584 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



the interments I have examined at Frilford, and that they are 

 Romano-British is, to omit for the present other evidence, proved 

 by the fact that superficially to them in the soil I have found 

 Anglo-Saxon urns containing burnt human bones, and belonging, 

 therefore, to the first periods of Anglo-Saxondom in England. 

 About half of the Anglo-Saxon interments discovered here were 

 interments in the way of cremation. The other half are cases 

 of inhumation with the well-known Anglo-Saxon relics, and, in 

 adopting inhumation, the Anglo-Saxons either dug shallow graves 

 without regard to the points of the compass, independently of, 

 though often superficially to, those of their conquered prede- 

 cessors ; or, secondly, they dug deeper graves pointing to or 

 towards the East, following thus Christian precedent both as to 

 depth and as to direction, but diverging from the practice of the 

 Romano-Britons in setting stones round the graves instead of pro- 

 tecting the body in a wooden or other coffin; and whilst doing 

 this, they sometimes — all supposed scruples as to secondary inter- 

 ments ^ notwithstanding — displaced one body, probably that of one 

 of their predecessors, to make room for the corpse they were in- 

 terring with the same orientation. I say it is probable that where 

 an Anglo-Saxon skeleton is found to have displaced another set of 

 remains, the primary interment was a Romano -British one, because 

 I think it improbable that the half-heathen custom of interring 

 with insignia should have been combined for a sufficiently long 

 time with the Christian method of deep and oriented interment to 

 allow of one body thus interred being sufficiently forgotten to be 

 safely displaced. Burial with insignia was early discontinued by 

 Christianised populations, except in the cases of distinguished per- 

 sonages ecclesiastical and temporal 2, and the Anglo-Saxons I have 

 exhumed do not appear by their insignia to have belonged to either 

 of these classes. 



^ The Abb^ Cochet, in the first edition of his 'Normandie Souterraine,' p. 185, had 

 stated that ' I'usage d'enterrer plusieurs fois au m§me endroit est ^minemment mo- 

 deme j' but in the second edition of that work, pp. 209, 432, 436, and also in the 

 ' Tombeau de Childeric,' p. 55, he has receded from this untenable position. Grimm, 

 towards the conclusion of his paper, ' Ueber das Verbrennen der Leichen,' ubi supra, 

 p. 269, quotes the words of Sidonius ApoUinaris, * Jam niger caespes ex viridi, jam 

 supra antiquum sepulchrum glebae recentes,' to show that the practice was only too well 

 known to the Christians of the later Eoman Empire. See also Friedr. Simony, 'Die 

 Alterthumer Halstatter Salzberg,' Wien, 1851. 



^ See ' Capitularia Regum Francorum,' ii. 852. 



