186 REPORT ON THE STAPENHILL EXPLORATIONS. 
great pains bestowed upon its manufacture, not only by the 
Saxons, but also by the preceding early British or Celts, and is 
generally very highly and artistically ornamented. 
These last two kinds of urns nearly always accompany burials 
by inhumation; the food vessel being rarely found, and the 
drinking cup never, I believe, with burnt bodies. They contained 
offerings of food and drink, probably the mead for which our 
ancestors were so celebrated. 
The various kinds of ornamentation occurring on these burial 
urns may be described as straight lines, zig-zag, and curved ones ; 
dots, circles, and impressed patterns. (See Plate VI., Figs. 8, 9, 
and 10.) The long straight line ornamentation was produced by 
the impression of a twisted cord or thong; a more regular effect 
of this kind, as in the case of short lines, was probably obtained 
by means of a stick obliquely serrated at the edge; it might also 
have been produced with a pin or bone skewer. Impressed 
markings, such as circles, angles, series of dots, were evidently 
produced in many cases by cross sections of stems of certain 
plants pressed into the clay whilst in a wet or plastic condition. 
The circle is very characteristic of Anglo-Saxon pottery, chiefly 
occurring in the form of concentric circles, or as a dot surrounded 
by a circle, or by two or more concentric circles. Their extreme 
regularity seems to preclude the possibility of their ever having 
been executed with the free hand; but they must have been 
stamped with a tube or punch of some kind. 
Another form of ornamentation especially characteristic, in fact, 
I may say peculiar to Saxon pottery, both in England and 
Germany, is the projecting boss or knob. Most of these bosses 
have been formed by merely pressing out the sides of the urn 
with the finger from within whilst the clay was soft; in some 
cases, however, they were formed of solid lumps of clay stuck on 
the surface of the vessel. When we come to compare the orna- 
mentation on the different kinds of urns, I think it will be found, 
more or less, the rule that these bosses or knobs are generally 
found only on the food vessels, while the zig-zag lines and circles 
seem to be characteristic of cinerary urns. This is seen very 
