A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE 



These bronze-using people, of finer physique and possessing better 

 weapons than their predecessors, probably came into the country from 

 Gaul, and drove the small, long-headed people before them to the west 

 and north, where at the present day the inhabitants show their descent, 

 though now of course in a modified form. 



Northamptonshire in the Bronze age, as in the preceding one of 

 polished stone, was still largely covered with forest ; and here again 

 the remains are scanty as compared with those counties so rich in the 

 external evidences of early man in the shape of his burial mounds, as 

 Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Wiltshire, etc. The chief discovery of this 

 period in our county was made in some ironstone diggings near Corby 

 in 1890. At a spot where the two parishes of Great Weldon and 

 Corby join, the men came upon the site of a burial, from which remains 

 of six cinerary urns of the characteristic shape and ornamentation of 

 this age were obtained ; with them a skeleton was found in a sitting 

 position, and associated with this find was a bronze weapon with three 

 rivet holes. This kind of weapon is called by Sir John Evans a knife 

 dagger, and is considered by him to belong to the early part of the 

 Bronze age. There was no indication of any tumulus over these remains. 

 Those urns which were found in Weldon Lordship were on the pro- 

 perty of the late Lord Winchelsea, who kindly presented them to the 

 Northampton Museum. The knife dagger and the skeleton with the 

 remains of the other urns were found in Corby parish on the glebe 

 belonging to the rectory. The skeleton was re-interred in the church- 

 yard at Corby before any measurements of the skull or limbs could 

 be taken. The locality of this find was adjoining the valley of a small 

 brook which, on a plan of the Hatton property drawn for Queen 

 Elizabeth's Lord Chancellor in the sixteenth century, shows a clearing 

 in what was a part of Rockingham Forest ; and one may well imagine 

 this clearing to have existed in those early times, an ideal spot for 

 encampment or for a temporary resting-place for a few wandering 

 members of the Bronze age. A smaller cinerary urn devoid of any 

 decoration, and a vessel of the kind classed as incense cups, were found 

 in other workings adjoining the site of this clearing. Two cinerary 

 urns have been found at Brixworth ; one was a plain one, and the other 

 decorated with herring-bone work made by some sharp-pointed instru- 

 ment. Both were about 5I inches high. At Desborough in 1826 a 

 small urn also ornamented with a herring-bone pattern was obtained 

 with osseous remains, and with this were remnants of a larger urn, of 

 which only a fragment was preserved. 



In the British Museum are two vessels found when opening a 

 barrow near Oundle, and a cinerary urn with zig-zag marking on the 

 top part found at Cransley. Near Wansford paper mills about 1836 

 was discovered a cist made of four upright large stones covered with 

 a rough slab, in which were a quantity of partially burnt bones and 

 an urn with some remains of bones inside. This is now in the museum 

 attached to the Stamford Institute. Brixworth, which has proved to 



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