Rupert Bruce-Mitford

Rupert Leo Scott Bruce-Mitford was a British archaeologist and scholar. He spent the majority of his career at the British Museum, primarily as the keeper of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities, and was particularly known for his work on the Sutton Hoo ship-burial. Described as the spiritus rector of such research, he oversaw the production of the monumental three-volume work The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, termed by the president of the Society of Antiquaries as "one of the great books of the century".
Though Bruce-Mitford was born in London, his preceding two generations had lived largely abroad: his maternal grandparents as early settlers of British Columbia, his paternal grandparents as missionaries in India, and his parents as schoolteachers in Japan. When Bruce-Mitford was five his father died in Japan, having returned there two years earlier. His mother was left to raise the four sons, of whom Bruce-Mitford was the youngest, on a tiny salary; the stresses were substantial, and he was fostered for a time after his mother had a breakdown. He attended preparatory school with the support of a relative, enrolled at the charity school Christ's Hospital five years later, and, in 1933, earned a Baring Scholarship in History to attend Hertford College, Oxford. Recommending him for a museum curatorship in 1936, the University Appointments Board noted that he "has an exceptional gift for research, a sphere in which he could do work of outstanding merit".
After spending a year as an assistant keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, during which he produced the first standardized chronology of medieval pottery, in December 1937, Bruce-Mitford joined the British Museum's Department of British and Medieval Antiquities. The ship-burial was excavated in 1939, weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War; Bruce-Mitford spent 1940 to 1946 in the Royal Corps of Signals, and returned with responsibility over Sutton Hoo. Bruce-Mitford spent much of the next four decades focused on the subject, publishing dozens of works, studying contemporary graves in Scandinavia, and leading a second round of excavations at Sutton Hoo from 1965 to 1970.
In his other duties, Bruce-Mitford excavated at the Mawgan Porth Dark Age Village, published significant works on the Lindisfarne Gospels, Codex Amiatinus, and Celtic hanging bowls, translated P. V. Glob's book The Bog People into English, and oversaw acquisitions including Courtenay Adrian Ilbert's collection of thousands of clocks and watches, considered the greatest such collection in the world. He also founded the Society for Medieval Archaeology, and served as secretary, and later vice-president, of the Society of Antiquaries. After his retirement from the British Museum in 1977, he served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge, a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a faculty visitor in the Department of English at the Australian National University.

Early life and background

Rupert Leo Scott Bruce-Mitford was born on 14 June 1914 at 1 Deerhurst Road, Streatham, London. Following Terence, Vidal and Alaric, he was the fourth of four sons born to Charles Eustace and Beatrice Jean Bruce-Mitford; a daughter did not survive. Family tradition has it that Rupert's brothers were responsible for his given names, selecting them from their reading: Rupert from Anthony Hope's Rupert of Hentzau, Leo from Rider Haggard's She, and Scott from either Robert Falcon Scott's diary, or his "Message to England".
Bruce-Mitford's paternal great-grandparents, George and Elizabeth Beer, sailed to the Godavari River Delta in India to work as Baptist missionaries in 1836; poor and unordained when they left, they went on, according to Anthony Norris Groves's biographer, to "stand amongst the most tenacious Christian workers of all time". Their two sons, John William and Charles Henry, continued the calling, while their two daughters married schoolteachers in the area. In 1866 John Beer married Margaret Anne Midford, the daughter of an English family living in Machilipatnam. They had five children, including in 1871 Herbert Leonard and in 1875 Eustace, Rupert Bruce-Mitford's father. The family returned to Devon in 1884, when John Beer fell ill. He died shortly after arrival; his wife returned to India, but died there four years later. Eustace Beer, Rupert Bruce-Mitford would later write, was thereby "himself twice orphaned while still a small boy". By 1891 he was in England, having either returned or never left following his father's death. After studying in Exeter he taught English and Classics at Blackburn Grammar School, but then sailed from Genoa in 1901 to teach at the Weihaiwei School in China, an institution for European boys founded by his brother Herbert. He left less than nine months later for Japan, intending to establish his own school there with a curriculum and ethos reflecting his own ideas.
Shortly before his 1902 departure to China, Eustace Beer adopted the surname Bruce-Mitford—perhaps indicative of his desire to separate himself from his family's missionary past. "Mitford" was a take on "Midford", his mother's maiden name, and, perhaps not unintentionally, that of the unrelated Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, whose name carried respect in the British expatriate community in Japan. "Bruce" may have been taken from Major Clarence Dalrymple Bruce, an acquaintance who commanded the Weihaiwei Regiment. In Japan Eustace founded the Yokohama Modern School, which targeted the sons of English, and English-speaking, businessmen and missionaries. In 1903, and likely on the basis of his book and articles on Weihaiwei, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; he subsequently became interested in geography and vulcanology, writing additional works on Japan.
Eustace Bruce-Mitford had met Beatrice Allison on his ship to Yokohama, and soon after founding his school recruited her as an assistant teacher; they married on 27 July 1904, at Christ Church, Yokohama. She was the eldest daughter of early settlers of British Columbia, Susan Louisa and John Fall Allison, an explorer, gold prospector, and cattle rancher. In 1908, however, by which time the family had three sons, William Awdry, the Bishop of South Tokyo, announced from the pulpit of Christ Church that "certain marriages of British subjects celebrated in Japan" might not be legally valid, and if so "the couples... will find that they have been and are living together... in concubinage and that their children are 'illegitimate'". Though a legal technicality, and one which was remedied by an Act of Parliament in 1912, the announcement disgraced the Bruce-Mitfords, and Eustace lost his leadership of the Yokohama Modern School. He was taken on as an assistant editor by Francis Brinkley, owner and editor of The Japan Mail, though by 1911 had returned to England as a freelance journalist. Rupert Bruce-Mitford was born three years after his family returned from Japan. Three years later, his father left for India to work as an assistant editor at The Madras Mail. Eustace died following a short fever in 1919, when he was forty-four and Rupert five.
Following the death of his father, Bruce-Mitford later wrote, "the family was stranded in London and fell on very hard times". His mother then earned roughly £170 a year, of which she lent £120 to Terence and Vidal, to be repaid after their studies, and spent approximately £42 18s yearly for part of a house, with rent paid weekly. Bruce-Mitford was frequently sick as a child, coming down with scarlet fever and diphtheria when aged two, and influenza when around six. The stresses on the family were substantial, and at one point Beatrice had a breakdown, causing Rupert to be fostered for a time.

Education

Fatherless and poor, Rupert Bruce-Mitford was educated with the financial support of his mother's cousin. The support hinged, Bruce-Mitford later wrote, "on one condition – that my father's novel, depicting life in Yokohama at the turn of the century, should be burnt; she thought it immoral and scurrilous". Around 1920, Bruce-Mitford was thereby sent to Brightlands preparatory school in Dulwich, London, which his brothers Terence and Alec also attended before receiving scholarships to Dulwich College. Bruce-Mitford was baptised around the same time, perhaps to improve his later chances of admittance to the charity school Christ's Hospital. Five years later the Brightlands headmaster nominated Bruce-Mitford to take an examination for Christ's Hospital. Following success in the examination—covering the three compulsory subjects of English, arithmetic and practical mensuration, and history and geography, as well as all three optional subjects of Latin, French, and mathematics—and his mother's application, he was admitted on 17 September 1925.
Bruce-Mitford was successful, and happy, at Christ's Hospital. He was also introduced to archaeology; in 1930 he participated in a dig with S. E. Winbolt at the Jacobean ironworks in Dedisham, Sussex. Winbolt wrote in the school magazine that "unhappily the 'dig' produced no useful results", but added that "possibly, however, the diggers learnt something", and named Bruce-Mitford "among willing helpers, mentioned honoris causa". Meanwhile, Bruce-Mitford was active in school events, including playing rugby and cricket, acting in John Galsworthy's The Little Man, debating at the Horsham Workers' Educational Association, and writing his first article, on a ten-day signals camp held over the 1931 summer holiday.
By the time Bruce-Mitford was 16 or 17, he had switched his studies from classics to history—the result, in no small part, of his shaky grasp of Greek and Latin, despite devoted tutoring by his brother Terence. Around the same time, he came across Samuel Gardner's English Gothic Foliage Sculpture in the school's library, and upon reading it discovered his love of the concrete and visual. In 1933, he was awarded a £100 Baring Scholarship in History to attend Hertford College, Oxford. This came as surprise, he wrote, "for I never had a head for dates and treaties". But as he recalled four decades later, at Oxford "I fell in love with the atmosphere and smell of the oldest part of the Library where, under the flat-arched 15th century ceiling, cases displaying illuminated manuscripts were set out". One, the twelfth-century Ashmole Bestiary, open to a folio of a red eagle on a background of gold, so captured his attention that "after some weeks I could stand my ignorance and quell my curiosity no longer", and, "crewing up my courage", asked for permission to see it; he remained absorbed in the work through lunch and until evicted at the end of the day.
During school vacations, Bruce-Mitford often took the tram to the British Museum, where he spent time in the Reading Room. He also walked around the building, listening to guest lecturers speak on the objects, and particularly enjoying hearing about the Chinese paintings and the Royal Gold Cup. In 1936, he obtained his bachelor's degree with a Second Class in Modern History, and in Michaelmas term began a postgraduate Bachelor of Letters on "The Development of English Narrative Art in the Fourteenth Century". The research included an investigation of the pigments used in early illuminated manuscripts. Bruce-Mitford's supervisor was Robin Flower, deputy keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum. The same year, the University Appointments Board recommended Bruce-Mitford for the curatorship of the York Castle Museum, writing that he "would do well in a trading or administrative post, but has an exceptional gift for research, a sphere in which he could do work of outstanding merit". He never finished the Bachelor of Letters, although he was promoted to the rank of Master of Arts in 1961 and awarded a Doctor of Letters in 1987, both from Hertford College.

Career

Ashmolean Museum

By 1937, Bruce-Mitford had taken a one-year position as an assistant keeper at the Ashmolean Museum. Initial work included rearranging and displaying the museum's collection of medieval pilgrims' badges. Soon, however, he was introduced to what would be later termed rescue archaeology, when a group of seventeenth-century houses was demolished in favour of a large extension to the Bodleian Library. Before the demolition, the head of the library invited the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society to investigate the houses for their architectural or antiquarian interest, and observe the forthcoming demolition and excavations of foundations. The Society, in turn, created a subcommittee consisting of Edward Tudor Long, Edward Thurlow Leeds, and William Abel Pantin to direct an investigation of the houses and watch for finds during their demolition.
Demolition lasted from December 1936 to March 1937, after which began, according to the geologist William Joscelyn Arkell, "the removal of the greatest quantity of subsoil... ever taken out of one hole within the City of Oxford". Bruce-Mitford was tasked with watching the site during the excavation. Much of his work involved waiting for the well in front of each house to be dug out, revealing two or three feet of mud at the bottom, filled with broken medieval pottery and other artefacts. He waited "impotently", he later recalled, for the jaws of the mechanical diggers to pick up the mud and transfer it to a lorry; he then jumped aboard, and picked out the artefacts as the lorry made its way "to some gravel hungry site at Cumnor". When back at the Ashmolean, he would wash the sherds and stick them together. Bruce-Mitford's energy and eye resulted in a collection of pottery that was exceptionally useful. Because the wells quickly silted up during their use and had to be replaced by new ones every 50 or so years, Bruce-Mitford found it possible to accurately date pottery within particularly short time-frames. In 1939, he published an article on the finds, to be read in conjunction with an article by Pantin, in which he described five distinct groups of pottery in their probable chronological order; his brother Alaric provided the illustrations. This was "the first serious study of medieval pottery", wrote the archaeologist Maureen Mellor in 1997, and "has never had to be challenged, although refined and extended". Bruce-Mitford's work also influenced him, decades later, to create a national reference collection of medieval pottery at the British Museum.

British Museum

On 3 December 1937, Bruce-Mitford was named assistant keeper of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum. He was possibly helped in this position by his professor from two years previously, Robin Flower, also the deputy keeper of manuscripts. The following year Bruce-Mitford was reacquainted with archaeological work, spending three weeks with Gerhard Bersu at the Iron Age site of Little Woodbury in Wiltshire. "I learned a lot", he later wrote, "and loved being out on the chalk, in the fresh air." There, Bruce-Mitford met Charles Phillips, the secretary of The Prehistoric Society.
In 1939 Bruce-Mitford was tasked with leading an excavation, this time at the medieval village of Seacourt in Oxfordshire. Though Seacourt was a difficult site, Bruce-Mitford thought it would be possible to determine a complete ground plan of domestic buildings and of the church. It was also a village that was known to have been deserted and archaeologically sealed by 1439, within a century of the Black Death. This provided a terminus ante quem for any artefacts found there, offering the chance to obtain important chronological evidence as to pottery and small objects such as brooches, ornaments, bucks, fittings, shears, horseshoes, and nails, the dating of which was particularly imprecise. Excavations wrapped up 15 July 1939, seven weeks before Britain's entry into the Second World War.

Second World War

From 1940 to 1946, Bruce-Mitford served in the Royal Corps of Signals. Joining as a lance corporal and initially assigned to a territorial unit in Essex, he transmitted morse code during the day, after which he watched for fires from the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. He was in Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire by autumn, when The Yorkshire Archæological Journal reported that he and his friends cleared out a Roman hypocaust at Middleham. The site had previously been excavated around 1881 and 1906. Bruce-Mitford's notes were published in The Journal of Roman Studies, with photographs taken by Eric Lomax.
Bruce-Mitford was commissioned as a second lieutenant on 1 February 1941, and promoted to war substantive lieutenant on 1 August 1942, acting captain on 20 November 1942, and temporary captain on 26 February 1943. By 1943 he was working on the publications staff of the Royal School of Signals at Catterick, where he wrote a booklet on wireless communication, attempted to reorganise the Northern Command's signals system, and travelled around Yorkshire by motorcycle, laying cable. From 1943 to 1945, he led parties from the School of Signals to archaeological and other sites across Northern England, including Richmond Castle, Jervaulx Abbey, Easby Parish Church, Stanwick St John, Middleham Castle, and the Georgian Theatre Royal, recording notes and commentaries when there.

Return to the British Museum

Sutton Hoo

Bruce-Mitford spent the war awaiting his return to the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities. As early as 1940, T. D. Kendrick—then keeper of the department, later director of the museum—wrote to Bruce-Mitford at his army camp, telling him he would be responsible for the collection of Anglo-Saxon antiquities, the Germanic collections of Europe, and the Late Celtic collections of the British Isles. The letter closed with a warning: "You will also be responsible for Sutton Hoo. Brace yourself for this task." Bruce-Mitford's responsibility for the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship-burial, wrote the Oxford scholar Martin Biddle, would become "the defining moment of Rupert's life, his greatest challenge, the source of almost insuperable difficulties, and his greatest achievement". Discharged from the army as an honorary captain in early 1946, Bruce-Mitford immediately returned to the museum; the first lecture he attended after discharge was by Phillips on Sutton Hoo.
Bruce-Mitford returned to a museum that had suffered during the war. Understaffed and with inadequate facilities, the museum had much of its collection still in storage. The Sutton Hoo finds, excavated in 1939 and promptly taken to the safety of the tunnel connecting the Aldwych and Holborn tube stations, had been returned to the museum only a year or two before. Herbert Maryon, a technical attaché recruited for the task, set to work restoring what Bruce-Mitford later termed "the real headaches – notably the crushed shield, helmet and drinking horns". "When I began work", he continued, "I sat with Maryon while he took me through the material and with infectious enthusiasm, demonstrated what he was doing". "There followed great days for Sutton Hoo when new, often dramatic, discoveries were being made in the workshops all the time. Built from fragments, astonishing artefacts – helmet, shield, drinking horns, and so on – were recreated."
Early in 1946, Kendrick and Bruce-Mitford placed restored artefacts from Sutton Hoo on display in the museum's King Edward VII Gallery. In January 1947, Bruce-Mitford was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the museum published The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: A Provisional Guide, which Bruce-Mitford had written and produced during evenings at his kitchen table. The work quickly proved to be one of the museum's most successful publications, going through ten impressions even before the second edition was issued. Also in 1947, in what he later termed "one of the most rewarding experiences of my life", Bruce-Mitford visited Sweden for six weeks at the invitation of the archaeologist Sune Lindqvist. Bruce-Mitford studied the similar finds from Vendel and Valsgärde and helped Lindqvist excavate the boat-grave from Valsgärde 11, learning Swedish along the way.
Although Bruce-Mitford continued to write prolifically on Sutton Hoo—he quickly became, in the words of Francis Peabody Magoun, the "spiritus rector of present-day Sutton Hoo research"—a definitive publication remained elusive. Writing a memorandum to Kendrick in May 1949, Bruce-Mitford outlined a plan for "hree large volumes" and possibly a fourth, buttressed by "a formidable array of technical reports obtained at my request from outside scientists", and accompanied by the "hope that the publication will set a new standard in archaeological publication". But he admitted that he could not see "any real prospect of getting the catalogue out the way things are at present". The museum had other needs, and Bruce-Mitford other responsibilities; the country plunged into the Korean War, and resources were diverted elsewhere. In a 1957 addendum to his 1949 memorandum, Bruce-Mitford wrote "here was no reply to this report".

Other matters

Throughout the 1950s, Bruce-Mitford's attention was directed away from Sutton Hoo. In these "fallow years for Sutton Hoo", as Biddle termed them, germinated many of the other contributions of Bruce-Mitford's career. He began two projects that would result in posthumous publications: excavations at the Mawgan Porth Dark Age Village in Cornwall from 1949 to 1952, and the compilation of information on Celtic hanging bowls. He undertook another effort in 1955, unsuccessfully searching Lincoln Cathedral with Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark and Harold Plenderleith for the burial place of Saint Hugh of Lincoln. He also shouldered increasing roles and responsibilities, including deputy keepership of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities in February 1954, full keepership upon the retirement of A. B. Tonnochy that August, appointment to the Ancient Monuments Board for England that same year, membership in the Museums Association by 1955, and founder and president of the Society for Medieval Archaeology in 1957. In the latter half of the decade Bruce-Mitford became a semi-regular participant in the show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, appearing in 1955, 1956, 1958, and 1959. In 1960, he opened an exhibition, "Archaeology from the Air", at the Victoria Galleries in Kingston upon Hull.
This time also saw Bruce-Mitford's primary work on early medieval manuscripts. In 1956 and 1960, he published a two-volume work—facsimile and commentary—on the Lindisfarne Gospels. The work was his first major publication; the museum gave him four months' leave to focus on the work, including time at the Royal Library in Copenhagen and the Laurentian Library in Florence. The result, according to the journal Antiquity, was "magistral". While at the Laurentian, Bruce-Mitford also studied the 700 AD bible known as the Codex Amiatinus, eventually resulting in a Jarrow Lecture on the subject in 1967. Around the same time, he translated P. V. Glob's 1965 book The Bog People from Danish to English, with the result published in 1969.
Though Bruce-Mitford helped secure acquisitions throughout his 21 years as keeper, two of his most significant efforts came in 1958. That year, the museum purchased the Lycurgus Cup from Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild, for £20,000. The museum also purchased Courtenay Adrian Ilbert's collection of clocks and watches. This, wrote Biddle, was "the greatest collection of horology in the world", and Bruce-Mitford's "greatest coup". After Ilbert died in 1956, his collection—some 210 clocks and 2,300 watches and watch movements—was set for auction at Christie's. Although the treasury declined a request for funds, Bruce-Mitford approached the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, which was able to secure a donor to purchase the clocks for the museum. The company then again approached the treasury, the head of which this time agreed to petition parliament for funds to purchase the remainder of the collection. The collection was purchased for the museum, and the company made Bruce-Mitford a liveryman.
Shortly thereafter, in 1960, Bruce-Mitford embarked on an ultimately unsuccessful two-year attempt to acquire what would become known as the Cloisters Cross. The ivory cross, which a panel of experts at the museum declared "one of the finest and most impressive objects of the 12th century they ever seen", appeared at the museum on 5 December 1960, prior to which it was virtually unknown; Bruce-Mitford was alerted by an urgent note that a man had arrived with an ivory cross, and that it was his last day in London. Bruce-Mitford studied the cross over the ensuing two years—including four days spent in a bank vault in Zurich—assembled a file an inch and a half thick, and successfully persuaded the treasury to allocate £195,000 for its purchase. But as unsavoury rumours swirled around the owner, Ante Topić Mimara, and doubts persisted that the unprovenanced cross might be Nazi loot, Mimara steadfastly refused to disclose how he had obtained possession. With the museum unwilling to pay without this information and Mimara unwilling to disclose it, the museum's option expired at midnight on 31 January 1963. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had been waiting in the wings; its curator Thomas Hoving, untroubled by the issues with the cross and owner, stayed up over dinner with Mimara and purchased it immediately.

Return to Sutton Hoo

Frank Francis succeeded Kendrick as director in 1959, and the following year made two floors of a Montague Street house available for Bruce-Mitford to devote to the Sutton Hoo operation. A research assistant was added in 1962 and, eventually, thirteen people were involved. By then, criticism over the delays in publication had begun to mount; a 1964 article by Christopher Hawkes lamented the fact that " quarter of a century has passed... and Sutton Hoo is still not published", and concluded that the museum "really must go to it". Much of the criticism landed on the shoulders of Bruce-Mitford, leading the archaeologist Robert T. Farrell to observe that "it has become something of a trend to slate Bruce-Mitford for delay". After the volumes were ultimately published, Hawkes and his wife Sonia went as far as to translate, privately publish, and distribute amongst colleagues a biting German review by Joachim Werner. Sir David M. Wilson, who became director of the museum in 1977, disparaged Bruce-Mitford in his 2002 book The British Museum: A History, and wrote that work on the Sutton Hoo volumes "presents a precautionary, if unique, tale of procrastination and obfuscation". To others, including Biddle and Rosemary Cramp, while Bruce-Mitford's perfectionism and penchant for detail did not speed matters, the criticism failed to account for the many other demands on his time, and the museum's delay in making resources available for the publication. Nor, wrote Biddle, did it appreciate the scope of the undertaking, which involved modernising multiple fields of research—such as the proper chronology of Merovingian coins, used to date the burial; the study of textiles; and the study of soil, used to determine whether the burial was a grave or a cenotaph—and the re-excavation of the ship-burial.
From 1965 to 1970, Bruce-Mitford led another round of excavations at Sutton Hoo in order to acquire more information about the mound, the ship, and the burial. Especially given that the original two-week excavation had been an exercise in rescue archaeology, it was hoped that an excavation without the looming spectre of war might discover items or features that had been missed. In 1968, Bruce-Mitford updated the Provisional Guide with a new edition, now entitled The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: A Handbook; second and third editions of the Handbook followed in 1972 and 1979. In 1973, he delivered the second G. N. Garmonsway Memorial Lecture at the University of York, speaking on Sutton Hoo, and in 1974, he published Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology. The book contained twelve updated and rewritten chapters that had appeared elsewhere, along with four new chapters; originally conceived as a reference work which the forthcoming Sutton Hoo publication would cite throughout, it also provided a more high-level overview of certain portions of the burial.
The first volume of The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial finally appeared in 1975. It focused on the larger issues of the burial—such as the site, the excavations, the ship, the date of the burial, and the questions of whom it honoured, and whether or not it was a cenotaph. The book was widely welcomed; A. J. Taylor, then president of the Society of Antiquaries, hailed the publication as "one of the great books of the century". The book was "splendid", wrote Birgit Arrhenius, and to Biddle, "the firm foundation on which all subsequent work on the site and on the contents of the mound will safely rest". Cramp wrote of "the consistently high standard of argument and presentation" in the work, and even beyond the specific site of Sutton Hoo, the art critic Terence Mullaly suggested the book "sets standards for archaeologists everywhere". The authors and the museum, James Graham-Campbell wrote in Antiquity, "merit every congratulation on the appearance of this first volume".
Also in 1975, Bruce-Mitford relinquished his role as keeper of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities to spend two years as research keeper. This period was the only time during his career which he was able to devote exclusively to Sutton Hoo. Amidst some internal conflict, some of the museum's trustees, led by Eric Fletcher, Baron Fletcher, sought to terminate the keepership six months early; the effort was thwarted by the advocacy of Sir Grahame Clark and A. J. Taylor, who had seen the first volume of The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial shortly after printing, and were able to report being "impressed... by the copiousness and quality of the volume". During this period, in 1976, Bruce-Mitford was also elected a fellow of the British Academy.
The second volume of The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, covering arms, armour, and regalia, followed in 1978. The work was again widely praised, with Graham-Campbell calling it a "tour de force", Farrell a "very great accomplishment": and Vera Evison a "mighty effort" with "no sign of limitation on the length of the text or the number and scale of the illustrations". This resulted in what J. N. L. Myres termed an "open-ended approach" that emphasised exploring judgment calls in reconstructions and interpretations rather than presenting conclusions as unimpeachable. The third volume, published in two parts and covering many items including the silver objects, hanging bowls, drinking vessels, textiles, and lyre, came in 1983. Writing of the series as a whole, Farrell termed it "a series which in scope and format is one of the most monumental to have been undertaken in the field of medieval archaeology", Catherine Hills " monument of publication enshrines the original monument", and Myres "a truly heroic achievement in archaeological publishing". Martin Carver, who led research and excavation at Sutton Hoo after Bruce-Mitford, called the publication "the most compendious ever produced for a British archaeological site".
A fourth volume had been planned to offer thoughts on the relationship between Sutton Hoo and Beowulf, the connection between Sutton Hoo and Sweden, studies of comparable materials, and any needed revisions, although its fate was uncertain even after volume one was in press. The plan was ultimately shelved in the face of financial considerations and a desire to focus on facts rather than interpretation. Writing in the preface to the final volume, Bruce-Mitford stated that "the Trustees felt that with the completion of the third volume their essential responsibility to archaeology had been discharged, the factual record being completed with Volume 3".

After the British Museum

Bruce-Mitford retired from the British Museum after his research keepership ended in 1977. From 1978 to 1979, he served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge, and in the same year served as a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. In 1981, he took his last position at the Australian National University, where he was a faculty visitor in the Department of English. Two years later, he was elected an honorary fellow of Hertford College, his alma mater.
In his years after leaving the British Museum, Bruce-Mitford worked to bring old works to publication. He finished his work on the excavations at Mawgan Porth; the book was published posthumously in 1997. He also resumed work on A Corpus of Late Celtic Hanging-Bowls, on which he had begun work in the 1940s, and which was finished by Shiela Raven and published in 2005. The result, a 500-page tome with 800 illustrations, was reviewed as "a fitting memorial to Dr Bruce-Mitford whose contribution to early medieval archaeology — and to metalwork studies in particular — was immense".

Personal life

Bruce-Mitford was married three times and had three children. In November 1941 he married Kathleen Dent, with whom he fathered Myrtle, Michael, and Miranda. A professional cellist, Myrtle Bruce-Mitford herself contributed to the Sutton Hoo finds, being employed by the British Museum to work on the remnants of the lyre and co-authoring a paper with her father. She was also the longtime partner of Nigel Williams, who from 1970 to 1971 reconstructed the Sutton Hoo helmet.
Bruce-Mitford's relationship with Dent was long troubled, and he left home in the later 1950s and formed a series of relationships. In March 1975 he and his former research assistant Marilyn Roberta Luscombe announced their engagement, marrying on 11 July. The two had met eight years prior, when Bruce-Mitford was interviewing her for the position; knowing Bruce-Mitford's work but believing him to be dead, Luscomb said she spoke at length about one of his papers before realising she was interviewing with its author. The marriage was dissolved in 1984, at which point Bruce-Mitford found it necessary to sell his library, which went to Okinawa Christian Junior College in Japan. In 1986 he married for a third time, to Margaret Edna Adams, a child psychiatrist and published poet, whom he had met at Oxford fifty years before.
In 1987, Bruce-Mitford visited British Columbia, the homeland of his mother's family. He met cousins living on a reservation there and, Biddle wrote, was "deeply moved" by The Lake, an opera about early life in the Okanagan Valley. Biddle noted that Bruce-Mitford "was fascinated by his family's background" in both British Columbia and Japan; Bruce-Mitford wrote two essays to feature in the 1989 auction catalogue for his library, one of which was titled "My Japanese Background".
After years of inherited heart disease, on 10 March 1994 Bruce-Mitford died of a heart attack at the John Radcliffe Hospital; he had driven himself there two days before. He was buried eight days later by St Mary's Church in Bampton, Oxfordshire. The Guardian recalled him as amongst "that tiny band of scholars whose names are linked with great archaeological discoveries". A service was held at St George's, Bloomsbury on 14 June, with the address given by Biddle. Additional obituaries were published in The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, The Independent, Old English Newsletter, and Medieval Archaeology. Biddle's memorial address was later published in The Hertford College Magazine, and in 2015 expanded into a bibliographic memoir published by the British Academy. Bruce-Mitford's widow, Margaret Edna Adams, died in 2002.
Bruce-Mitford was a fan of boxing, rugby, and cricket. He was a member of Marylebone Cricket Club, and frequented the Athenaeum and the Garrick. An avid reader of the books of Dick Francis, he was fond of recalling a two-day transcontinental train journey in Australia during which he shared a compartment with the author.

Publications

Many of the works below are listed in the 1989 catalogue of Bruce-Mitford's library produced in preparation for its sale. The first 156 items in the catalogue are works by or about Bruce-Mitford; Bruce-Mitford's personal copy is held by Columbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, and contains 14 additional works added by hand.

Books

Articles

*Edited and republished in
* Response to:
*Includes prefatory essays My Japanese Background and Forty Years with Sutton Hoo by Bruce-Mitford.

Chapters

* Contains
** Briefly summarised in
* Contains