SOCIAL CONDITION OF PEOPLE. Ill 



examination of the barrows, various remarks have been made, 

 incidentally, concerning- the social condition of the people who 

 erected these burial-mounds, their food, clothing-, arms, imple- 

 ments, ornaments, and other accessories of daily life. The barrows, 

 indeed, only give us a very imperfect, and at times but a doubtful, 

 outline with respect to some of these subjects. Sufficient evidence, 

 however, has been brought together to admit of some conclusions 

 being arrived at which are based upon the secure foundation of 

 facts. A brief account then of what we appear to have learned 

 concerning the people and their progress in civilisation, their 

 art and manufactures, their social habits and their polity as 

 evidenced by the contents of the barrows, may not be out of place. 



That they lived in an organised condition of society may be 

 considered as quite certain ; and, as a necessity of such a state, 

 they must have been under the government of a head, most 

 probably the chief of a sept or clan. They had unquestionably 

 long passed beyond the stage when the family is the only com- 

 munity, and they were ruled by an order and constraint embracing 

 wider bounds than those comprised within the authority of rela- 

 tionship in its more limited sense. The magnitude of the burial- 

 mounds would in itself imply this, as, from the amount of continued 

 labour bestowed upon them, they could never have been erected 

 except by a community which included several families. The 

 very extensive and strongly constructed defensive arrangements, 

 so abundant on the wolds, enclosing in many instances large 

 tracts of country within their lines, are strongly indicative of a 

 combination which necessitates an union of very considerable 

 bodies of men; and there is every reason to believe that these 

 works and the barrows were constructed by the same people. 

 Within what may perhaps be designated as the larger federation, 

 held together by a common origin and mutual interest, there 

 were doubtless several smaller tribal divisions, ruled over by their 

 respective chiefs, either independent, or more or less under the 

 authority of the federal head. It may also be that there were 

 still more minute subdivisions, where the family government 

 might prevail, and where the interest and property in the land 

 would be parcelled out into tracts not larger than what is com- 

 prised within contiguous ranges of high land, in some cases not 

 more extensive perhaps than the present parishes. To the heads of 

 these smaller communities, if such existed, the greater number 

 of the barrows must probably be attributed, if the supposition 



