. The Prittlewell chamber grave, created c.580–605, is one of the best preserved.