Sonia Elizabeth Chadwick Hawkes

Sonia Chadwick was born in Dartford, Kent, on 5 November 1933, and went to school there before reading English at Bedford College, London. She took part in excavations while still at school, notably at the Lullingstone Roman villa and the series of early medieval stone buildings at Morgan Porth under the direction of Rupert Bruce Mitford and Paul Ashbee. After graduating she began a doctoral thesis, supervised by Vera Evison, on German Migration period art, concentrating on the animal ornament on the fine metal dress and weapon fittings recovered from fifth- to seventh-century AD graves. Chadwick’s detailed study of these led, in 1958, to her appointment as curator of Scunthorpe Museum. Also in 1958 she attended the CBA’s Bronze Age Conference where she ran into Christopher Hawkes, Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford, whom she had met briefly in London, and they were married shortly afterwards.The honeymoon was spent excavating an Iron Age enclosure on Longbridge Cow Down in Wiltshire, from whence they returned to Oxford to live happily ever after. The Oxford University Institute of Archaeology, founded in 1961 under the directorship of Christopher Hawkes, became the research centre for Chadwick Hawkes’s Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Graves and Grave-Goods, an ambitious project focused on cemeteries in the kingdom of Kent, especially the princely burial ground at Finglesham, which produced spectacular Frankish jewellery. Chadwick Hawkes dug there from 1959–67, funded by the old Ministry of Works and it remains, with the possible exception of Dover, the only totally excavated Kentish cemetery. In 1973 she was appointed lecturer in European archaeology at Oxford and worked hard to raise the profile of Anglo-Saxon studies among the students. Along with David Brown and James Campbell she founded the occasional publication, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, the first volume being published in 1979 (BAR British Series 72); and also organised the Oxford Seminars in Anglo-Saxon Studies, a series of weekend interdisciplinary conferences restricted by invitation to a small number of scholars. At one such seminar, Weapons and Warfare, Chadwick Hawkes provided an agreeable, though entirely serious, diversion in the form of a demonstration by members of the Dark Age Society of an ‘affray-at-arms’ in the gardens of St Cross College. Another notable conference was that held in Liverpool in 1986 to mark the centenary of the death of Joseph Mayer who bought the Revd Bryan Faussett’s collection of Anglo-Saxon artefacts from nine Kentish cemeteries and presented it to Liverpool’s Public Museum. The material was taken to Oxford in 1963 where, over a period of seven years, it was examined, photographed and redrawn under Chadwick Hawkes’s supervision in readiness for a fresh catalogue which, unfortunately, never appeared. The loss was all the greater since her opening conference paper on ‘Bryan Faussett and the Faussett Collection: an assessment’ promised perceptive new insights into the material. Her paper, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kent c .425–725’ appeared in the CBA’s Research Report on Kent (no. 48, The Archaeology of Kent to AD 1500) and, after her husband retired, she co-edited with him Archaeology into History, volume 1 (1973). Although Chadwick Hawkes did not retire until 1994 her academic work was curtailed from the late 1980s by her devotion to her ailing husband who died in 1992. She never overcame her nervousness as a lecturer and her best work was the supervision of graduate students many of whom, including her successor, Helena Hamerow, now hold important posts. Nevertheless, Chadwick Hawkes was a gregarious soul who set the friendly tone for the Institute in its early days, choosing the furnishings for the new common room and establishing the popular teatime ritual. She loved parties and organised the Jubilee Open Day to celebrate the Institute’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1986. Inevitably, its character changed after Christopher Hawkes’s retirement and, with the influx of more and more students, it declined as a social centre but retained the academic excellence which neither husband nor wife would compromise. Although Chadwick Hawkes published regularly, much material remains unpublished, notably reports on Bifrons, Kingsworthy, Finglesham and Eastry. Her archive is deposited in the Institute and is being edited for publication. She died on 30 May 1999, only four years after her second marriage.