ANGLO-SAXON REMAINS 



have been given to several of the finds, which for the sake of convenience 

 have been described in geographical order ; but a few lines may now be 

 devoted to the task of arranging them in chronological sequence. Before 

 doing so it may be remarked that cremation seems to have been the common 

 practice in Britain from the time of the Roman conquest till about 250 A.D., 

 and in the south-east even before the time of Claudius. After the middle of 

 the third century, many years before the official recognition of Christianity as 

 the religion of the empire, the dead were buried unburnt, usually in stone 

 cists or coffins, and it seems necessary therefore to assign cremated burials in 

 mixed cemeteries, even when Roman cinerary urns were used, to Teutonic 

 immigrants and not to the Romanized natives. There were probably 

 numerous exceptions to all these rules, but in Leicestershire the above theory 

 finds some confirmation. Thus Rothley was evidently occupied in Roman 

 times and yielded brooches of the sixth and seventh centuries. Some of the 

 pottery is Roman, some Anglo-Saxon (as at West Cotes), and may have been 

 used to hold the ashes of the dead. From Leicester there is a well-made 

 cinerary urn with narrow mouth, incised round the shoulder in Anglo-Saxon 

 style, and again near Bensford Bridge was found a well-made vessel of similar 

 form, highly ornamented, that may have been a cinerary urn, a spear-head 

 being found across the mouth. On this site, however, there were certainly 

 several skeletons, and with the important exception of Saxby, inhumation 

 seems to have been the rule in the county, at least during the sixth and early 

 seventh centuries. Only a few graves of women have been distinguished, but 

 the shield and spear are present in nearly all the graves of men, and the other 

 grave furniture is remarkably uniform. As to the orientation of the graves 

 little can be said, and the presence of arms negatives the idea of Christian 

 burial, even when the head lay at the west end, as at Melton Mowbray. 

 The opposite was the case at Saxby, and north-and-south burials are recorded 

 at West Cotes and Glen Parva. It may therefore be concluded that all the 

 burials described in this chapter were of the heathen period, and this is also 

 clearly indicated by the history of the time. 



Christianity was introduced, or perhaps re-introduced, after a wave of 

 barbarism had swept the country, in the year 597, and reached Leicestershire 

 in 653, on the marriage of Peada, ruler of the Middle Angles, with the 

 daughter of Oswy, king of Northumbria. Wulfhere, who succeeded after a 

 short interval (658) to the throne of Mercia, was supported by the pagan 

 population, but Christianity was again encouraged by his successor Ethelred, 

 who came to the throne in 675. Further than this it is unnecessary to follow 

 the course of events, as the practice of burying weapons, ornaments, and 

 utensils with the dead would soon cease under the influence of the new religion, 

 and burial in the open country soon went out of favour as cemeteries under 

 the protection of the Church were provided adjoining the sacred buildings ; 

 and the bones of converts are therefore not so liable to disturbance and 

 discovery in the course of agricultural or building operations. 



The antiquities described above may therefore be considered as the 

 relics of an Anglian population dominated early in the seventh century by 

 Northumbria before being welded into a kingdom by Penda (626-55), anc ^ 

 possibly forming part of the East Anglian kingdom under Redwald before the 

 rise of Northumbria. Still earlier the Middle-English who settled in the 

 i 241 31 



