CONDITION OF WOLD-DWELI.EBS. 57 



The whole of the evidence afTorded by the barrows appears to 

 show that they are the burial-places of a people who were not 

 possessed of much wealth of any kind. They were not likely, 

 therefore, to have any abundance either of bronze or of those 

 materials of which personal decorations are usually made. Their 

 intercourse, in the way of traffic, with people at a distance must 

 have been very limited. Nor is such a condition difficult to 

 account for. The district is not one producing any substance 

 which could well be made a subject of barter or exchange. .Its 

 productions in the way of animals, or of anything which in such 

 a state of society constituted wealth, were possessed by other 

 districts, and probably in greater abundance. The inhabitants 

 of the wolds had no gold, no copper, no flint, no jet, and very 

 possibly no hides or grain to spare, so that there was nothing 

 which they could offer in exchange ; and, indeed, it is difficult 

 to understand how they obtained their bronze and jet except by 

 the plunder of their neighbours. 



Weapons, implements, and ornaments, it has been seen, are 

 sometimes found deposited in the barrows with the dead. The 

 custom has usually been accounted for by the explanation, that it 

 was the result of a belief in an after state of existence of the same 

 nature as that which had just terminated, and where such things 

 would again be required ; that when he passed to the happy 

 hunting-fields where the buffalo and the elk roamed in herds 

 unnumbered, and which no slaughter could make less, he might 

 have 'his faithful dog to bear him company;' that when he 

 joined the departed brave in the halls of Odin, there to quaff 

 without satiety the ever-replenished mead from the skull of his 

 enemy, he might bear with him the trusty sword, the unerring 

 arrow, wherewith to subdue the foes that never failed and yet 

 were ever vanquished. The practice has been all but universal ; 

 every ancient burial-place testifies to it 1 ; almost every modern 

 savage grave gives the like evidence of the custom 2 . To archa?o- 



1 One of the latest notices of the occurrence of this practice in Europe is contained 

 in a deed of contract, bearing date A.D. 1249, between the newly converted Prussians 

 and the Knights of the Teutonic Order : the former promise ' quod ipsi et heredes 

 eorum in mortuis comburendis vel subterrandis, cum equis, sive hominibus, vel cum 

 armis, seu vestibus, vel quibuscumque aliis preciosis rebus, vel etiam in aliis quibus- 

 cumque, ritus gentilium de cetero non servabunt, sed mortuos suos juxta morem 

 Christianorum in cemeteriis sepelient et non extra.' Dreger, Codex Diplomat. Pome- 

 ranise, pp. 286-294, No. 191, quoted by W. M. Wylie in an essay on the burning and 

 burial of the dead, Archscologia, vol. xxxvii. p. 463. 



2 An interesting account of the burial of ' The Stung Serpent,' a chief of the 



