ANGLO-SAXON REMAINS 



Mercian see about the year 679. Whether the districts of Ayles- 

 bury and Buckingham had by this time passed under the rule of the 

 Mercian ./Ethelred cannot now be determined ; but Caedwalla of Wessex 

 recovered territory north of the Thames after his accession in 686, so that 

 the Mercian see of Dorchester had only a few years of existence. 



The next century however saw the rapid expansion of the Anglian 

 dominion of the Midlands ; and though the West Saxon defeat in 733 

 at Somerton (perhaps in Oxfordshire) was retrieved by Cuthred in 752 at 

 Burford, the battle of Bensington in 777 (779) was a crushing blow to 

 Wessex, and everything north of the Thames was thenceforth in Mercian 

 hands till the revival of Wessex under Egbert fifty years later, and the 

 consolidation of the English kingdom. A coin of Offa (757-96) found 

 at Mentmore 1 may be looked upon as a souvenir of the final Mercian 

 occupation of Buckinghamshire. 



It will thus be seen that there is good reason for the scarcity of 

 Anglian relics in Buckinghamshire ; and at least before the general 

 acceptance of Christianity, there was a marked difference in the orna- 

 ments worn by the two peoples as well as in their funeral customs. Not 

 a single specimen of the distinctive long brooch of the Eastern counties 

 and the north, where the Anglians mostly settled, has been recorded from 

 the county, and only two instances of the Anglian rite of cremation have 

 come to light within its borders. Two urns of the ordinary type of 

 dark pottery, rudely ornamented and made without the wheel, were 

 found in 1859 near Tythrop House, at the extreme west end of 

 Kingsey village. 2 Both were filled with human bones in a frag- 

 mentary condition, and in one of them was also a coin of the em- 

 peror Hadrian, who died in 138 another instance of imperial money 

 continuing in circulation for centuries. An iron spearhead of an ordinary 

 Anglo-Saxon type illustrated from the same site may have belonged to 

 either of these or to an unburnt burial. 



The later history of Anglo-Saxon Buckinghamshire, subsequent to 

 the spread of Christianity in this district about the middle of the seventh 

 century, seems to be represented by a solitary relic in the museum at 

 Aylesbury. It is a stirrup of iron, with a rectangular loop, belonging to 

 a type usually associated with the Danish invaders of the ninth and tenth 

 centuries ; and a certain number inlaid with brass may be seen in the 

 British Museum, chiefly from the Thames and the Witham. Another 

 is preserved at Canterbury and was found in the neighbourhood, while 

 one with inlaid decoration of interlaced animals has been illustrated 3 from 

 Mottisfont near Romsey, Hants. 



1 Proc. Soc. Ant. iii. zzz. 



" Records of Buckinghamshire, ii. 1 66, and plates. 



' Arch. vol. 50, p. 533. 



205 



