A HISTORY OF NOTTINGHAMSHIRE 



side, however, suggests that Sherwood did not baffle the Romans, who 

 also drove a road (Stane Street) through the Weald of Sussex. 



At present it is impossible to bring forward conclusive evidence as 

 to the course followed by the earliest Teutonic immigrants into this 

 district ; but the view put forward by John Richard Green has everything 

 in its favour. A glance at his series of maps will explain, and in many 

 cases substantiate his statements, though here and there imagination may 

 too readily fill the void left by archaeology. If by the Engle (Angles) 

 be understood the tribe or tribes that at the date of their arrival, and for 

 some time longer, practised cremation and urn-burial, little exception can 

 be taken to his contention that ' their main settlement along the lower 

 Trent (in what is now the county of Nottingham) must have been in the 

 little dales that break the picturesque wold country that lies to the south 

 (or east) of the river, and through which they pushed along its course as 

 far as its junction with the Soar.' 1 The map showing Anglo-Saxon sites at 

 the head of this chapter fully warrants this view, and physical reasons for 

 such distribution are not far to seek. ' The forest of Sherwood stretched 

 from the outskirts of our Nottingham ' northward within a short distance 

 of Southwell ' to a huge swamp into which the Trent widened as it 

 reached the Humber. Here, indeed, a thin line of clay-country remained 

 open on the left bank of the river, with lifts of soft sandstone here and 

 there ; and on the slopes of one of these the house of the Snotingas fixed 

 their home.' 3 



The finds at Oxton and Tuxford, both of which may belong to the 

 sixth century, represent therefore in all probability the western limit of 

 the earliest Teutonic settlement of the lower Trent valley ; and the ques- 

 tion arises, Whence came these strangers from over-sea ? The answer 

 must depend on the final interpretation of their diverse funeral customs, of 

 which the traces are evident ; and the first step is to correlate the archaeo- 

 logical data in this and neighbouring areas. Of the latter only those now 

 known as Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire are of importance, as 

 forest and swamp completed the circuit ; and it may be said at once that 

 there seems to have been, in the period now under discussion, an archaeo- 

 logical frontier 3 coinciding roughly with the upper courses of the 

 Warwickshire Avon and Welland. North of this line there is a marked 

 absence of a certain type of brooch that is characteristic of the southern 

 midlands, an area that in its turn is practically devoid of the large 

 square-headed variety represented by two examples in Nottinghamshire 

 itself. 



As is generally the case north of the Thames, groups of burials with 

 or without cremation of the body have been discovered in the county ; 

 and it must be confessed at the outset that this discrepancy with regard 

 to a ceremony usually controlled by a rigid tradition, is at present 

 unexplained. It is true that in the Trent valley there is but little evidence 

 of a mixed cemetery in which burnt and unburnt burials occur side by 



1 Making of England (1897), vol. i, p. 88. 

 1 V.C. H. Warw. i, 256 : Bucks, i, 196. 



' Ibid. pp. 85, 88. 



194 



