A HISTORY OF NORFOLK 



ments and their funeral customs. More than one able paper by Grimm, 

 by Kemble and by Wylie, has arrayed the classical authorities before 

 us, and also shown cremation to have been largely practised in some 

 parts of Europe during the early Middle Ages. But English antiquaries 

 at least have been perforce content to recognize cremation in vaguely 

 defined districts of the north and east of England ; and their general 

 statements have been justified from time to time by excavation and research. 

 All are agreed that in East Anglia cremation was the rule, and it is here 

 that the connection between the Anglian folk and urn-burial receives its 

 fullest confirmation. All the available material goes to show that for a 

 certain period the population east of the Fens for the most part burnt 

 their dead ; and though the name of England were proof enough, com- 

 parison with burial places north of the Humber and in the early 

 Mercian kingdom shows that the Angles constituted the bulk of the 

 population in these parts, and were not a small ruling class to which 

 we might otherwise assign the extended burials that do undoubtedly 

 occur in Norfolk and elsewhere. These are the exceptions to the general 

 rule obtaining in East Anglia, and though they need some explanation 

 there is no doubt that Anglian cremation is one of the ascertained facts 

 in English archaeology. 



It is a commonplace perhaps not fully appreciated that ' Teutonic 

 cremation is generally wanting in the interest and information which 

 attends the burial of the body entire.' The weapons of the dead, their 

 ornaments and objects of domestic life, were all but consumed in the 

 funeral pyre, and archeology is here denied the help that is afforded by 

 relics found with skeletons in the protecting bosom of the earth. Local 

 variations apart, there seems sufficient evidence for the generally accepted 

 view that in England during the Anglo-Saxon period cremation was the 

 earlier practice and gradually gave way to the Christian rite as the Gospel 

 spread among the Teutonic conquerors of the island. This sequence 

 however does not necessarily imply that all who were laid in the grave 

 unburnt had been converted to the Christian faith, for certain Teutonic 

 graves on the continent which have the Christian orientation are con- 

 sidered undoubtedly heathen, and so far prove that the direction of the 

 interments is not always a fair test of the religious convictions of the 

 interred, however just the inference as to date. 



To illustrate cremation in Norfolk it is natural to turn to those 

 districts of north Germany from which the Angles and kindred tribes are 

 commonly supposed to have set out to occupy south Britain. And in 

 this connection some valuable evidence was obtained by Kemble and 

 distinguished German archasologists who conducted extensive explora- 

 tions on Luneburg Heath and the banks of the Elbe. In a well-known 

 article on burial and cremation ^ the author of the Saxons in England states 

 that urns of precisely similar form, and with exactly the same peculiar- 

 ities as those found in this country, have been discovered in Jutland and 

 parts of Friesland, on the borders of the Elbe and Weser, and in other 



1 "Journal of Archaokgtcal Institute, vol. xii. 

 326 



