376 



YORKSHIRE. WEST HIDING. 



which might have formed a constituent part of it except an 

 unctuous whitish substance, which chemical analysis has proved to 

 be of animal origin l . The corpse had been enveloped in a woollen 

 fabric, enough of which remained to show that it had reached from 

 head to foot [fig. 2]. It was very rotten, and partly on that 

 account, and partly by reason of the infiltration of earth which had 

 found its way into the coffin through the breakage occurring when 

 the barrow was first opened, and which had become mixed up with 

 the cloth, it was impossible to recover any but small pieces of it, or 

 to prove whether the body had been laid in the grave in its ordinary 

 dress or simply wrapped in a shroud. It is on the whole probable 

 that in this case, as in those of some tree-burials discovered in 

 Denmark, the person had been interred in the dress worn by him in 

 daily life, though perhaps it may be alleged that the absence of 

 anything like a button or other fastening is rather against that 

 view. The material is now of a dark-brown colour, due most likely 

 to the tannin in the oak of the coffin ; whilst to the acid generated 

 in the decaying wood and set free by the percolation of water is 

 perhaps to be attributed the total disappearance of the bones. 

 There was nothing found in the coffin besides the woollen stuff; 

 nor, with the exception of pieces of charcoal and some burnt earth, 

 was anything met with foreign to the ordinary material of the 

 rest of the barrow. 



In the absence of any associated articles in the coffin, or of 

 potsherds or flints in the mound itself, it is difficult to assign a 

 precise date or period to this remarkable burial. But if we take 

 the general shape and construction of the barrow into consideration, 

 as also the encircling ditch, the presence of charcoal and other 

 indications of burning, I see no reason for hesitating to refer it to 

 the people whose usual custom it was to place the body of the dead 

 person in a stone cist or in a grave within the barrow; merely 

 supposing that in this and in a few other instances they departed 

 from their ordinary practice in favour of a wooden receptacle 2 . And 



1 Near to Featherstone Castle, Northumberland, at a place called Wyden Eels, 

 where several wooden coffins similar to this have been found in a wet situation, the 

 bones had decayed entirely away, except in one instance, where however all the earthy 

 part had disappeared, leaving the bones in the condition of a substance very much 

 resembling old leather. The hollows within the bones were filled with the mineral 

 Vivianite. Bones which have been met with in peat bogs have sometimes been found 

 to be in the same condition, the change in them being due to the action of the 

 carbonic acid generated in the peat. 



2 It may not be without use to bring together in a note other cases, in this country 

 and in Denmark, where burials in tree-coffins of a time before the introduction of iron 



