A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE 



little use for fixing dates or grouping specimens together. We must 

 therefore pay special attention to any rare patterns that can be found, as, 

 for instance, on those on the cross-shafts at Norbury; (i) the pattern 

 composed of concentric rings and arcs of circles, and (ii) the pattern 

 composed of Stafford knots with an additional cord interwoven with each 

 knot. Both of these patterns occur on the crosses at Ham and Checkley, 1 

 Staffordshire, and the second of the two is to be seen on the fragment of 

 a cross-shaft at Alstonfield in the same county. From the similarity of 

 the ornament on these monuments they may be grouped together as being 

 of the same date. I have proposed in a paper on the Norbury cross- 

 shafts (Journ. Derb. Arch. Soc. xxv. 97) that this group shall be called 

 the Dovedale group. We are greatly helped in our endeavour to fix the 

 date of the Dovedale group by observing that the ring pattern already 

 referred to is not derived from a simple plait, like nearly all of the 

 knotwork used in Celtic and Saxon art, but is formed by the repetition 

 of a device made of interlaced rings. Now as this particular device is to 

 be seen on the Lewis chessmen in the British Museum, and on Norman 

 fonts in Norfolk, it is probably of Scandinavian rather than of Celtic 

 origin, and its occurrence on a pre-Norman monument is an indication of 

 a date within the Viking period. I should therefore be inclined to 

 assign a later date to the Dovedale group than to the group of which the 

 Bakewell cross may be taken as the type. The character of the work on 

 the monuments of the Dovedale group is, however, so good that they 

 probably belong to the beginning rather than to the end of the Viking 

 period, when decadence had commenced. 



Latest in point of age I should place the cross-shaft from St. Alkmund's, 

 Derby, and the portion of a round pillar used as a font at Wilne. Both 

 of these exhibit zoomorphic decoration of the same kind, which has a 

 distinctly Scandinavian look. 



Besides the decorative features of the monuments their shapes are 

 often an indication of their age. Both the round pillar-crosses and hog- 

 backed recumbent stones of which examples are to be found in Derbyshire 

 belong to the Viking period. The pillar-crosses are of two kinds : 

 (i) those which are of round section for the full height of the shaft ; and 

 (ii) those which are of round section at the bottom and of square section 

 at the top. The second kind are the most common, and are found chiefly 

 in Mercia and Cumberland. The hog-backed recumbent monuments are 

 much more widely distributed, and extend into the purely Celtic parts of 

 Great Britain. My reasons for attributing a comparatively late date to 

 the round pillar crosses and hog-backs have been given elsewhere. 



Summarizing the results thus arrived at, we may now tentatively 

 arrange the pre-Norman sculptured monuments of Derbyshire in the 

 following order as regards their approximate age : 



SEVENTH CENTURY. Coped stone at VVirksworth. 



EIGHTH CENTURY. Crosses at Bakewell, Bradbourne, and Eyam. Fragments of cross-shafts with 

 Anglian foliage at Bakewell. Fragment of cross-shaft at Blackwell. 



1 Arch. i. 287. 

 288 



