wealth and power, but does not necessarily memorialise Rædwald, or a king; theoretically, the ship-burial could have even been a votive offering. The case for Rædwald depends heavily on the dating of the coins, yet the current dating is only precise within two decades, and Merovingian coin chronologies have shifted before. The case for Rædwald depends on the assumption that modern conceptions of Middle Age wealth and power are accurate. The wealth of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial is astonishing because there are no contemporaneous parallels, but the lack of parallels could be a quirk of survival just as much as it could be an indicator of Rædwald's wealth. Many other Anglo-Saxon barrows have been ploughed over or looted, and so just as little is known about contemporary kingliness, little is known about contemporary kingly graves; if there was any special significance to the items termed regalia, it could have been religious instead of kingly significance, and if anything of kingly graves is known, it is that the graves of even the mere wealthy contained riches that any king would be happy to own. Distinguishing between graves of chieftains, regents, kings, and status-seeking arrivistes is difficult. When Mul of Kent, the brother of King Cædwalla of Wessex, was killed in 687, the price paid in recompense was equivalent to a king's weregild. If the lives of a king and his brother were equal, their graves might be equally hard to tell apart. Rædwald thus remains a possible but uncertain identification. As the British Museum's former director Sir David M. Wilson wrote, while Rædwald may have been buried at Sutton Hoo, "the little word may should be brought into any identification of Rædwald. After all it may or even might be Sigeberht who died in the early 630s, or it might be his illegitimate brother if he had one (and most people did), or any other great man of East Anglia from 610 to 650." Description Weighing an estimated , the Sutton Hoo helmet was made of iron and covered with decorated sheets of tinned bronze. Fluted strips of moulding divided the exterior into panels, each of which was stamped with one of five designs. Two depict figural scenes, another two zoophormic interlaced patterns; a fifth pattern, known only from seven small fragments and incapable of restoration, is known to occur only once on an otherwise symmetrical helmet and may have been