A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE 



and frequently found in localities yielding Anglo-Saxon relics. The original 

 setting of the centre may have been a carbuncle or glass paste, and it should 

 here be mentioned that an oval specimen of the same type, set with marbled 

 glass, was found on the site of the London Road railway station at Leicester, 

 and is now preserved in the Municipal Museum there. This kind of brooch 

 has been found at Canterbury 5 in association with ornaments richly enamelled 

 in the Roman manner, and the national collection includes both round and 

 oval examples from Roman and Anglo-Saxon sites. 8 



A similar discovery has been made on the other principal Roman road 

 of Leicestershire. 7 On the eastern side of the Fosse Way opposite West 

 Cotes, near the county town, a burying-place was found in 1897, and 

 attributed to the late Roman and Saxon periods. Some Roman vases were 

 found and several skeletons, lying nearly north and south (position of the 



head not stated), with brooches, armlet, 

 swords, and coarse pottery, the last being 

 fragments of an urn (possibly cinerary). 

 Whether the Roman vases were found in 

 these graves is uncertain, but there can be 

 no doubt as to the Anglo-Saxon character 

 of three brooches, nor of the swords, as 

 the Romans did not bury weapons with 

 their dead. Two of the brooches are 

 figured, one belonging to the common 

 ' long ' type, the comparatively broad head 

 betokening a late date and the form of the 

 foot proclaiming its home manufacture, as 

 the nostrils of the horse were greatly ex- 

 aggerated in many English examples. The 

 other illustration, though peculiar, bears 

 some resemblance to two of the Bensford 

 Bridge group, and both may be assigned 

 to the late sixth century. 



Ten miles south of the county border, 

 at Norton in Northamptonshire, a very 

 similar burial-place came to light about 

 1844, during the excavation of a mound two or three yards wide and about 

 a yard high, which ran by the hedge along this same Watling Street. The 

 level at which the bodies had been deposited was about 6 ft. below the 

 crown of the Roman road, and about 25 ft. from its centre, just outside the 

 original embankment. The graves were in a single line, and contained, 

 besides the skeletons which, it is believed, lay with the heads to the south 

 some formless pieces of metal, and one rude bead of amber. 8 



While burials by the side of a great Roman highway may have been due 

 to the same motives that lined the Via Appia near Rome with monuments of 

 a more pretentious kind, burials in the centre of the road show that the 

 traffic along it had declined at the time of the interments, or had perhaps 



' Coll. An&q. vii, 202, pi. XT, fig. 3. 



' Long Wittenham {V.C.H. Berks, i, 222) and East Shefford, Berks. ; and Haslingfield, Cambs. 



' Leu. Tram, vi, 339. " Arch, xli, 479 ; V.C.H. Northants, i, 234. 



224 



LONG SQUARX-HEADEO BROOCHES, 

 WEST COTES, LEICESTER (|) 



